This is the concluding part of the piece which, yesterday, continued with the narrative of the truth behind Peter Obi’s mission and consuming zeal in politics to serve the people
APART from when he was not in Awka, he mostly reported for work at 7.00 am everyday, and never closed until nightfall. It was, of course, a burden. One morning during our first months, I entered the Governor’s office and found him lying on a couch. Startled, I asked what the matter was. He thought it was an attack of malaria. Asked if I should fetch Dr. Ezenwa of the Government House Clinic, he demurred. At that moment, Damian, his elder brother, who was on his way to Enugu stepped in. He was sure the Governor’s problem was overwork. As I saw him to his car, he said: “Your friend listens to you. Please advise him to slow down.” Quickly back again inside his office, I found the Governor Obi at his desk – working!
“Sir, why are you back at your desk working?” I asked. “I didn’t come here to fall sick,” he replied. We didn’t leave the office that day until well past 7.00pm. Because of his sterling achievements, adversaries have been mushrooming even from the woodworks, spewing lies and many more lies, all aimed at assassinating his character and rendering his presidential bid a nullity. How woefully the detractors are failing! People of this country, across all the states, through ethnic barriers, religious divides and conspiratorial animosities have stood out resolutely for him. For one reason: They want the country to take a decisive turn for the better. They want the country to turn its back to the ruinous politics that, to this moment, has held the country in the throes of grinding poverty, endless bloody conflicts, empty stomachs, leaking pockets and utter hopelessness.
The Nigerian peoples have examined Peter Obi and have also examined the others busily digging above their limits and purporting to be aiming for the highest office in the land. They have found that Obi is the way to go. Not because his initials are P. O., but because he represents a breath of fresh air in comparison to the malodorous stench of the capricious lot that have carpeted a country once bound for glory. The Nigerian peoples have taken to heart the admonition of Marcus Aurelius, who was the Roman Emperor from 169 to 180 AD. In his book, Meditations, is to be found countless arresting gems of quotable quotes. For instance, Emperor Marcus had this to say on the evil conspiracies to destroy genuine servants of the people: “When a bunch of known corrupt people unites against one man and spares no attempt to assassinate his character, blindly follow that one man.”
The Nigerian people have wisely decided to follow Peter Obi. Without question, Obi’s traducers belong largely in the category that cannot show their certificates, that are incapable of pointing out their ancestral homes, that frittered away the peoples’ commonwealth, that, with effrontery and impunity, pissed on all the citizens’ heads on the pretext that it was raining. That is why they decided to go with him. The people are insisting that the days are now in the past when they could be hoodwinked with the inanity that a receipt acknowledging the payment of electricity tariffs, or the label on a loaf designating its baker was enough certification for educational qualification. The people have decided the intolerability of ailing, nonagenarian leaders that would, every two minutes, be stretchered into air ambulances for medical tours of American and European capitals.
The tremendous thing about the positive developments of this New Era is that it is youth-led. The youths are sick and tired of the interminable strikes by university teachers. They are fed up to the hairline with the incessant bloodbaths in places of worship, in villages, in townships, on farmlands. Their acclamation for Peter Obi rebukes a bedraggled leadership coterie of insensate hoodlums that is suffering from a crippling paralysis of the will to take remedial actions against vicious and incessant terrorist attacks that have rendered Nigeria about the most dangerous place to live in the whole wide world.
In every clime under the sun, the tired take a rest. Even God Himself rested on the seventh day of His run of creations, according to Genesis 2:2. But Nigeria is suffocating from the wiles of exhausted and panting Methuselahs who deserve a place by the fireside singing lullabies to their great-grandchildren, but who insist on participating in political marathons they lack both the steam and the fuel to feature in. This impunity is precisely what has stoked Nigerian youths into open revolt. Happily their armament, for all its lethality, is solely the Permanent Voters Card. They have taken to heart the pronouncement of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the sage, who famously prophesied that: “A day will come when Nigerian masses from the North and South, Christians and Muslims and Animists will merge as a force for progress and unity, and kick against rigging, corruption and tyranny.”
The Nigerian youths are to be celebrated. They are this country’s division of the global moral army that the American actor Harrison Ford spoke about when he addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23, 2019. Said Mr. Ford: There is a new force of nature at hand, stirring all over the world. They are the young people, whom frankly, we have failed, who are angry, who are organised, who are capable of making a difference. They are a moral army. And the most important thing that we can do for them is to get the hell out of their way.
Nigerian youths have rejected the politics of the retrograde class, together with their avarice, mendacity and equivocations. They have abjured carrots thrown at them in the form of job offers as “Internet consultants”. That would have conscripted them into the ragtag army of social media marionettes fitted with cell phones and inexhaustible data, to sustain a campaign of calumny and perfidy against Peter Obi. They have called the bluff of faceless marauders in cyberspace, who have been employing false aliases, to impugn Peter Obi’s integrity. Nigerian youths are not asking for remuneration. They are not asking for bags of rice and cartons of agbado. They are no longer interested in their future being mortgaged. They would have nothing more to do with bloodsuckers that shamefacedly denied the massacre of young blood at the Lekki Tollgate. They want new. They want sparkling. They want whole. They yearn for a New Era. They shall vanquish.
This, then, is the score. For the rationale, the purpose of elections is to put in office the competent. From every available empirical evidence, Peter Obi trumps the tired and recycled candidates of the old order in this Department of Competence. Whoever does not vote for him in 2023, will no doubt have his or her reason. But it will be nothing to do with the imperative of competence.This is my testament. I stand resolutely on it.
