“It seems at last Obidients have met their match in a man who has never backed down from a fight in 88 years of existence”.
The 2023 elections have been held with winners announced but the controversy surrounding the elections remain. In fact, the rhetoric around the country could mislead a foreigner into thinking Nigeria is still in the full swing of electoral campaign. A full month after the presidential election, someone decided to leak an audio clip of a pre-election phone conversation between the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, and David Oyedepo, the founder of Living Faith Church Worldwide, where both seemed to be planning to mobilise Christian votes in support of the candidacy of Obi.
In the audio, Mr Obi could be heard referring to the then forthcoming presidential election as a “religious war”. Opponents of Obi have been accusing him of playing politics with religion and ethnicity since he began campaigning last year but it is ironic that they could not find their smoking gun until after the elections were held. Mr. Obi has denounced the audio clip as fake and threatened a lawsuit against the media platform that published it.
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Nonetheless, the audio clip has raised concerns about the role of religion in Nigeria’s politics. During the 2023 presidential election, identity politics took over Nigeria’s political space, with candidates using ethnicity and religion to mobilize voters. The eventual winner of the presidential election, Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Southern Muslim, has equally been accused of playing identity politics as he fielded a northern Muslim as his vice president in a Muslim-Muslim ticket that many continue to denounce as destabilizing. Many religious and ethnic leaders campaigned for candidates and urged their followers to vote along religious and ethnic lines. This is a worrying trend that could lead to a further polarization of the country.
While the nation was enmeshed in a heated conversation on the audio clip, Nigeria’s only Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, granted an interview to Channels TV that has upended everything. In the 82-minute interview, Soyinka spoke extensively on the election and the state of the nation, condemning what he considered unbecoming actions that took place during the election and after. While Soyinka took all the major parties and candidates to task in the interview, his comments on a post-election interview by Labour Party vice presidential candidate Mr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed and the pre-election posturing of some Labour Party supporters became the only thing everyone was interested in.
Some context is important to understand Soyinka’s concerns in the interview. Baba-Ahmed had on March 22 on Channels TV said that it would be unconstitutional for the president-elect to be sworn in. He went ahead to instruct the president and the Chief Justice of Nigeria to subvert our democracy by not swearing in the president-elect, insisting that if they refused to heed his warning, Nigeria’s democracy would end on the day they swear in Bola Tinubu as president. Baba-Ahmed was menacing in that interview and his entire body language and utterances are simply unbecoming of a democrat.
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Like many other people, Soyinka condemned Baba-Ahmed’s position. He also deplored some Labour Party supporters for turning a democratic process into a divine coronation of their candidate, believing in the inevitability and divinity of Obi’s victory. As far as Soyinka is concerned, citizens in a democracy should not hold any candidate to be a messiah and should be open to the idea that their candidate could lose.
While Soyinka only dedicated 2 minutes to his comments on Baba-Ahmed and other LP co-travellers, social media and the traditional media platforms have been dominated by analysis of just this part of the long interview. Everyone wants to have their say. On one hand are people who believe that Soyinka went overboard by condemning Baba-Ahmed. They, in their own response to Soyinka, went overboard, rubbishing and slandering the old man and everything he has achieved and done for the country. He was called every bad name Obidients could think of, ranging from tribalist to idiot. His Nobel Prize and invariably Nigeria’s only Nobel Prize was not even safe from the extremists.
Let me clear here, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with Soyinka or any other person for that matter, but there has to be civility and proportionality in responding to any citizen offering his opinion, especially when that someone is of Soyinka’s age and longstanding service to the nation. While Soyinka’s Channels interview was only 4% about Obidients, the disproportionate response by Obidients on social media has provoked Soyinka to now dedicate more energy to attacking Obidients and their anti-democracy attitude. He has now given an interview on AriseTV where he denounced Baba-Ahmed and similarly minded Obidients as fascistic in attitude and posturing. He has also written an article titled provocatively as “Fascism on course” where he, among other things, called Obidients’ choice of name for their movement as “one of the most repulsive, off-putting concoctions I ever encountered in any political arena.” It seems at last Obidients have met their match in a man who has never backed down from a fight in 88 years of existence.
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At what point are Obidients going to realise that they are no longer just a protest movement but a political force with the third largest number of seats in the national assembly and state houses of assembly? They need to realise that citizens have a right to hold them to account to how they conduct themselves especially when it comes to their reaction to criticism. Our democracy suffers greatly when political parties cannot stand criticism and attempt to use America-styled cancel culture to shut their critics up. While all major parties have members who treat critics with contempt, Labour Party seems to be dominated by members with this attitude. It’s high time the leadership of the party and movement reined them in, for the party’s sake and the sake of the nation and its nascent democracy.
