Charles Baudelaire once wrote: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” That line is usually credited to The Usual Suspects, but the French poet got there first. He understood deception. And if you want a shorter, sharper epigraph for rogue politics, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather offers one: “A man who is not a father to his own children can never be a father to the village.”
This brings us to Nigeria’s political swamp and its strangest actor yet: the Godfather of U-Turns.
Meet the man who discovered his passion for fighting terrorism nearly three years after losing a presidential election. The same man now preaches about liberating northern Nigeria through education like a messiah, while children in his home state of Anambra are still limping from the damage he did to their schools. Let me tell you a short story. There was once a trader who refused to fix the leaking roof of his own mother’s hut. “The cost is too high,” he told neighbours. “Let her learn to sleep with a bowl.” The old woman caught pneumonia. Years later, that same trader travelled to a distant kingdom and began shouting from every podium: “The roofs of this kingdom are a disgrace! I will cover every house with gold!” The villagers clapped. But those who remembered the old woman’s wet mattress simply smiled. That trader is Peter Obi.
Today, Obi has found a new love, the North. He speaks about investing in northern education with the fervour of a convert. He scolds the government for neglecting Almajiri children. He promises to declare “total war” on terrorists. Let’s pause there. During most of his 2023 campaign, he insisted dialogue was the only way to end terrorism. He said the government had mischaracterised IPOB. He called military force crude and counterproductive. And this is the same North he tore apart along religious lines during that campaign. The voting data does not lie: he weaponised religion, with active help from Christian clerics. The Godfather of U-Turns has simply calculated that the North holds votes. Nothing sharpens a man’s conscience quite like desperation.
Let us judge Obi by what he actually did, not what he now says. In 2006, this apostle of education, this man who lectures the North on schools, made a statement that should follow him to his grave: education is not for the poor. He did not whisper it. He implemented it. As governor, Obi forced secondary school students in Anambra to pay three terms of school fees at once. First, second and third term. Upfront. Think about the parents in Onitsha, Nnewi and Awka. Petty traders. Market women. Artisans. They could not afford one term, let alone three. So what happened? The children of the poor dropped out. School enrolment collapsed the following session. He traded thousands of children’s futures just to keep his treasury looking neat.
And for what legacy? Obi glories in his fiscal discipline, his “savings.” But according to the National Bureau of Statistics, poverty in Anambra rose from 20 per cent in 2004, the lowest in Nigeria then, to a staggering 68 per cent in 2010. That is a 238 per cent deterioration. Professor Chukwuma Soludo put it best in 2015: “While Obi gloated about savings, there is no signature project to remember his regime except that his regime took the first position among all states in Nigeria in the democratisation of poverty, mass impoverishment of the people of Anambra.” No university. No teaching hospital. No industrial park. Just boreholes for public relations and a balance sheet that starved the poor.
Now this same person wants to transform the North in four years. He sees a future in Kano and Kaduna, but not in Enugu, Owerri, or Uyo. He wants to build schools for northern children while telling south-eastern children that education is a luxury for the rich. He wants to declare war on terrorists, yet he cannot even deny that infamous “religious phone call” controversy, the one that targeted northern Muslims and exposed his own sectarian instincts. Do not be fooled by the recent Arise TV performance. Everyone knows how powerful northern votes are. Obi is not a visionary. He is an opportunist who changes parties the way a chameleon changes colour: from APGA (which he swore on his life never to leave) to PDP, to Labour Party, and now to ADC—where he eats and dines with the same people he once called a “structure of criminality.”
Three years after the 2023 election, he is still bitter. Still claiming he was robbed. But the empirical analyses suggest he was fortunate to come third, thanks to those anomalous polling figures from the South-East. And here he is, speaking of democracy as if he ever believed in it. Speaking of leadership as if Anambra is not standing there as a monument to his failure. Thank God for Soludo, who has summoned the courage to make bold decisions and reroute that state back to progress.
If you could not govern a small state like Anambra without impoverishing its people and pricing its children out of school, how do you propose to govern Nigeria? If you discovered the righteousness of war against terrorism only after losing an election, what will you discover after losing the next one? The North does not need your fake love. It needs honesty. And honesty begins with looking into the mirror and seeing not a saint—but a trader who forgot his own mother’s roof.
By Eshioromeh Sebastian
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