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Presidential aspirant, Peter Obi, lamed and tamed in the primary process of one of the major parties, PDP, decamped to a fringe Labor Party where he promptly picked up nomination and is mounting a formidable challenge for the presidency. What are his chances in 2023?

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In the run-up to the presidential election primary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which held on May 27, 2022, some political leaders from the SE, fearing the vicissitudes and an unfavorable outcome from the process, decided to leave the party for more promising pastures.

The presidential aspirant, Peter Obi, a former governor and erstwhile vice-presidential candidate, was part of that minor wave of party switchers. Obi bolted from PDP just before the primary election got underway, to join the Labor Party.

It was smart timing that enabled him to stay in compliance with the relevant rules of the Independent National Election Commission (INEC).
In very short order, a popular Peter Obi was able to snag nomination as the Labor Party’s presidential flag-bearer, after several aspirants..

in the party enthusiastically stepped down for him.
There is something of a momentum building up behind Obi’s candidacy, powered by his apparent appeal to the youths and educated professionals.

Certainly, the major political parties cannot afford to ignore Peter Obi’s momentum, which will likely be strongest in the SE, his home region, as well as a swathe of dense conurbations across the South. Obi’s emergence complicates the calculus somewhat for the major parties.

He will exert less impact on the parties’ choice of personnel, but I fully expect that his growing momentum and issues-oriented campaign will serve to radicalize the platform of the mainstream parties, likely forcing more rigorous thinking within their policy development units.

This will surely be a salutary development.
I believe Peter Obi will have a significant impact on the presidential election as an issue driver and a policy thought leader.

He will also drive democratic participation, as witnessed in emerging reports of a surge in voter registration, especially among eligible youths, since his migration to the Labor Party.

Obi will certainly be a boon to the Labor Party, a hitherto itty bitty outfit which secured only 0.019% of votes in the 2019 presidential election and currently has no seat in either the Senate or House of Representative, and has no governorship or House of Assembly seat, after..

20 years of its existence.
We will wait to see, however, if Peter Obi’s flight to the fringe will foster the presidential quest of the South East geopolitical zone, and prove a successful strategy for him personally.

It is doubtful if any politician, not even one as fortunate and formidable as Peter Obi, can win the presidency from the periphery of Nigerian politics.
And it’s not just in Nigeria.

No fringe candidate has been able to win the presidency in modern times in the United States of America which, like Nigeria, operates a duopolistic multiparty system. In the 1992 presidential election, for instance, Texan billionaire and business magnate, Ross Perot, ran as an...

independent (non-partisan) candidate. He ran again in 1996, this time as a third-party candidate under the aegis of the Reform Party, a fringe political outfit he had formed in 1995 based on a movement started by his grass-roots supporters in 1992.

He lost to the Democratic Party candidate, Bill Clinton, in both elections despite heavy spending and strong grassroots mobilization. He did not win a single state in either election, polling 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 and a dwindled 8.4% in 1996.

Contrast Ross Perot’s performance with that of Donald Trump, another iconoclastic political outsider who had had an unsuccessful run as a fringe candidate in 2000. Trump won the presidency in 2016 when he ran on the mainstream platform of the Republican Party.

There is everything to be said for controlling the structures of a political party, especially those of a mainstream party in diverse polities such as the United States and Nigeria.

There could be an argument that Peter Obi should have stayed in the PDP – which he joined only but a few years ago – to deepen his contacts in the party hierarchy. Nigerian politicians are usually ambulatory, we know, in part because they have no ideological anchor and are...

entirely transactional in their political behavior. Even at that, the spectacle of Obi’s skedaddling is nothing but dizzying.

He had spent eight years as Anambra State governor under the aegis of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA); with the party, he fought off many challenges to his mandate. Obi had contested in the Anambra State governorship election of 2003 on the platform of APGA, but his...

opponent, PDP’s Chris Ngige, was fraudulently declared winner by the electoral commission, INEC. Obi challenged that decision in the courts. After nearly three years of litigation, on March 15, 2006, Chris Ngige’s supposed electoral victory was overturned.

This enabled Obi to assume office as Anambra State governor on March 17, 2006.
However, barely seven months after he assumed office, Obi was impeached by a PDP-dominated state house of assembly, and was promptly replaced his deputy, Virginia Etiaba.

Once again, Obi headed to the courts to challenge his impeachment. He won the challenge and was re-instated as the governor on February 9, 2007.
Then there was the skirmish with Andy Ubah. Obi had had to leave office on May 29, 2007, after Ubah was declared winner in an election

held that year at the culmination of the four-year governorship tenure that was supposed to have started in 2003.

Obi returned to the courts once more, this time arguing that the four-year term he had won back in the 2003 election actually started running when he assumed office in March 2006. In a dramatic ruling delivered on June 14, 2007, the Supreme Court of Nigeria upheld Obi’s...

contention, ordering that he be returned to office to compete his term. This ended Andy Ubah’s tenure, which had lasted all of 14 days. Obi served out his first term, and on February 10, 2010 he won a re-election, again under APGA, governing thereafter until the end of his...

second term on March 17, 2014.
Still, after this rather checkered but gloriously charmed history with APGA, Obi abandoned the party barely four years after leaving office. He joined PDP, the opposition party he had done battle with throughout his governorship tenure.

PDP welcomed him with open arms, and, though new to the party, he would be fielded as a VP candidate in the 2019 presidential election, running with the party’s flag bearer, Atiku Abubakar.

And yet here we are: just three years after PDP fielded Obi as running mate on its presidential ticket, Obi scuttled off again, this time to a fringe party, to contest against his former PDP ticket mate.

It is ironic that the leading Igbo presidential contender feels he can only find a political home in a fringe party. This is feeding a dynamic leading to the minoritization of Igbo politics.

I certainly wish Peter Obi well in his new endeavor, and I would be thrilled personally if he pulls off a meritocratic revolution as his giddy supporters are hoping.
While wishing Obi favorable auguries in his current quest, I myself am skeptical about his chances.

Consider this: We are now witnessing an incredible power struggle in the presidential primary process of the ruling party, All Peoples Congress (APC), as contending power blocs jostle for advantage on ticket leadership.

It would seem that a northern power bloc that has dominated the party (and the country) is unwilling to concede power to the South. We saw the very same dynamic in PDP which, presumably, had led to Obi’s decampment from that party.

There also, the northern cabal closed rank to prevent a potential power shift to the South.
If we are witnessing this much drama, this much tenacity and raw power struggle just at the primaries stage, is it plausible that a fringe insurgency started just one year to the...

presidential election – even one kindled by the electricity of a candidate like Peter Obi – can usurp the entrenched political oligarchy in the general election? I sincerely doubt it.

But the value and excitement of Peter Obi’s insurgency may not be the plausibility of him winning the 2023 presidential election. No, the Nigerian juggernaut cannot be turned that quickly, in my view. Rather, we may be at the starting- (not yet the tipping-) point of a long-term

process which, if sustained, could lead ultimately to a revolutionary disruption of the entrenched politics of Nigeria. There are certainly revolutionary pressures in Nigeria – there have always been. Trouble is that such pressures have never found a mainstream political outlet.

What Peter Obi offers is a potential mainstreaming of revolutionary instincts that hitherto have subsisted only at the margins of Nigerian politics. This means that he can enlarge the political base for that revolutionary endeavor.

Not just in terms of the number of people conscripted into the movement. He could also enlarge the composition of political constituencies supporting the movement.
To achieve this, Peter Obi needs to consult and conscript widely.

He needs to build a political coalition transcending ethnicity, transcending democracy, transcending class even. To do this, he also needs to articulate a coherent agenda, a revolutionary manifesto which will articulate the organizing philosophy of his movement.

Right now, he talks in off-handed ways on a vast range of topics, much like a political commentator. He needs to think more as a political revolutionary, someone leading a movement with clear-eyed revolutionary tactics.

He needs to build a structure to sustain the movement – all across the country.
This will take time and resources. It will also require patience and dedication. This is where I worry about Peter Obi.

Does he have the patience to stay for the long haul? Will he abandon the Labor Party, as he did APGA and PDP, if he finds more felicitous pastures elsewhere? It is instructive here that even after his defection to the Labor Party, Obi was still, seemingly, genuflecting to...

PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, calling him “my leader”. Perhaps this was just Obi practicing his own brand of “politics without bitterness” (a la Waziri Ibrahim of blessed memory).

But I have heard hints suggesting that this may be more an opportunistic nod to the mainstream stalwart from a politically efficacious part of the country.

This is my challenge to Peter Obi: To stay the course on his current revolutionary enterprise and make a lasting, glorious history.

© Chudi Okoye PhD
Awka Times June 5, 2022

Nigeria 2023: The Peter Obi Insurgency

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