It took former Anambra governor Peter Obi over 2,600 words, about the size of a full newspaper page, to craft a simple defection (or what seems like defection) from his former party to the so-called mega opposition coalition, the African Democratic Congress (ADC). The statement was not just verbosity on display, it was the clearest indication of the dithering that buffets his politics and how deeply puzzled he gets when grappling with complex issues and entities. His experience in the Labour Party (LP), whose standard-bearer he was in the 2023 presidential election, concretises the general lacuna of his life and politics. As far back as the end of the third quarter of 2025, it was clear that Mr Obi’s stay in LP had become untenable. But he wanted ironclad assurances in the ADC regarding the presidential ticket for the 2027 poll. Yet, no one would give him that undertaking despite his Obidient Movement predicating their fanatical support for him on nothing less than the number one ticket.
The party primaries are now a few months away. To continue dithering would mean being stranded next year. So, Mr Obi has finally taken the plunge, but has needed circumlocutions and considerable blather to salve his troubled conscience and convince his ardent crowd that he remains the real deal. So he was impelled to say nothing, which his defection statement amounted to, in grand terms that fetch his amorphous band of supporters from their delusions. The supporters are, however, still agitated. They tentatively hinge their support for him on his taking the presidential ticket, not the running mate position. How they would react when it becomes obvious that the Camorra which runs the ADC had been pledged to former vice president Atiku Abubakar lock, stock, and barrel, remains to be seen. They can, if they wish, bolt from the party or reappraise their jaded philosophies about party politics. If the former, they would be committing suicide; and if the latter, they would be emptying themselves of the passion that frenzies their irrationalities.
Either way, Mr Obi is headed for very interesting times. He will make a grand show of contesting the presidential ticket not many months from now, but he knows deep down that that battle is lost and won already. He had been preceded in the ADC by the political aurochs from Adamawa State, a head start backed by financial wizardry and assured outcomes. Mr Obi can certainly not hope to upstage him, even if he managed, together with his baying crowd, to create an atmosphere in the party and in the country conducive to only a southern presidential candidate. The jobholders that flocked into the party along with Alhaji Atiku are not interested in Mr Obi’s vexing parsimony; they instead salivate for the former vice president’s munificence, and can breathe better under his inattentiveness to detail. Well, all said, Mr Obi is now irretrievably locked in the same boat with Alhaji Atiku and the ADC. It does not matter any longer whether the opposition craft is seaworthy or not.
Indications of the despondency and desperation that led the former Anambra governor to take the fateful step of hitching a ride with the ADC in 2027 abound in his rambling disquisition on democracy, defection, and patriotism. His statement was replete with value judgement, name-calling, unverified facts, simplistic reasoning, untested theories, and sweeping and sanctimonious generalisations. Winning elections at a state level or being elevated to the governorship office does not often tax a politician’s profundity; so, it was not surprising that Mr Obi took the Anambra stool. Manipulate the electorate’s emotions, conjure the right catchphrases, posture as the moral right in a sea of moral wrongs, and add some religious or cultural ketchup, and a governorship candidate is made. But transiting to a higher level has, however, proved daunting for him, despite exploiting the country’s dangerous religious cleavages. To aspire higher, he would need to manifest philosophical depth, network across the country’s geopolitical zones, and develop a solid and verifiable cross-cultural appeal. These have proved too much for his short-termist approach to politics.
In his presumed defection statement, Mr Obi gave an indication of how his mind worked. He was already thinking of the presidency and campaigning for the presidential ticket. He used more than two-thirds of the statement to angle for the top job, when it was not clear that he had registered with the ADC already. After profusely de-marketing Nigeria and concluding it had been consigned to the dregs, after describing its institutions, particularly the electoral commission INEC, as weak and perhaps unsalvageable, he spoke glowingly of how other nations rose to prominence and development through ‘unity and effective leadership’, ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’, and ‘responsiveness’. He regurgitated the street mendacity about the current Nigerian government attempting to turn the nation into a one-party state simply because of political defections, which culture he himself exploited to his advantage on at least three occasions, and he also parroted the ignorance about taxing the poor obviously because he had not read the new tax laws. And then he waxed theoretical about development indices of some south-east Asian countries without explaining why he was unable to apply, even partially, the rubric of those theories in Anambra which he governed for eight unremarkable years.
The statement was also full of non-sequiturs, drawing direct relationship between ‘grabbing power and mismanaging it’, and suggesting that his travels and interactions with intellectuals and leaders had opened his eyes to how nations develop, an epiphany he believed would serve him well as he had become equipped for leadership. Had it been so easy to transcend the chasm between theory and practice, every professor would be a great statesman. But just before he dropped his pen, he finally got to the subject of his defection, in the third or so paragraph to the last. For this peripatetic politician who just trotted the globe so effortlessly and spoke so glibly about everything, and inflated himself with the helium of leadership theories spanning three continents, he failed his own test of predicating great leadership on honesty. He had at various fora insisted he was still in the LP, and claimed he was only testing the waters in the ADC. But in his defection statement, he dishonestly claimed: “Having been part of the coalition from inception, I now respectfully call on my political leaders, associates, supporters, the Obidient Movement, political leaders and members of the opposition parties across the country to join this broad national coalition under the African Democratic Congress led by Sen. David Mark.”
He forgot that newspapers of the day contained reports of ADC leaders and so many other politicians urging him to make public his defection, especially as he had waffled over his continuing membership of the LP. Well, better late than never. He will now presumably go ahead and register with the ADC and intensify his campaign for the presidential ticket. But if he is again worsted in the presidential primary, he will have nowhere else to go. He will lick his wounds, aware that those who seized the leadership of the ADC had done so at the behest of Alhaji Atiku, and are in no mood to subsume their future or hope under the politics and style of a former LP man from whom they could not hope to make hay while the sun shines at its brightest.
Yet, in all this, there is a catch somewhere, and Mr Obi may perhaps be more disingenuous than some Nigerians think. His former running mate in the 2023 presidential poll, Datti Baba-Ahmed, seems to know him more than anyone else. He knows him, it appears, as a man full of vacillation. Speaking to the media late last week, he insisted that it did not seem as if Mr Obi had actually defected. What he thinks the former LP standard-bearer had done was to merely tune his mind to be in a coalition arrangement with the ADC. If Mr Obi fails to get the ticket, swears Mr Baba-Ahmed, the doors of the LP will remain open, and any support he wants will be given to him. The other side of the coin, however, is that Mr Obi lionised his association with the ADC right from the beginning, thus giving the impression he was not a late joiner. Yet, curiously, he said little else, in a manner that also suggests he is minded to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. What then are Nigerians, and particularly ADC chieftains, to make of Mr Obi’s encouragement to his support base to ‘join this broad coalition under the ADC led by Sen. Mark’?
Since Mr Baba-Ahmed has now burst everyone’s bubble, ADC leaders will likely press Mr Obi to clarify his association with the so-called mega coalition. If the former Anambra governor goes ahead to register at his ward, they will call for no additional proof and will regard any suspicion as crying wolf where none exists. But if he pussyfoots as is his custom, then they will smell a rat and press him to commit himself. What seems to be the case is that Mr Obi is hedging his bets. He is merely procrastinating as usual, unable to make up his mind as firmly as many, and probably himself, hope. He is disillusioned with the crisis-ridden LP, and can see no alternative in sight. But he thinks he still has in his corner the captive audience that gave him 12 states and the FCT in the 2023 presidential poll, in the same way the hallucinating Buharistas think they still have a captive 12 million votes that can be whimsically deployed during any election.
But deep down, Mr Obi probably senses his goose is already cooked. He has, therefore, shamefacedly committed himself to the ADC without making it sound so, in delicate literary half measures. He half boyishly expects that by some celestial intervention, Alhaji Atiku would in the course of events be unhorsed and he would be presented the ticket on a platter. Politics may have magical charms, but it is not magic. Alhaji Atiku realises this, and has now fully committed himself to the ADC after first taken refuge and playing politics in press statements. It is Mr Obi’s turn to chafe at how nature and political circumstances have dealt him a cruel hand.
