Open Letter To OBIdients: Don’t Give Up If Peter Obi Loses 2023 Presidential Election
Come February 2023, Peter Obi will lose the presidential election and either Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress or Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be declared the winner of the election. For many Obi supporters or OBIdients, as they call themselves, it will likely be a difficult outcome to bear and might also signal the beginning of the end of their selfless movement.
The emergence of the OBident movement has changed the course of Nneusrigeria’s political terrain and for the first time, Nigerians will be going into the poll in what many analysts have described as a three-horse race. Unlike the presidential elections since 1999 where it has been fierce battles between the ruling and opposition parties, the 2023 presidential election is already looking like a three-horse race.
In the last six months, we’ve seen how young Nigerians have been passionately involved in the political discourse ahead of the 2023 elections. They’ve gone beyond just tweeting to organising rallies and door-to-door campaigns to galvanise support for their favourite candidate. It will not be out of place to say this is unprecedented since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. The last time young Nigerians were actively involved in political events like this was after the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election. That era witnessed the rise of many student union leaders who confronted the military regime, mobilised students across campuses nationwide and led rallies to condemn the actions of the Sani Abacha regime. Some paid with their lives, those who are alive to tell the story spent days behind bars, while others fled the country. Sadly, some of those young student union leaders and pro-democracy campaigners are now in government and have become the monster they once passionately condemned.
Lessons from 1993: the young campaigners didn’t abandon their course in the face of persecution. After the Sani Abacha regime, many of them returned to the country to become active players in the new democratic government.
To the politically inclined and realist, as Nigeria moves closer to the 2023 presidential election, it is becoming more glaring that Peter Obi, the preferred candidate of the majority of young Nigerians, may not be able to gather the numbers to become Nigeria’s 16th president. If and when this happens, a lot of young Nigerians may lose hope in politics and the call for ‘Japa’ will ascend to a new height.
The OBIdient movement was not formed by Obi and thus should not end with his presidential loss. He is only the benefactor of an outraged Nigerian youth population that chose him. He has not demonstrated any political ingenuity that would make anyone believe he created the movement. In fact, it seemed as though Obi is running a separate political campaign different from the Labour Party while Atiku and Tinubu are running their campaign in tandem with their respective parties.
What is called the OBidient movement began shortly after the EndSARS protest. Young aggrieved Nigerians protested against police brutality and it spread into a sort of political consciousness. A Neusroom survey carried out after the protest showed that the group had identified Obi as one of their top choices for 2023. Thus the support he is getting is what I’ll describe as a harvest of outrage rather than any political strategy planted by Obi himself.
But despite all these, I strongly feel Obi will not win the election. First, he has not had a lot of time to prepare partly because he was optimistic that he would get the PDP presidential ticket, a party that had the structure needed to challenge for the highest office. By going to the Labour party, Obi has had to start from scratch rather than leveraging an already existing structure.
Many people have scoffed at the idea of a structure but the APC which had to bring four political parties together to be able to wrestle power from the ruling PDP in 2015 is a testament to the need for political structures. But for that, the PDP was certain of retaining power for as long as possible even going as far as saying the party would rule Nigeria for 60 years.
The lack of a proper structure is telling in how the Labour party has been unable to stick to its campaign schedules across states. Just a couple of days ago, the party announced that it was postponing its Ekiti and Ondo rallies due to unforeseen circumstances. A party with a solid structure will rely on its existing state apparatus to organise its rallies and not look towards the national party to do such.
It is not a coincidence that the EndSARS protest was successful due to students being at home as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown. The ASUU strike early this year also meant that young Nigerians were able to gather in large numbers to organise ‘100 million man match’ campaigns for Peter Obi, something that has tricked down since the strike was called off. The Labour Party also looks like a horse saddled with the responsibility of transporting an elephant in a race they should have started long ago.
The Nigerian political space needs the OBIdient movement as a healthy check and balance to sanitise the system and the longer it exists, the better it is for the nation. When Peter Obi loses the 2023 presidential election and fades away or returns to the PDP, the movement under whatever name it chooses to exist must keep the fire burning and play the long game. 2023 is as good as gone, 2027 is around the corner. The OBIdient movement needs to take lessons from June 12 campaigners. They never left the scene, they transitioned from activists to political players. This should be the next agenda for young Nigerians leading the OBIdient movement.
