Peter Obi won the Nigerian presidential election of February 2023. Probably not so in the statistical sense of ballot share, a matter which is being litigated, but with regard to the quotient of gained prestige and political stature. When assessed against other candidates in the election, Obi is the undisputed ‘Man of the Match’. This final part of a trilogy on the presidential election (see Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) examines the Obi phenomenon and what it might portend for Nigerian politics if consolidated.

By Chudi Okoye

I know – yes, I do! – that right now in Nigeria we are in a season of hyperboles and high-octane emotions. So, dear reader, I will understand if you espied the title of this essay and instinctively sneered at it. ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Tocqueville Effect’? What the heck are those?, you might have asked. ‘Revolutionary moment’ in Nigeria? Give me a break!, you might have gasped. Well, before you contemn or condemn the title, come along let’s unpack the phenomenon to which it alludes.

First, to ensure we are all on the same page, let’s start with concept definitions. If you aren’t familiar with what’s known as ‘Black Swan Theory’, it’s a concept – popularized by Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese-American writer and risk statistician – which explores the logic of random, unexpected or highly improbable events with high-impact outcomes. Mr. Taleb – a former options trader who has taught the Science of Uncertainty and also Risk Engineering at several universities – codified this theory across several books, the best-known of which are: Fooled by Randomness (2005); The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007); and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012).

Fascinating titles, right? You bet! The British Sunday Times once described Taleb’s Black Swan as one of the twelve most influential books since World War 2. The guy’s got game!

I have provided details of Mr. Taleb’s titles as an early hint of where I am taking this essay on the Peter Obi phenomenon.

Now, let’s turn to the ‘Tocqueville Effect’, or what’s sometimes called the ‘Tocqueville Paradox’. In my most recent Awka Times article on the outcome of the February 2023 presidential election in Nigeria, I coined the phrase “revolution of rising palpitations” to depict the roiling reactions attending the Independent National Electoral Commission’s management of the election and its now controverted results. I’d coined this phrase as a play on the well-known expression, revolution of rising expectations, invented (back in 1949) by the American diplomat, Harlan Cleveland.

Cleveland formulated this phrase to describe what had come to be known in Social Science as the Tocqueville Paradox which holds that social revolutions are born, often not out of deteriorating conditions and extreme immiseration of the lower classes – as Karl Marx and his followers have argued, but rather from growing frustrations in society caused by rising expectations of improved living conditions and upward mobility, themselves triggered by initial incidences of social progress. In other words, the more social conditions improve the greater the expectation from benefiting classes and the more intolerant they are of any reversal of social change.

This theory of revolution derives from the work of Marx’s contemporary, the 19th century French aristocrat and diplomat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who had studied the social conditions and revolutionary upheavals in America and France and published his findings in books that are now classics of Social Science: Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). From Tocqueville’s sociology of revolution has emerged a theory that stands Marxism on its head: the claim that revolutionary impulse is driven not so much by the deterioration of social conditions but by the initial improvement of them (which raises standards and expectations) and subsequent reversals (which breed widespread frustration).

With the foregoing, let’s now delve into the Obi phenomenon.

Obi vs. the Big Two
As soon as political party primaries commenced in this electoral cycle, I – like some other analysts – began to write about the Obi phenomenon. Though not awestruck like his fervent followers (yeah, a la Rudyard Kipling, some of us kept our heads while others seemed to be losing theirs!), I have written several articles in this magazine graphing Obi’s political ascent, describing what I called “the Peter Obi Insurgency” in one early piece and, onomatopoeically, “the Pitter-Patter of Petermentum” in another.

Although some newspaper columnists came late to the realization (one once portrayed a presidential field led by “two and a half” candidates, Obi being the “half”), Obi’s campaign did take off with an early tailwind and, showing remarkable agility, he kept building momentum right up to the eve of polling day. I wrote in my recent essay that “Peter Obi is the undisputed star of the 2023 general elections.” Indeed he is. I would add even, without equivocation, that he is the ultimate ‘winner’ of the presidential election, the ‘Man of the Match’.

I don’t mean by this that he polled the highest statistical votes. Obi claims of course that he did, and there’s not an iota of doubt about it among his posse of peppy supporters. But the matter is now being litigated. We will see where empirical evidence leads.

I mean instead that Obi won the election in terms of the quotient of gained prestige and political stature. I argue that Obi garnered the most and grew the mostest among all candidates in this presidential election cycle. I will discuss the details. But let’s look first, as baseline, at how the two other leading candidates tracked in this election, ignoring the rump (the other 15 contestants) in the long-tailed lineup.

Take the putative winner of the election, Bola Tinubu of the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC). The dude may have won, as INEC claims, but he comes away from this shoddy affair utterly discredited. For a start, his party APC lost a whopping 6.4m votes and dropped 19 percentage points in 2023 versus its vote share in 2019. Tinubu depleted his party and he will govern, if the courts confirm his ‘victory’, with a truly questionable mandate. Of the 93.5m registered voters and 87.2m of them who collected their PVCs, only about 24m assumedly voted, of whom just over a third, 36.6%, cast their votes for the ruling party’s candidate. As an even grimmer statistic, the 8.8m that voted for Tinubu represent only 9.4% of registered voters and something like 4.1% of the total population. This would be about the most impaired mandate of any president since the Second Republic. It trumps only by a few percentage points the 33.7% of votes garnered by Alhaji Shehu Shagari in the 1979 presidential election in which the latter, anyway, had to face some juggernauts of Nigerian politics, including Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Malam Aminu Kano and Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim. Every other winning ticket since then outperformed Mr. Tinubu’s squeaker in this election.

But it isn’t only the stats that startle about Mr. Tinubu. There’s also the image thing; the character thing; the reputation factor. It’s not just the niggling concern about Tinubu’s health, which is no mean matter by itself: look how sick Nigeria became under a sickly Muhammadu Buhari. It’s also the unshakable stench that pervades this man’s personal reputation. There’s financial scandal, with no one really certain about the source of Tinubu’s stupendous wealth. There’s drug scandal, which now has the world sniggering about a Nigeria soon to be ruled by a shady fellow implicated in drug trafficking. With his antecedents and the manner of his emergence as president, Tinubu will confirm the worst stereotypes about Sleazy Nigeria. He will sweep into Aso Rock trailing a cloud of moral turpitude which may not lift until he leaves office. Tinubu may be reputed as a political tactician but there’s just a foulness of form and fame that follows him which even the presidency cannot deodorize. It seeps through his allegedly porous pants into his political base and carries into all the crannies of his political universe. Tinubu, alas, will represent the ultimate cartoonification of the Nigerian presidency.

Turning to Mr. Atiku Abubakar, there’s nothing after this election but a flotsam, the wreckage of a once promising political career tarnished by repeated defeats, corruption scandals and the stigma of betrayal. He’ll be remembered not just as the man who made it impossible to evict a hollowed ruling party but also someone whose ambition filibustered the possibility of a president of Igbo extraction and, thus, a chance finally to exorcize the demons of the Civil War. Abubakar’s political denouement is both sad and sickening. He leaves the stage with his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) – under which he served as VP and whose ticket he has led in two elections – hugely shrunken and deeply fractured. It is a most unedifying legacy.

And so we arrive at Peter Obi.

The Obi Phenomenon
I am on record for questioning the exorbitant claims about Obi’s record as governor of Anambra State. I am from the state, so I know the truth and have not swallowed some of the fictions peddled by some of Obi’s supporters – and sometimes by Obi himself. This is not to say that Obi didn’t perform well as governor. He did. It just isn’t as outstanding a record as is often portrayed.

Obi also earns a slap on the wrist for his rapid flight from PDP when, it seems, he sensed some force fields against his prospects in the party’s primary. Obi’s exit certainly contributed to the fragmentation of PDP, an unfortunate reality which redounded to APC’s electoral advantage, as I argue in an earlier piece.

Obi might share in the blame for the consequence of PDP fragmentation, but, unlike Atiku Abubakar, he has a redeeming card in what he accomplished in this election from the platform of his destination party.

There are two ways to calibrate what Obi has accomplished – one, by the numbers; the other, normative.

The numbers are just staggering. Let’s recall where the Labor Party stood at the time Obi decided to join it after decamping from PDP. The party was nothing and it was nowhere. It had not a single seat anywhere, not at national or sub-national level. It did once boast a governorship and a House of Reps seat, but at the onset of the 2023 election cycle the party had nothing and it existed only on paper. The status of Labor as an electoral force is best depicted by its performance in the 2019 presidential election: of the 27.3m valid votes cast in that election, Labor scooped up all of 5,074 votes; that is, 0.02% of the total.

Yet, within just one election cycle, with Peter Obi’s diligent electioneering – and without merging with any other party – Labor went from that incredible state of absolute nothingness to being, now, a notable ‘Third Force’ in Nigerian politics. In the 2023 presidential election, Labor scooped up 6.1m votes, representing 25.4% of total valid votes cast in the election (PDP – a previous 16-year incumbent which fielded a veteran of five earlier presidential elections as its flag-bearer and which still controlled many governing and legislative seats – secured only an equivalent 6.98m votes or 29.1%). Labor carried the federal capital Abuja (where Buhari resides!), winning a whopping 61.2% of the votes there, which meant no other party approached the 25% threshold in the FCT (an achievement which might be critical in the ensuing election litigation). Labor also carried 11 states, and won 25% in a total of 16 states (APC and PDP carried 12 states apiece). The states carried by Labor included Lagos, a state Tinubu had governed for two terms and which he supposedly still controlled as political godfather. Furthermore, on current tally of the National Assembly elections, Labor has won seven Senate and 34 House of Representatives seats. And permutations are that the party is poised for significant wins in the upcoming state assembly and governorship elections.

There is no other way to put it: this is a monumental change in political fortunes for the Labor Party. And it’s down, simply, to a single factor: the capture of the party by Peter Obi.

The achievement is even more compelling when you consider other fallouts from these electoral facts. Obi has now emerged, indisputably, as a national political figure – from just four years ago when he was merely Atiku Abubakar’s nondescript running mate who barely registered on the Richter scale of national politics. He now has a fervent political following: a discrete, trans-regional, supra-generational, multi-demographic following with a strong affinitive identity and intense loyalty attaching exclusively to the person of Obi, not necessarily to his party. The remarkable thing is that although Obi is in his 60s, he has emerged as the avatar of generational change and symbol of post-primordial politics in Nigeria. There are still some sentiments attaching to Peter Obi as perhaps the embodiment of the hope for a geopolitical correction which will see a person of South East extraction catapulted to the apex of power in Nigeria. But this sentiment is not at all primordial in its aspiration; it is merely a yearning by South-easterners for re-integration into the grand diagram of power in Nigeria. Nigeria itself needs this correction, perhaps more so than its seekers!

This is a truly remarkable achievement, the more so – going back to our opening theoretical metaphor – for its Black Swan effect. The story of black swans is that no one believed they existed; it had been thought, in the West at least, that all swans were white. All that changed in 1697 when the Dutch explorer, Willem de Vlamingh, discovered black swans in Australia. This is the story of Peter Obi and the Labor Party. The party was totally inconspicuous in the arena of politics. And its nouveau venu, Obi, though better-known than the party, had been merely governor of a mid-sized state in the smallest geopolitical enclave in the country, one described as a “dot” by a certain dolt in Aso Rock. Sure, Obi occasionally popped up in national consciousness as something of a public intellectual grappling with sundry national issues. But he was just that, an occasional public intellectual without a discernible power base. Until Obi’s campaign took flight, few could have anticipated his incarnation as a canny political operator now with a proto-movement which could, if nurtured, disrupt the fundamentals of Nigerian politics.

Up until this election cycle, it had been believed – and our election statistics affirmed it – that fringe parties were merely an accounting fiction in Nigerian politics, without electoral force or efficacy. Though we had 18 registered political parties, Nigeria was really a de facto two-party state dominated by shifting coalitions of the political elites. Now, this election has started what could upend such presumption about Nigerian politics.

It might be thought that the Third-Force breakthrough engendered in this year’s elections is ephemeral; that it is merely a temporary aberration and that soon – perhaps by the next election cycle – we will witness a ‘regression to the mean’, as we say in my analytics profession: a reversion to the rigid orthodoxies of Nigerian politics. Perhaps. But this is where our second theoretical reference kicks in: the thing about the Tocqueville Effect. Hitherto, the rigidities of Nigerian politics discountenanced the deep currents of social change taking place in the country. There’s a youth bulge in Nigeria’s demographic structure which creates a peculiar impulse to change and a Weltanschauung totally unaccommodated in the insular praxis of our politics. Now, with Obi’s ascendancy, this impulse and its worldview may finally have found a mainstream political outlet and, if nurtured may compel its ethic of progressive change upon our politics.

Much depends on what Obi decides to make of his political career from here on out. If he settles in his mind that his departure from PDP constituted a revolutionary break with establishmentarian politics, and if he feels he has the stamina for it, he might want to nurture his proto-movement into a permanent force in Nigerian politics. Sometime last year, I wrote a poem titled “Rise Up!” to celebrate Obi’s exit from PDP and the dawn of his new mission. In it, I wrote:

The old party’s primary was his epiphany
To stop palling around with men of infamy
He felt a great vocation newly beckoning
Which he must give the fullest reckoning

I hope Peter Obi fixates on that mission, and that he can enlarge his vision to embrace its full revolutionary potential. Modifying the old, well-known Edmund Burke saw about good and evil, I’d say the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is not merely that good men do nothing, as the Irish statesman and philosopher said, but that they bungle what good they get to do. St. Augustine said to build a tower that will pierce the clouds, one has first to lay a foundation of humility. Obi is humility personified, at least going by his public image; a Black Swan that may become a real force in Nigerian politics.

As a social scientist and journalist, I can’t be partial to any partisan tendency. But, for the sake of our much-abused country, I will be rooting for Obi, if he pursues a revolutionary agenda.

The unspoken issue in Nigeria’s impending presidential election is the tension between who ought to win and who might actually win the election. If fate would favor this forlorn country, what ought to be will become fact in the Feb. 25 poll. But it is not at all clear that Nigerians – despite the current hardships – will call the winds and summon the rain to change their fate in this particular election.

By Chudi Okoye

The moment is nearly upon us: merely a matter of days before Nigeria decides in a critical election that will reveal, perhaps more poignantly than previously, the political character of this country. The dreamers and their drummers have had their say. It is now time to explore the lay and see who might actually win the day. I propose to provide insights to that hereunder.

The 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, provides a useful conceptual framework we might use for our task. In his highly acclaimed Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume tackled what is termed the ‘is-ought’ problem, criticizing the moral philosophers of his day for deriving normative conclusions from positive or empirical reality. His critique of moral philosophy is encapsulated, in part, in what is often called ‘Hume’s Guillotine’ (a.k.a. Hume’s Law) which posits that it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ where there is no logical link between the realm of value and the realm of fact.

Much the same can be said, despite fervent conjectures, about the conjuncture of factors in the Nigerian presidential election due to hold, all things being equal, on February 25.

Polls and the ‘Ought’ Argument
There has been much postulation and much polling, even beyond our shores, about the likely outcome of the election. Nigeria being a country sized for significance but punching well below its weight, the impending election has attracted much global attention. This is in part – to borrow from Einsteinian physics – because it is thought that the gravitational fields of Nigerian politics could warp time and speed up the deepening of democracy in wider Africa. At least that is the impression usually given by giddy global observers.

The polls have been clear, as I myself observed back in June 2022 shortly after the party primaries, that the 2023 presidential election, notwithstanding the crowded field, is essentially a three-way contest which could go into a runoff. Some of the polls – like that by SBM Intelligence for the Enough is Enough Nigeria group – seem reluctant to predict a likely winner in the election, merely indicating plausible paths to victory for the three leading candidates: Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and Peter Obi of the Labor Party (LP). One of the polls, by POLAF, tips Atiku Abubakar to win what it expects – as do other pollsters – to be a close race. A few other polls, specifically those by Fitch and Dataphyte Research, predict a win for Bola Tinubu. But many more of the polls posit Peter Obi as the presumptive frontrunner, including those by Stears, Nextier, Bloomberg/Premise, ANAP/NOI and Redfield & Wilton.

Perhaps tilted (or titillated) by this tally of polling and the apparent zeitgeist, the London Economist, in a lead editorial that probably reflects global sentiment, came out with a strong endorsement of Peter Obi. The magazine was pretty contemptuous of Atiku and Tinubu, saying that “Nigeria desperately needs a new kind of leadership” and that “Peter Obi offers the best hope of it.”

The Economist’s opinion aligns very much with mine. Going back to David Hume’s ‘is-ought’ dichotomy, there’s no doubt in my mind who ought to win this election. Peter Obi is the outstanding candidate of the entire field and, without putting too fine a point on it, ought to carry the day. I have argued this point in several writings from the very beginning of this election cycle. I argue this case not because I am persuaded by the padded resume of Obi’s governing record often put about by his supporters and the candidate himself. Nor am I impressed by the sheer exaltation and lionization of Peter Obi by his overzealous supporters – a fluid mass of idealistic meritocrats, urban professionals, rural primordialists and frenzied youths – some of who all but equate Obi to Jesus the Christ and Obi’s hopeful victory to the Second Coming. In one pro-Obi WhatsApp forum I’m familiar with, members once recounted, with unending glee, a story told about some woman at some event who supposedly spread her wrapper on the floor for Obi to walk on, not unlike the biblical account of cloaks and palm fronds laid out by Jesus’ followers for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When I protested such unseemly Jesusification of Obi, one forum member, a brilliant and well-travelled petroleum engineer, justified it on the ground that the Scriptures also mention a woman (named as Mary of Bethany in John) who anointed the feet of Jesus with expensive oil. I kid you not!

With such unbridled zeal, and maybe because Jesus reportedly said his true followers must forsake friends and even family, it is not surprising to find that the more ardent ‘Obidients’ have been willing to forsake their friends and even family to follow Obi. Because they’ve become so emotionally invested in the candidate, some supporters cannot countenance even the slightest likelihood of Obi losing the election. So Obi’s victory has become religion, assuredly invoked in his adherents’ frenzied glossolalia. And from this follows a disturbing level of impatience and intolerance – what seems really like a dictatorship of the faithful, reminiscent of Russia’s dictatorship of the proletariat – with terrifying portents of what might follow if Obi wins the election.

None of this, however, subtracts from the compelling case for Peter Obi. Despite the worrying cult of personality and the frenzy at the core and fringes of Obiworld, no cool-headed analysis, if fair, would deny that Obi is the best of the contesting bunch. Obi offers as deep a diagnosis of Nigeria’s problems and as creative a remedy as any on the table in this cycle. But that is not where he earns distinction. What Obi seems to have that eludes the establishment candidates is a relatively unspotted (granted, not superseding) record of governance; his unpretentious charisma and apparent authenticity; a spontaneous and energetic followership resulting from his relatability and facility with popular engagement; and an accessible vernacular of politics laced with the idiom of social contract far removed from the current patronage system and the clientelist approach of establishment politics. All of this lends freshness and even a revolutionary veneer to Obi’s political project, an antithesis to the current praxis which may be what Nigeria needs for a post-Buhari recovery. Under Obi, based at least on the tenor of his campaign, Nigeria’s current ersatz democracy would likely improve and become more people-centered.

Added to all this, there’s a geopolitical imperative powering Obi’s candidacy, given that it represents an affirmative correction for his native South East region which has long been locked out of real power in Nigeria’s post-independence dispensation. Obi himself affects a disavowal of this imperative, but it is part of the calculus of much support he has attracted, both inside and outside his native region. Such a correction might bring equity and needed tranquility to the polity.

All of the above represents the ‘ought’ argument in our discourse, making a normative case for an Obi win. But the question is: even though Obi ought to be elected the next president of Nigeria, can he in fact win the election?

Alas, despite the promising predictions of many polls presented above, it is not at all certain that he can.

Structure and Resistance
Obi deserves great credit for propelling himself to the frontline in this election, in a rather short span of time and on the platform of a once inconsequential fringe party. But whilst he has created a credible political vehicle, it is unclear that he has had the time to build a formidable movement with elaborate structures that may assure him victory in this election. According to the latest data from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), there are about 176,606 polling units for the 2023 election. Obi’s Labor Party submitted a total of 134,874 polling unit agents (PUAs) to INEC, covering about 76.37% of the total polling units, and 4,859 collection agents (CAs). These compare with 176,223 PUAs (99.78%) and 9,581 CAs for APC; and 176,558 PUAs (99.97%) and 9,539 CAs for PDP. Even Rabiu Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party, which is scarcely within polling radar, has submitted 176,200 PUAs and 9,604 CAs, far higher than Labor’s. By these numbers, it would seem that Obi’s Labor Party has a deficit in excess of 40,000 polling agents to the establishment parties, APC and PDP, and about half their collection agents. The party is also not fielding any (or strong) candidates in many of the federal and state elections that will hold on the same day as the presidential election and subsequently in March, the consequence being that Obi, even were he even to win, would rule Nigeria as a minority president.

It is impressive how Obi’s Labor Party has ramped up in the past few months. But its deficit to the main parties in terms of political structure cannot be ignored.

Electoral Monetization: There is also an issue as to the funding of field operations, including the unfortunate reality of voter mobilization and inducement, a constant in Nigerian elections. Recent improvements in INEC’s election management technology and the heavy messaging against vote buying should help to mitigate this factor. But the situation is complicated by human factors which we must consider. For one thing, there’s the evident desperation of the two ambitious septuagenarians running on the platforms of the main parties: this being their last opportunity for a presidential run, they can be expected to pull out all the stops to achieve their dream in this election cycle. This plays into the exigent conditions in Nigeria today marked by continuing terror and insecurity, fuel scarcity and a recent currency change which has severely curtailed money flows in the economy. The combined effect of these challenges is that electoral monetization may again play a decisive role in the outcome of the election, regardless of relentless messaging to the contrary.

Without question, many amongst the increasingly fretful and financially stranded electorate will be well disposed to inducements from our practiced politicians and their agents. The major parties are poised to take advantage of the current situation, with their elaborate resources and control of incumbent governing structures.

Many commentators have praised President Muhammadu Buhari for initiating the currency change, arguing that it will limit the opportunity for election monetization. However, the opposite may well be the outcome, with cash-strapped and desperate voters more easily induced by politicians and their agents. I’m not at all certain that the authorities are well prepared for such an outcome.

Resistance to Change: There’s yet another angle to this besides the current national exigencies which offer desperate politicians an opportunity for dirty tricks. We must consider too the many force fields of the Nigerian formation that may likely negate the momentum of change in this election cycle (a subject about which I have written several recent essays). There is, no doubt, a great desire for change in the country, in part inspired by Peter Obi’s rhetoric, which changed the dynamics of the election and helped to propel his political ascendancy. Obi came along and electrified what might well have been a run-of-the-mill election, exerting a force that has changed the usual inertia of the political public. His forceful momentum, built largely on his personal celebrity, has altered the mechanics of presidential election contest, eroding some of the structural advantages enjoyed by his establishment opponents. However, whereas we may be seeing in political play something of Newton’s First Law of Motion (F∆t = m∆v), classical physics also tells us, in the Third Law of Motion, that when an object exerts a force on another object, it receives an equal and opposite reaction (F1 = -F2).

Obi’s populism and politics of change, seemingly unthreatening because of his mild and self-effacing manner, might nonetheless be considered a threat to the hegemonic forces of Nigerian politics and the prevailing modes of accumulation in the country. Obi has done the utmost in his campaign peregrinations to reassure the entrenched powers, even whilst virtue-signaling and promising populist changes. But it is unclear the extent to which he might have succeeded with his reassurances. All things being equal, we must expect a strong resistance – along class, geopolitical and generational lines – to any kind of power shift or a reconstitution of the political economy entailed in Obi’s politics of change. Nigeria’s history is replete with reactionary responses to radical change: from the gradualist negotiation of self-rule to an anti-secessionist civil war; from the tradition of reactionary military coups to the outright annulment of a democratic election victory secured by a progressive coalition.

Granted, much of Nigeria’s reactionary history is associated with a once dominant military institution which seems now somewhat vitiated. More so with Major-Gen. Buhari’s dismal presidency which likely has significantly weakened the political potency of the military brass and its hegemonic civilian allies. But the power of hegemony, as we learn from Gramsci, is that it isn’t only the ruling elites but even sections of the masses that may resist change and want to maintain the status quo.

A vocal section of the Nigerian populace is supporting Obi, believing perhaps that the dream of a ‘New Nigeria’ after Buhari would require a non-establishment change agent like the Labor candidate, a new ‘kid’ on the federal block, to bring it about. The Bible tells us after all to pour new wine, not into old wineskins, but instead into new ones to avoid a rupturing of the container (Matt. 9:17, Mk. 2:22, Lk. 5:37). Obi may be embraced by some in the population as new wine in the new wineskin of a post-Buhari Nigeria. Unfortunately, however, his very ‘newness’ may constitute a problem for some sections of the population. The same biblical parable concerning new wine warns us about reactionary instincts in broader society, saying “no one after drinking old wine wants new wine, because he says, ‘The old wine is better’” (Lk. 5:39).

This is part of the paradox of the masses: though the yearning for change is palpabe, it is possible that a significant portion of the populace, particularly amid the current exigencies, may end up voting for the status quo, against their own interest. We’ve seen this in many other places, even in advanced democracies. Can we forget, for instance, how the Nigerian Labor Party’s namesake in the United Kingdom ended up losing the 1992 general election, which it had been widely expected to win after years of torrid Tory rule? Labor lost that election primarily because British voters had been cleverly nurtured by right-wing media into fearing the changes a Labor government might introduce.

Destiny Awaits
I hasten to say that nothing in my foregoing comment rules out a possible upset by Peter Obi in this week’s election. What this man has accomplished in a relatively short time, rising to political stardom on the platform of a fringe party, is nothing short of astounding. Clearly Obi’s rhetoric resonated because of the disaffection in society which has long sought a political expression. It is to Obi’s credit that he has been able to channel this deep discontent and its latent energy, which had been a blind spot for the stodgy and unimaginative politicians in the incumbent parties. In the process Obi has turned himself into a political star, far outshining his own party. Perhaps Obi has been able to project himself precisely because the party itself is not a competing celebrity, and perhaps because there are no entrenched coalitions within the party that are powerful enough to constrain his rhetoric or political strategy.

Whatever it is, Obi deftly created a political space for himself after the short shrift he received in his previous party, and he has greatly maximized that opportunity. We will see if the party from which he exited, PDP, wracked by the exit of another stalwart, Kwankwaso, and the dissent of the G-5 governors, will rally to a victory nonetheless. Or if the ruling party, APC, will overcome the burden of its abysmal record and its own internal fissures to retain power, even with a singularly distasteful standard-bearer and the disagreeable single-faith ticket it has chosen. Even if Obi loses to either of the establishment candidates this time around, he will be able to bid for power in subsequent elections – if he can stick around to build a lasting political movement from the political vehicle he is currently riding. He could also use his new political stature to attempt a capture of any of the dominant parties so as to re-align it to a radicalist reform agenda. We will see if Obi has the temperament and talent for this, and if in fact his current following, a fluid and possibly ephemeral base, might stay with him even through electoral misfortune, were that unfortunately to happen.

The woman who reportedly laid out her wrapper for Peter Obi to walk on, a la Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, might be more prescient than we know. The biblical event presaged Jesus’ passion: his trial and subsequent crucifixion by the entrenched authorities. But that suffering mediated the ‘resurrection’ and the eventual theosis of Jesus Christ.

Peter Obi could yet pull off a surprise win in this coming election, and in doing so transform the physics of political contest in Nigeria. He could indeed surprise the pollsters by realizing their prediction. But even if he falls short this time, there is an opportunity to build his incipient movement so Nigeria can eventually witness the convergence of what ought to be and what finally becomes.