BY EMAMEH GABRIEL
Chinua Achebe wrote about Okonkwo in his 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart. Achebe wrote him into immortality, a roaring warrior brought low by his own rigid hands, a man who would rather watch his world collapse than stoop to bend. That Okonkwo was fiction. The one who commandeered our television screens on Monday morning is real. No novelist made him up. He is just the slow, ugly sight of a man turning into everything he once hated.
Kenneth Okonkwo, the lawyer and Nollywood actor turned politician who fought as Peter Obi’s bull in the 2023 campaign, sat before the cameras on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily and whined like a man who lost a fight he never should have picked. He raged, he pointed fingers and then he hurled fresh, damning allegations.
According to Okonkwo, the NDC, the new acronym of Obi’s latest political vehicle, has become a money-making machine where House of Representatives aspirants paid N10 million for tickets and senatorial hopefuls coughed up N20 million as bribe.
Peter Obi himself, the man Kenneth once called Nigeria’s best hope, was reduced in his telling to a casino kingpin writing lists of anointed candidates from Room 12 of the John Wood Hotel while the party’s primary elections were going on across the country.
The interviewer asked the obvious question: did you verify any of this? Kenneth offered no bank statements. Instead, he pointed to Aisha Yesufu’s separate grievance with the NDC and called it corroboration. Two people falling into two different potholes is not evidence.
Rewind three years. Kenneth Okonkwo could not open his mouth without baptizing Peter Obi’s name in praise. He was the legal pit bull, the bulldog who bit and held. He stood on stages across Nigeria and declared the APC and PDP evil twins. He promised a new Nigeria. He had found his messiah. The videos are still there. The internet does not forget.
Then came the rupture. Nobody outside Kenneth’s inner circle knows exactly what happened in that room. But the break was not clean. It was a slow, ugly sawing—first whispers, then snide remarks, then full-throated denunciations. By the time Kenneth landed in the ADC, he had begun rewriting his own history. He was no longer a disciple who lost faith. He was a man who had seen the light, the light being that Obi was a fraud, a cult leader, a financial puppeteer pulling strings in nondescript hotels.
Somewhere along this road of bitterness, Kenneth found himself standing in Atiku Abubakar’s shadow.
In Nigerian politics, when a man spends all his energy savaging a Peter Obi he once told the world was Godsend, he is working for someone. And that someone is Atiku. The former vice president does not need to attack Obi directly. He has surrogates. He has former Labour Party men willing to do the dirty work. Kenneth Okonkwo, who once swore to end the old order, now dances to its music.
His kinsmen have watched this transformation with a mixture of pity and disgust. The Igbo political class does not forgive easily, but it forgets even less. Since Kenneth began his crusade against Obi, the responses from his own people have been brutal. One Anambra elder called him “a rented voice with no constituency.” A former colleague from the bar described him as “an ambulance chaser who found politics.” Another wrote on social media: “Kenneth sold his soul the moment he realised he would never be the pilot. Now he crashes the plane from the outside.”
These are not idle insults. They reflect a growing consensus that Kenneth Okonkwo has no ideological anchor. He moves from party to party, from grievance to grievance, from microphone to microphone. The only constant is his own name in the headlines. He accused Obi of bribery. He accused Obi of extortion. He accused Obi of running a criminal enterprise. He will ride these allegations until the next election buries them.
Kenneth Okonkwo is the ex-lover who cannot stop talking about the woman who left him. Every interview is a new allegation. Every allegation is a desperate grab at relevance. Meanwhile, Atiku smiles quietly. He does not need to get his hands dirty. He has Kenneth for that.
Achebe wrote that Okonkwo’s tragedy was his inability to bend. The fictional warrior was too rigid, too proud, too terrified of appearing weak. The real Kenneth Okonkwo bends so much that nobody trusts his spine anymore. He was Obi’s bulldog. Now he is Atiku’s mascot. Tomorrow, who knows? The only guarantee is that he will be on another screen, making another allegation, holding another press conference, offering another story without a receipt.
His kinsmen have written him off. And they watch, with folded arms and knowing smiles, as a man who once had a cause reduces himself to a walking caricature of political prostitution.
The finest columnists write about empires rising and falling. But the saddest columns are written about men who had a chance to stand for something and chose instead to stand in front of any camera that would have them. Kenneth Okonkwo wanted to be remembered. He will be. Just not as the hero of his own imagination.
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