Restarting The Obidient Movement (2): The Reputation Of A Revolution

One factor that made the Obidient Movement formidable was its popular appeal. Having Obi emerge as the president was something many people desired, and this translated to the mass appeal that gave the movement a great reputation. This character of the Obidient phenomenon made it indeed seem a very promising movement.

However, this commanding popular appeal may have also deprived the movement the advantage of both internal and external scrutiny it needed for realizing its full potential. There was this palpable mass hysteria about a Messiah and a promised land finally beckoning on the long beleaguered Nigeria. Many people, especially young ones, appeared to envision an Obi presidency that would bring an instant and total reversal of the fate of Nigeria. At the Awka South LGA INEC headquarters, I saw a young man wearing dreads and looking somewhat unkept waiting like others to pick up his PVC ahead of the elections. A visibly frustrated youngster fed up with the perennial hardship in the land, this chap spoke emotionally to someone seated beside him, “I want to have money, I want to be rich. This is why I must get my PVC and vote for Peter Obi.”

While such hope for instant transmutation from extreme poverty to opulence may not have reflected the attitude of an average Obidient, it was an instructive commentary on the sheer magnitude of the expectations placed on the anticipated Obi presidency. The euphoria, thrills and buzz of the expectations did not leave any room for critical engagement of the movement’s ideals and mission.

Nigeria is a country that has resisted all interventions to reverse its multifaceted ailments. The question then should have been, “what different intervention was the Obidient Movement bringing in a bid to make a difference?” It was a movement that thrived on the promise of making a difference based on the perceived revolutionary leadership credentials of Obi.

Anybody with the right insight into the causes of Nigeria’s lingering failure as a nation would appreciate that the root of the problem is our weak institutions and lopsided values. The institutions, from the highest political office to the least desk in the civil service bureaucracy, are overburdened by the ills of corruption manifesting as bribery, favouritism, ineptitude, and other such destructive elements that have kept the nation from growing. Those that saw Obi as the revolutionary leader Nigeria has long-yearned for usually pointed to his eight-year tenure as the Anambra state governor as evidence of this. The excitement of the moment did not allow for any serious interrogation of this.

Did Obi’s tenure achieve a decisive departure from these “Nigerian” ways? Did the state civil service become different from what obtains elsewhere in the nation? Did civil servants stop asking for bribes? Did they do their work strictly in accordance with laws and regulations without the usual sentiments of self-interest? Did the state bureaucracy become remarkably more efficient than seen elsewhere in Nigeria such that enquiries for information at ministries and agencies were attended to promptly and mails to government email addresses replied as and when due? Did the moral ferment in the only state-owned university by way of widespread “sorting” and other malpractices end? (Even the current acting Vice Chancellor had to battle these old demons upon taking office about a year ago). Did the state traffic body, the Anambra State Traffic Authority (ASTA, now ATMA) established by Obi perform in a way different from other security agencies in the country in terms of working with ethical diligence without resorting to extortion and bribery? Did the massive job recruitments made in the twilight of Obi’s administration show any modicum of departure from the usual nepotistic culture where merit is continuously trampled upon while favouritism is elevated. Did Obi’s politics depart from the usual Nigerian counter-democracy, counter-accountability strategies? For instance, was APGA’s primary election that produced his successor conducted in line with the strict demands of internal party democracy? What of his local government election of early 2014 where APGA claimed 100 percent victory even with no election taking place in many places?

The above questions are not intended to show that Obi wouldn’t have made the difference as a president. They were posed just to highlight the fact that hinging this hope on his performance as a governor was a product of mere mass euphoria as against any sober evaluation. I am strongly of the view that the Obidient followership drew its existence more from Obi’s post-governorship image projection than from any revolutionary legacy left behind by his time in power. This projection came mainly via the series of speeches and his other communications that presented him as a different breed of leader in terms of accountability. This image may be true of him, but translating this to a revolutionary leadership is a different thing altogether.

The point, therefore, is that the Obidient followership was motivated by a sincere desire for change, but its hope was founded on a false imagining of Obi’s leadership antecedent. I personally questioned a lot of undergraduate students in my university and discovered that they knew little to nothing about Obi’s leadership in Anambra. They were merely being swayed by the prevailing sentiments that he was the ideal leader for the nation. And their hopes that he would redeem Nigeria, a task no previous leader had achieved, was so fanatically strong.

This unswervable belief and hope made it difficult for the Obidient Movement to really scrutinise itself, understand its strengths and weaknesses and be ready to carry on with the journey no matter how long and chequered the road turned out to be. Yes, the movement could not see the need to engage its icon, Obi, on his leadership antecedent, its successes and failures and how he intended to replicate the successes and mitigate the failures. It failed to query the contradiction of having the likes of Okupe and other members of the “old order” as leaders of a movement that intended to institute a new order. In fact, any attempts at raising these questions were treated as bullets fired from the enemy camp. A man, who on national TV demanded clarity from Obi regarding the contradiction between his capitalist ideology (that favoured subsidy removal and privatisation) and the socialist ideals of the Labour Party whose flag he was flying, was mobbed by the Obidients on the Internet. Such was the fate of Prof. Okwudiba Nnoli, a scholar with an unquestionable reputation for progressive thoughts, when he repeatedly raised questions about Obi’s neoliberal economic ideology; the same strategies implemented by Obasanjo, Jonathan, Buhari, and now Tinubu, and which have been impoverishing Nigerians since the days of Babangida’s structural adjustment programme (SAP). Nnoli, as a Marxist, was bringing an alternative perspective to the discourse.

However, the Obidient Movement was too immersed in its dreams and self-adulation that it became blind even to its own weaknesses. Otherwise, it was not difficult to see that the elite core of that movement was made up of everyday “Nigerian” politicians who would desert Obi once the electoral project failed and that these persons could not be trusted to uphold any wholesome principles if the project succeeded and they became part of the government. They were not ideologically committed, they were mere opportunists.

All this underscores why popular appeal cannot always be evidence of how healthy and promising a movement is. One of the most seminal insights into the phenomenon of public appeal was offered by Walter Lippman in his immortal 1922 book PUBLIC OPINION. According to him, public opinion is usually a product of “stereotypes” – simplified images of reality that do not reckon with the complexities of the social experience. Lippman argued that the masses are often carried away by representations that appeal to certain entrenched thought patterns and belief systems that may not correspond to reality. For instance, in Nigeria, because of the entrenched beliefs about ethnic politics and marginalization, it is easy to manipulate the populace into believing that a politician being tried for corruption is simply being persecuted due to their ethnicity. Politicians know this much, hence are ever ready to exploit it. The case of Innoson and GTB was another good example. Many Igbo people believed that Innoson’s fate was a product of ethnic persecution. People easily overlooked the fact that use of state agencies like the EFCC to pursue personal vendetta is an evil that has always been with us. Hence, even if the EFCC (as alleged) was seen as implementing GTB’s agenda, this would not automatically translate to the Buhari government attempting to stiffle a business owned by an Igbo. Even the evidence of multimillion dollars contracts awarded to Innoson by the same Buhari government was not enough to convince many – underscoring how right Lippman was in his argument that public opinion usually thrives on entrenched stereotypes.

It is for this reason that hinging the success of a movement like the Obidient phenomenon on how much public opinion is on its side may be a mistake. I say this given my experience in discussing with people about the problem of lack of a committed elite core in the movement. They have invariably remarked that the backbone of the movement is the ordinary people. In my most recent of such discussions, my interlocutor had said, “It [the Obidient Movement] is a people’s movement. It is the people that will make it succeed or fail.”

This observation is right, but only to a certain extent. As I argued in the first part of this essay, “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… The second constituent of an ideological movement is a mass followership, which reflects the level of public appeal and support enjoyed by the movement.”

Public appeal is crucial for success of such a movement, but the elite core ensures that the movement is first of all healthy, focused, and tenacious to meet the expectations of the public. Public opinion is often swayed by the mood of the moment. After the euphoria of an election victory, it may not endure, and upon the disappoinment of an election failure, it may wither. Those close to Anambra politics in the early years of the fourth republic would recall that after the euphoria of Obi’s electioneering with its splendid catchphrase “Is Anambra state cursed or are we the curse?” many of his erstwhile cheerers became disillusioned by his governance. Those of us that remained his supporters throughout had to struggle to defend his government. One person told me, “What we need are good roads and not all these sermons about accountability.” Public opinion thrives on simplified images of reality, otherwise it is not difficult to see that fixing the Nigeria’s perennial problem of accountability is more critical to solving our developmental woes than mere fixing a number of roads. When accountability is there, good roads will come as a natural result – public opinion does not have the reflective patience and interrogative insight to see this sublime truth.

This unreflective nature of public opinion was also visible in the fact that most people who could not see anything good in Obi’s government turned out to become fanatical Obidients. I personally know a lot of persons who fall under this category. How a leader they saw as incompetent to govern a small Anambra suddenly became the Messiah to liberate the vast and complex political space called Nigeria is just a striking example of the silliness of public opinion.

A movement that has an existentially monumental goal of salvaging the “giant of Africa” from its continued descent to doom cannot be left to rely only on public appeal for its oxygen of life. The movement must not mistake its external reputation for its internal strength. Its elite core must be one that is fit for the task. Public opinion may not be reliable, as rightly observed by Lippman, who advocated that informed and discerning “expert elites” should take up the responsibility of guiding public discourse and actions. The Obidient Movement requires exactly this because the journey is far and rough, it cannot be done and dusted in just one electoral cycle.

TO BE CONCLUDED

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