Exasperated Peter Obi Considers LP Leave

Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s contender for the 2023 presidential election, has a devoted following. However, to his great joy, his fanaticism is entirely personal and cannot be transferred to anyone or any party.

Akin Osuntokun, the Director General of the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Organisation in the 2023 elections, confirmed that unwavering support in March when he declared that if Mr Obi and his Obedient supporters left the party after the contentious March 23, 2024 LP national convention, nothing would remain. Mr Obi understands where he sits within the party and the importance of his membership.

LP leaders, particularly Julius Abure, who was re-elected as party chairman on March 27 at the national convention in Nnewi, Anambra State, understand that without Mr Obi, the party would be unable to function. Worse, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), which claimed to have created the party and had unrestricted authority over it, understands that Mr Obi was their Godsend, rescuing them from their mundane existence and saving them from extinction in 2023.

As this column warned weeks ago and has continued to underline, Mr Obi has no stomach for a damaging intraparty fight, and no ability to govern one, let alone found one. Critics claimed that the writer was biased, if not discriminatory, and unjust to the ‘unimpeachable’ LP presidential candidate. The more this writer was attacked by reviewers, the more he vowed that Mr Obi will soon reveal his true colors. In the end, his breakdown occurred in a few dizzying weeks rather than a few dramatic years. However, as always, Mr Obi attempted to conceal his inability to handle stress and suffering.Last week, he finally made oblique reference to the most important subject matter unnerving the troubled LP – the party’s national convention and its aftermath. He said tersely: “I am still a member of the Labour Party and I don’t and will never engage in anti-party activities…I’m a Christian. Jesus said, when you go into a city, try to change them, live with them, fast with them. In the end, if you can’t, come out and even wash the sand that is on your shoes. He didn’t say go there and die with them. I tell you, I’m making spirited efforts to change them (LP), but I’m not going to die with them. That will not stop what we set out to do. We will try to change them (LP), if we can’t, we will leave them; we will not die with them.”

Ignore Mr Obi’s persistent use of religious identity and reiteration of his party membership. His heart is clearly no longer with the LP; it has fled. His affections are now focused on another party or individual, or, God forbid, a future alliance. He never looked like he’d stay in the LP for long, since, unlike his obsessive fans who can’t read the weather, Mr Obi realized he couldn’t use the same ethnic and religious reasons that he used to confuse the people in the previous election cycle. Shorn of the casuistry he had adored his entire life, and robbed of the political ecosystem that suited his divisive campaign techniques, he was already considering how damaging it would be to continue in LP. Now, the tensions inside that improbable party, particularly its three ungainly sections, have heightened his proclivity for political flirting. The beleaguered Mr Abure may have cleverly reserved the LP presidential ticket for Mr Obi, but the 2023 LP presidential candidate is astute enough to recognize that if he remained in the LP, he would not thrive, and that his chances of even running for president in the next election are slim.

What is clear now is that Mr Obi will quit LP in the near future. He had the opportunity to intervene decisively in the LP situation, but he showed no interest. If he had the political skills to reach an agreement, he would have undoubtedly brought the LP combatants to the negotiating table and hammered out a peace settlement. He did nothing of the sort. Perhaps, as a practical man rather than an intellectual leader, he recognized that attempting to reform the relationship between the NLC and LP was a futile effort. A little success had thrown the NLC and LP leaders off course, weakening the links that held them together. More success, such as winning the presidential election, would cause seismic changes in the party that no one, not even the belligerent and hungry leaders of the largest trade union, could achieve.

It is best for Mr Obi to let terrible things alone. He is intimately familiar with the NLC guys, and he understands that there is no way to appease their rage and hatred. And he knows the bedraggled LP leaders well enough to know that it would take something far more incendiary than the NLC breaking down the gates and smashing the windows of the party headquarters building to remove their snouts from the largesse that tempts the union leaders and party apparatchiks. More crucially, he understands that even if peace is restored, the union and the party will be at each other’s throats on some foreboding tomorrow. And, when combined with his personal disinterest in restoring normalcy or imbuing the party with a raison d’être, it is evident that staying in the party and inheriting and fighting its amorphous cause would be like tilting at windmills. Mr Obi may be a merchant or whatever else others call him, but he doesn’t consider himself a Don Quixote. That is why he can claim with unequaled delight that he was’making vigorous efforts to change the LP, but would not die with them’, given that he is neither a Quixote nor a martyr.