Opinion
By Andy Ezeani
IT appears that Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 election, has finally overstepped his bounds. He has been going around the country creating problems for the government, causing food scarcity and making Nigerians not to appreciate all the good work President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is doing.
So far, the liberal, people-oriented government of Tinubu has looked away from Obi’s many mischiefs. All that may be coming to an end now, as Obi’s offenses are becoming insufferable, and big brother can no longer watch him lead millions of innocent Nigerians into temptation.
The warning late last week, by Bayo Onanuga, the incredible, anti-government-yesterday,pro-government-today veteran and adviser on information and strategy to President Tinubu, that Obi should be held responsible for any protest against escalating hunger and economic hardship by Nigerians, confirms what many people have always suspected,that Obi is responsible for their empty barns and pantries.
The case against Obi is indeed multiple and compelling. He has been sowing seeds of discord all over the country. Among other crimes, Obi has single-handedly caused the value of naira to be in free fall since mid-2023, just because the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] refused to declare him winner of the presidential election earlier that year.
Usually reliable sources, which served Onanuga quite well during his days of pro-democracy confrontation with military regimes, reportedly confirmed to the government he now serves with his full chest, as Nigerians will put it, that Obi is manipulating the exchange rate. Any
day the former governor wakes up from the wrong side of the bed and remembers that somebody else was declared President instead of him, he normally meets with leaders of bureau de change operators, after which the value of the naira will take a tumble.
Obi’s negative impact on the value of the naira has been a source of concern to the Tinubu government, which has been watching him closely.
There is even a report that Obi is responsible for doctors and nurses in Nigeria abandoning their lucrative jobs at home, to relocate abroad in droves. According to information available to the government and its master strategist, Bayo Onanuga, the LP presidential candidate works in deceptive and mysterious ways to lure doctors away from their high-paying jobs in Nigerian hospitals.
As the government investigation found out, any time Obi donates his personal money to health and social development institutions, such as he did recently in Kogi State, where he gave N10 million to the Grimard College of Nursing Sciences at Anyigba, or when he gave N20 million to Faith Foundation Mission Hospital in Nsukka, Enugu State, or when he donated N2 million to an Abuja Primary Healthcare Centre, or with the N10 million he donated to the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations [FOMWAN], etc, it is always a ploy to induce otherwise well-remunerated doctors and nurses in Nigerian hospitals to flee the country. In fact, it has been reliably gathered that Obi uses such visits to healthcare institutions to collect the names of doctors and nurses for subsequent placement in hospitals in Europe and America.
As if Peter Obi’s negative activities in the area of healthcare were not grievous enough, he turned his attention to the agricultural sector a few months back, succeeding within a short time in driving up the prices of garri, yam, beans, rice, potato, onions and even pepper, all of which are now beyond the reach of ordinary and not-so-ordinary Nigerians.
In markets across the land, from the produce markets of Ketu, Mile 12 and Oyingbo in Lagos, over to Dugbe in Ibadan, and from Ochanja in Onitsha, Ogbete in Enugu and Diobu in Port Harcourt, Peter Obi has held market women and men in his palms, deploying his uncommon capacity to influence them to arbitrarily increase the prices of food items, in spite of the Tinubu government’s lauded agricultural policy. To imagine that Obi is causing all this food scarcity and hunger in the land just because he was not declared President. The good thing though is that President Tinubu is aware of the pains of Nigerians. He is barely restraining himself from confronting Obi, the evil genius causing food scarcity in Nigeria.
It is obvious that Onanuga was being very matured and circumspect with sensitive information available to his high office, if not he would have released more details to Nigerians last week,of the many treasonable offenses of Peter Obi. For instance, the last time Obi was seen in the northern part of the country, not many people knew that he traversed Kano, Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Taraba and Kebbi,just to convince farmers to abandon their farms and stop supplying yam, beans, potato, onion and whatever they produce, to markets across Nigeria, just because he was not declared President in 2023. This much was established by the government’s strategist.
Fortunately, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu understands the suffering Nigerians are going through.
The government has allowed Obi to be,simply because it is respecting his fundamental human rights, seeing that the Tinubu government subscribes to key international treaties, including the recent Samoa Agreement. Yet, for all the magnanimity of the government, this same Peter Obi went about prompting the Muslim ummah and Christian faithful, alongside civil society organisations (CSOs) to rise against the Samoa Agreement, an agreement that has potential of attracting over $500 million or thereabouts, to Nigeria. If Obi is not bitter because he was not declared President in 2023, why should he influence Christians, Muslims and CSOs, to oppose a harmless treaty, just because the Agreement latently promotes the right of men to answer women and vice versa? If not for Obi, would the religious bodies have opposed the treaty?
The patience of the Tinubu government is, however, running out on the LP presidential candidate, especially with the concrete evidence available to Onanuga’s government,that Obi recently incited Senator Ali Ndume, a staunch member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Chief Whip of the senate, until recently, to declare publicly, that there is hunger in Nigeria. How could Senator Ndume have made such a critical comment, if he was not under the influence of Peter Obi? Ndume must have met Obi before he spoke out about hunger in the land. Only Obi can convince Nigerians that they are hungry, when indeed, the government has made life abundant for them.
Yet, for all of Peter Obi’s pervasive influence and activities, Nigerians do not seem to understand how dangerously impactful he is. That is what worries the government. The decision last week, by the special adviser on Information and Strategy to the president, to alert Nigerians that Obi is capable of causing more rainfall in the days ahead, is a very sane and patriotic duty. Nigerians need to know. Now they know! So, parents should properly advise their children. Any time they cry out that there is no food in the house, all patriotic parents have a duty to inform their children that Peter Obi is the name of the man responsible for scarcity of food in the land.
By the same token, manufacturers and sundry consumers of foreign exchange, should always remember, when they are confronted with shortage of foreign exchange, occasioned by the sluggish gyration of the value of the Naira, that Peter Obi is said to be responsible for their woes. He is the man government has identified as responsible for the collapse of the local currency. It is also important to note that Obi is causing all these problems because he was not declared winner of the presidential election in 2023.There is no need to ask what the declared winner of the said election is doing in the face of Obi’s protestant activities.
If Peter Obi has not been a confirmed rain maker and a certified magician, the curious allegations against him, as being responsible for everything that the government should be responsible for, would have been dismissed as vacuous. But Obi is who he is and it does not appear that he intends to change.
What last week’s pathetic statement by Bayo Onanuga, shows, sadly, is that the Tinubu government is not even ready to realistically face the problems at hand.
The public alert by Onanuga that Obi should be held responsible for all failings of the Tinubu government and also, for any public protest against hunger and government policies, should be received in one of two ways; either it is dismissed as gross, or it is taken as an acknowledgement by the government itself, that Peter Obi is now the barometer for gauging the predominant feeling of Nigerians. He has become, by government’s concession, more or less, the conscience of a beleaguered country..
(The article was first published in the SUN)
25th July, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: Labour Party Peter Obi
