When Peter Obi stood up recently and quoted Winston Churchill to defend his habit of jumping from one political party to another, you could almost feel the awkwardness in the air.
The man was trying hard. He reached for those famous words, “Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party”, and you could see he wanted it to land like a punch. But it didn’t. If anything, the whole thing fell flat.
Even Obi himself seemed to struggle a bit, like someone trying to wear a coat that doesn’t quite fit. And for his supporters, many of them just looked away.
They sat there in quiet embarrassment, watching their candidate borrow a dead British statesman’s wit to explain away a problem that has followed him for years.Look, the truth is simple.
Churchill’s quote works when you use it once, maybe twice, to describe a painful parting of ways. It doesn’t work when you have switched parties four times, PDP, APGA, then PDP, Labour Party, ADC and then NDC. At some point, you have to stop blaming the parties.
If every political home you enter eventually fails you, maybe the problem is not every single house. Maybe the problem is the guest who keeps leaving.And here is the other thing. Obi didn’t leave those parties over big, earth-shattering matters of principle.
He didn’t walk away because someone suddenly embraced corruption or abandoned the poor. Most of his exits followed internal fights over tickets, nominations, or who gets to stand where on the ballot. That is not morality.
That is politics as usual. Nobody gives a a ticket or a spot on a platter. You fight for it. So when he stood there and quoted Churchill as if he were some kind of martyr, his own people who knew the real stories could only shake their heads.Let’s not even talk about the irony of quoting Churchill, a man who switched parties exactly twice in his entire life, with decades in between. He was a party loyalist at heart.
Obi quoting him to defend serial hopping is like a man who changes jobs every six months quoting someone who worked in the same office for forty years. It just doesn’t fit.The sad part is, Obi might actually mean well. He might genuinely believe he is the principled one. But a borrowed quote cannot do the work that a consistent record should do. His supporters are not embarrassed because they hate him.
They are embarrassed because they love him, and they watched him try too hard to defend something that may simply be indefensible. You cannot quote your way out of a pattern.
Only staying put, really staying, not just pausing, can do that. Until then, the Churchill line will keep landing not like wisdom, but like a man reaching for a lifeline that is not there.
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