We are in the second week of the new year that appears to have got off to a very dramatic start on the political front. The opposition against the implementation of the tax reforms is suddenly muted, now all four bills that constitute the law are in full throttle. Two of them took off on June 26, 2025.
But as is to be expected of an opposition that is determined to politicise every issue and turn what should often be a conversation into an argument, it pretended it had made awful discoveries about the bills on the eve of the implementation of the reforms. It fought hard, bit and kicked against the bills that are now laws to the bitter end, but Abuja stayed on course. It remained resolute. And now like the silence that follows an ugly storm, it’s been largely quiet since January 1, 2026.
The manufactured grievance around the reform bills, all claims of discrepancies between the gazetted copies of the bills and the copies to which the President gave his asset, have suddenly disappeared, pushed from the front pages of news reports. They have been replaced by more burning issues of the day. One of these, which was carried over from December 2023 and which Nigerians thought had been laid to rest after the emergency rule that was imposed on Rivers State ended in October 2025, is the lingering fight between Governor Sim Fubara of Rivers State, the disaffected members of that state’s House of Assembly led by the Speaker, Martins Amaewhule, and the political godfather of the combatants, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and immediate past governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike.
The Rivers case is stale news. As Fela would have said, ‘Na old news be dat’. I will return to it some other day. But now, I go to the other issue that competed for the frontrunner position with the Rivers State saga before it fell off the front pages. Here, I talk of the formal defection of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 election. He jumped from the party that gave him unanticipated fame and landed as he had been expected to in the latest home of Nigeria’s political malcontents, the African Democratic Congress. His defection was hyped up as a major political event and staged with much pomp and circumstance- as something with deeper political meaning than it actually portended. Even the choice of Enugu as the location of the declaration was invested with symbolic power. The whole thing finally ended on a whimpery note, far from a bang.
It would, in fact, seem like the declaration was a face-saving act to salvage whatever was left of Peter Obi’s dignity as an assumed political powerhouse who has in the last one year been destitute. Just over a year before the next general election and less than six months before the commencement of the party primaries, Obi’s defection happened a bit too late. Much later than could have given him the leverage he desired. It was an act of desperation as every other option appeared foreclosed or placed him in a more precarious position. As far as the ADC is concerned, Obi’s defection was either now or never. The Labour Party had proven to be less and less accommodating. Yet, he could not have jumped on the ADC bandwagon without appearing to be selling himself too cheaply to Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who everyone knows is not just the brain behind the ADC move but is also the landlord of that piece of political estate.
Peter Obi is as far as is immediately obvious just a tenant, probably a temporary one at that, in that ADC compound. He has at least one more trip to make in his search for a political home and that will be just before or during the party primaries, when all doubts and denials are finally cleared and he is confronted with the fear he has been running away from. Then would he look for a political party willing to give him a wild card to enable him contest in the general election in his preferred way that short circuits party primaries to stand as a presidential candidate. In all his moral posturing, it is remarkable that it has never occurred to Peter Obi or his followers that primaries are a part of the established processes of democratic politicking and that it is electorally fraudulent for a putative democrat and an advocate of a New Nigeria to not want to subject himself to that process.
It has been a part of Peter Obi’s scheme as a politician not to participate in primaries. He wangles his way duplicitously from behind to take what others assiduously prepared and worked for. Yet he is the first to mount the moral high horse to pontificate on all issues. How can his New Nigeria be possible when its main proponent fails to walk his talk? From APGA whose ticket he got on a platter and swore never to leave (a big lie!) to the PDP and then LP, Peter Obi has never participated in a primary election on which he is at the top of the ticket. In the PDP primaries that preceded the 2019 election, it was Atiku that carried the burden, not Obi. His failure to participate in primaries is neither random nor a case of happenstance. It is the calculated move of a serial betrayer of the political system.
Yet in his public career as a political statistician, he has not availed Nigerians the true statistics of the number of Chinese, Bangladeshi or Singaporean politicians that have shied away from party primaries. Ask me about gbajue and I will show you Peter Obi. He is the past master of political subterfuge. By the time he gets to admit that the ADC was repurposed for Atiku who needs him as a running mate, then would he make his way to the actual party, his special purpose vehicle for the 2027 election that he had penciled down to achieve his ambition. He knows which party that is right now even if he demurs and would not mention it, should anyone ask. Either that or he would make his way back to the LP where Datti Baba-Ahmed has promised him an open door when the scales finally fall off his eyes and he admits his second-place position in the ADC.
For now, he will continue to hope (which is probably why he went to the ADC) that Atiku could be persuaded to hand him the party’s ticket, a thing the Waziri (?) Adamawa has made clear would not happen. Not until his marabouts tell him something different.
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