Restarting The Obidient Movement (1): The Anatomy Of A Revolution

On Friday morning, we were greeted by the news of the death of Dr. Doyin Okupe, former presidential spokesperson and former DG of the Peter Obi presidential campaign council as well as its one-time vice presidential placeholder. May his soul find peaceful rest. Expectedly marking many of the public reactions to his death were comments about his perceived betrayal of his erstwhile comrade, Peter Obi, and what became known as the Obidient Movement.

Let us pause a while and think along this line: since the end of the 2023 elections, the news around the Obidient Movement has never failed to be that of betrayal by one of its former apostles or the other. If it is not about Julius Abure, the Labour Party chairman, falling out with Obi and pursuing a different agenda, it is about Kenneth Okonkwo, its once vivacious spokesperson, turning a rebel and dumping the movement, or about lawmakers elected on the platform of the LP defecting to the APC. What is going on? Why is a once promising and formidable movement quickly crumbling?

However, while the lovers of Obi and the Obidient Movement have been quick to condemn the likes of Abure, Okonkwo, Okupe and others who have openly rebelled, they are failing to see a more subversive enemy as represented by many who, while still donning the toga of the Obidient Movement, are indeed nothing close to it in their hearts. I am talking about the legislators in the National Assembly who, having entered the legislative chambers on the back of the high-galloping horse of the Obidient Movement, has simply swum along with the tide of the old order in total negation of the promise of a new order which the movement represented in the eyes of many. We have not seen these lawmakers speak and act for the poor masses in any way different from what we saw in the past. We have not seen any paradigm shift in the art of lawmaking from these legislators to justify the euphoria that greeted their largely unexpected victories. Rather, they have simply joined the chorus of political vultures who allocate large chunks of our commonwealth to their bottomless pockets. The case of the N57.6bn spent to purchase SUVs for the legislators easily comes to mind. Can anyone remember any of the LP lawmakers rejecting theirs, or at least rising to speak against the unjustifiable waste?

Regarding the action of Okupe, Okonkwo and others who openly cut ties with the movement, it is just a case of a movement losing some of its apostles, but in the case of the lawmakers, it is the greatest disservice to the movement by a people who are in a position to continue flying its flag in no less a place than the hallowed chambers of the nation’s highest lawmaking institution. Being fortunate, unlike Obi, to have become successful with their electoral ambition, it behoves them to start putting in practice the splendid avowals of the movement regarding transformative governance. Nothing less than revolutionary legislative inputs would have demonstrated their commitment to a movement that projected itself as revolutionary. And it is such an exceptional performance that would have kept the flag of the movement flying, the flame of its torch burning, and the banner of its credibility lifted. For example, imagine the profundity of the impact if some of the LP lawmakers had risen to say, “We are against spending such a humongous sum from the public treasury just to purchase cars for legislators. Such elitist policy is against our ideals as a party of the people. We are against this sort of lavish spending. We won’t support it and if this House goes ahead to approve it, we will not accept our own cars.” No doubt, such rare legislative activism would have sustained the movement’s momentum and appeal, and even fortified it ahead of another electoral outing in future.

But then this failure is easily understandable when one pays attention to the glaring fact that the Obidient phenomenon was more of an electoral struggle than an ideological movement. Every ideological movement is constitutive of, first, an elite core; a small group of ideologues on whose shoulders rests the responsibility of articulating and propagating the ideology of the movement. They are the first-level apostles of the movement, its think tank, and its frontline army. The elite core is the leadership of any notable movement as we have seen all through history. In the case of the French Revolution, figures like Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, and Camil Desmoulins constituted the elite core of the movement. The American Revolution saw the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin emerging as the elite core, just as Georgi Plekhanov, Julius Martov, and Vladimir Lenin were among the figures that made up same in the Russian Revolution. Back home in Nigeria, the Ogoni movement had its inner core in figures like Ken Sarowiwa, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbokoo, and Felix Nuate among others. Also, we saw Zik, Ahmadu Bello, Awo and others become the elite core of that titanic movement that won our independence.

The second constituent of an ideological movement is a mass followership, which reflects the level of public appeal and support enjoyed by the movement. I shall return to this later. However, it is in regard to its elite core, the backbone of every movement, that the anatomy of the Obidient Movement had its weakest link. Its elite core was not a product of ideological commitment but of electoral opportunism. When one looked at its set-up, the glaring picture was that of a very popular presidential candidate and an army of political defectors seeking to ride in the tide of his popularity. There were very few exceptions such as represented by non-career-politicians and activists like Duro Farotimi and Aisha Yesufu. But then being a movement that sought to take over political power, the most influential component of its engine room was inevitably the part located in its political base – the Labour Party, and this part was so much populated by the old lot who had been part of Nigeria’s problem and so much polluted by the old-order filth to effectively institute the avowed new order.

Again, since it was an electoral project in urgent pursuit of success in the fast-approaching 2023 elections, electoral exigency prevailed over ideological commitment. This is why the adoption of Labour Party by Obi was clearly a move dictated by electoral necessity and never ideological affinity. Otherwise, given Obi’s neoliberal socio-economic manifesto that favoured privatisation and subsidy removal, a party founded on the principles of socialism could never have been his destination. At the time of his presidential campaign, someone pointed out on national television that Obi’s position on fuel subsidy was in stack contradiction to the position of Labour Party as reflected in its manifesto published on its website. This is instructive.

Given all that have transpired within the elite core of the Obidient Movement since the unsuccessful electoral bid of 2023, it has become clear that the movement lacked a committed inner circle of apostles that would uphold its banner beyond that election season. With Obi not getting the presidency, his supposed lieutenants have been deserting him, and even those among his party’s legislators that have not defected appear now too estranged from the ideals he preaches. What all this points to is the fact that if Obi had become the president, he would have had to work with allies that may not share the same ideals with him. He would have to work with a National Assembly that blackmails the executive by refusing to approve budgets until their own pecuniary interest is accommodated in it (read Obadanjo’s autobiography MY WATCH for some interesting insight). His labour Party would not have the majority seat, and based on hindsight, we cannot be too sure that the opposition members from LP would speak out when the lawmakers begin to ask for wasteful privileges like N130m-worth SUVs.

For the Obidient Movement to show convincing promise of bringing a radical shift to our national life, it ought to have been a movement of an ideologically united elite with an uncompromising commitment to certain ideals. This is inevitably so given that the task of transforming Nigeria can never be a one-man affair but one titanic struggle involving multiple heads thinking alike and operating in Aso Rock, in the hallowed chambers of the Senate and House of Reps, in the judiciary complexes, and in other domains of exercise of governmental powers.

This was the point Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah tried to make in his incisive write-up “Nigeria: In search of a new power elite” published as the lead content of THE GUARDIAN newspaper of October 1, 2008. Drawing on the arguments of sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1956 book THE POWER ELITE, Kukah noted that what Nigeria needs to achieve the change we all yearn for is a new power elite given that the realm of political power is constitutive of not one individual – the president – but a network of powerful individuals as found in government, in the military, in the civil service etc. It is the collective actions of these persons (the power elite) that ultimately map the destiny path of a nation. My reading of biographies of the likes of Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan has convinced me that any leader of Nigeria is ultimately up against a power elite that has got so used to the decadent “Nigerian” way that the leader must negotiate or fight if they are to make any meaningful change. And so far, none of the successive leaders appears to have prevailed in this struggle. So, looking at the anatomy of the Obidient Movement, it is clear that it was from the onset beset by formidable obstacles given that its elite core, the would-be nucleus of the power elite in an Obi’s government, was not a creation of ideological commitment.

The nature of politics is that you cannot go all alone or jettison your lieutenants who worked with you to attain power. For instance, in making appointments, even when you as the leader have your own ideas regarding competence and character, you will always defer to negotiations and compromises as your party and some important individuals stake their claim in the sharing of the spoils of electoral victory. So, while I voted for Obi, I could not help wondering what he would do as the president and how he would do that amidst all this complexity.

TO BE CONTINUED

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.