By Basil Okoh
There’s a sense in which Peter Obi has changed the politics of Nigeria, perhaps forever. Nigerian political parties have two distinctive features. First they are a coalition of strongmen in their various communities gathered together to form an association for the purpose of accessing benefits from the Nigerian state. Each strongman is required to hold his community in thrall and deliver their votes periodically in order to remain strong in the party and have high consideration among members.
Secondly, Nigerian politics has historically been propelled by the imperatives of ethnicity, regionalism and religion. These provide a rampart for erecting barriers for the protection and delineation of spheres of influence among politicians. Regions and their religions provide enclaves for the exercise of political power among the politicians as strongmen. The bigger your enclave the stronger you’re perceived as a politician. It is why the northern Muslim politicians who claim the entire north as their enclave, albeit falsely, insist on the leadership of Nigeria because they have a claim to a bigger enclave.
You hear people “speak for the north” or hear of “southern coalition”. It is usually a gambit to claim enclaves and spheres of influence. Enclaves and spheres of influence form the basis for the sharing of economic benefits among these ethnic, religious and regional strongmen. Peter Obi emergence and his political philosophy threatens to change all of that.
The Peter Obi phenomenon has introduced a new paradigm that is both dynamic and threatening to the traditional practice of politics in Nigeria. It is a new paradigm founded on youth energy that threatens to destroy the old terms of engagement in Nigerian politics.
The Peter Obi paradigm is different from what we are used to and what brought us to this sorry socioeconomic pass. Obi promised to engage with the public on the basis of qualification, capacity and public record of performance, not ethnicity, religion or regionalism. This proposition represents an existential threat that can wipe away the old guard. These old guard have no capacity, questionable qualifications and have never been able to gather good records in all their years in public offices.
The Nigerian politician, unable to adapt to these proposed terms of engagement with the Nigerian public is in a quandary on how to respond to the gale of youth activism in the political space. Pampered and tolerated over the decades in unthinking hedonism and with a vacuity of mind unmatched in any other clime, the Nigerian politician has always found safety and protection running back to ethnic, regional or religious fortifications, behind which to negotiate elite benefits from the Nigerian state.
Peter Obi’s insistence on the work ethic as the governing culture and productivity as the new qualification to public office has threatened to throw politicians out of jobs. And it’s not an acceptable proposition to them.
No one in the old guard of the Nigerian political firmament has been able to fashion a way to meet this challenge of changing the paradigm and terms of engagement to build a new Nigeria. Peter Obi has left all traditional politicians groping, not only to respond effectively to this challenge but to provide an alternative vision to its propositions for the rebuilding of Nigeria.
Peter Obi has thrown a challenge but everyone has been scrambling, denying the generational threat that youth rage presents to our traditional politics and hoping that Peter Obi and his threatening proposition just disappears and let all of us go back to our old lazy and unproductive normal. Politicians of the old order are looking to reassert the power of the traditional politics by deploying old tricks to confront a new problem which the recourse to ethnicity and religion represent. But Peter Obi is also changing the theme and structure of political discourse which now leaves them mum.
Atiku Abubakar’s riposte that northern youth are not in the social media was his way of responding to youth rage in the south while denying it’s presence in the north. He succeeded only in presenting the picture of a man without shame or regret that the youth of his region are illiterate and backward and without a footprint in the 21st century world. For a Nigerian politician who has made a home in the glittering world of Dubai, it is a shameful admission of failure in his own home.
It is not true of course that the youth of the north are not in the Social Media but he needed to reassure himself that the youth rage burning through Nigerian cities and rural communities will not extend to northern Nigeria and destroy his electoral prospects. He finds comfort in the fact that those who vote for him can only be uninformed and illiterate.
Social Media is the most immersing, engaging and influential means of public communication in the world today. But Atiku and his ilk will have none of it in their enclave as it will educate, inform and empower northern youth to reject his self entitlement politics and the regressive practices of his fellow northern politicians. Atiku’s shameless pride in announcing the backwardness of the youth of his region tells the sorry story of a man thriving and making personal progress on the ignorance and backwardness of his own people. And these are the kind of political practices that the Peter Obi proposition stands to destroy. No one should be allowed to benefit from the ignorance and poverty of their own people.
Bola Tinubu has himself shown a worse example of the elite entitlement argument that characterize the political culture of Nigeria. His public confession that leadership succession has turned into an elite conspiracy has angered the Nigerian youth population to no end. The youth believe that elite self entitlement schemes are designed to raid the wealth of the nation and further pauperize the already poor.
“Emi l’okan” typifies the worst examples of elite self entitlement political culture that has festered in Nigeria across the many decades of both military and democratic rule.
The culture of “emi l’okan” is elite conspiracy that undermines democracy. It has incubated sloth and laziness and worse, a debilitating lack of imagination to engage in competition with the rest of the world. Politicians wait for their turn not to bring value but to plunder the national patrimony.
It is to these entrenched culture and attitudes that the Peter Obi phenomenon presents a deep philosophical challenge. It will be a revolution that if successful will present a new hope and a well founded paradigm shift for the future success of the Nigerian enterprise.
@basilokoh.
