By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo

Gifted with many charlatans as leaders, Nigerians are enjoying the comicality of shallow electioneering campaigns. Ortom, who now wears multicoloured suits since he became Wike’s apostle, woke up one morning and, in a fit, said that anyone who likes Atiku is his enemy.

He spoke in plain English. Some of Ortom’s cheering supporters might have believed that hating Atiku was godly. But three days later, Ortom was in Bauchi to woo a Fulani governor. And before the cocks had crowed thrice, Ortom denied ever making the divisive statements he made in Benue. 

He actually said that anyone who understood what he said literally to mean what he said was mischievous. Ortom is the deputy leader of the ‘Intigrity’ group. The group that globe-trots to real Madrid, Turkey and London every once in a while, at taxpayers’ expense, to defend the interests of the common man in Africa. Let’s forgive Gov Ortom. He needs logistics. And Wike is a renowned provider of logistics.    

Time flies. In 2015 Buhari used to tell us pridefully how he owned only 150 cattle. Then the APC preached Change and Modesty. Buhari was their emblem. The frugal man who abhorred ostentation. In 2022, The APC has forgotten the word Change. It’s no longer mentioned.

And when APC supporters see anyone exhibiting or pretending modesty or moderation, they lament and moan against the glamorization of poverty. It was APC supporters who pointed out that Peter Obi had hired a campaign aircraft. They have come down from the moral high ground. The sybaritism they once abhorred is now valorized.

At the APC rally in Jos the Jos airport was filled with jets. Jets became a sign of capacity. Some APC members scoffed that the Labour party was so wretched, so structureless, it wouldn’t muster 10% of the air traffic Jos witnessed. Who would have thought?  

In Benin, while his hopes hung in the balance in the supreme court, Gov Obaseki praised the Obi phenomenon. He said every household in Edo had been infected with Obidiency. Then Obaseki was an internally displaced politician. But once the courts restored his control of the Edo PDP, Obaseki developed an allergy towards Obidiency. Recently he refused to let Obi’s people use the stadium for their rally.

In defending that refusal, he described the Obidients as confused people with virtual existence. Who can blame Obaseki? Now that he is firmly sheltered in the PDP, he cannot afford to frighten his party men by declaring the monstrosity of the Obidiency. But he has to worry about Oshiomhole too. Because during Oshiomhole’s make-up visit to Gov Wike, Oshiomhole said he would ask Wike to lend him election logistics.  

One of the most comical has to be the governor of Cross River. Once a riverine Emperor donated some buses to the PDP in his state, the strong and loquacious Olympotic man began to fret. The story is that the Emperor sent heavy earth-shaking logistics as the first phase of an intervention programme.

The fretting governor called a rice governor in the southeast to pray for him. That governor reached out to the Enyimba governor, and prayers of intercession were delivered to the riverine Emperor. A meeting was set up. The three governors gathered in the palace of the Emperor and begged him to stop providing heavy logistics to the opponents of the beleaguered governor.

The troubled governor prostrated before the megalomanic Emperor. The Emperor promised to consider his request for an embargo of heavy logistics to political dissidents in his state. The Cross River governor was naive.

Talking about heavy logistics. Obi, who doesn’t give shishi, was in Rivers state. Once he was promised logistics, he cast at his running mate and threw the entire Rivers Labour Party under a moving bus. His party’s governorship candidate has been a bulwark against the state governor’s arbitrariness.

She had for seven years stood up for teachers and pensioners in the state. She has, since winning the labour party ticket, dreamt of rescuing Rivers from political banditry and prebendalism. But since the last few weeks, she has been bedridden. Occasionally, standing up with the aid of crutches.

But Peter Obi, the hope of the poor and sick, came to Port Harcourt, exchanged banter with the oppressor and opponent, got the promise of logistics and a few gratuitous votes, and threw the broken woman and her compatriots in Rivers under Wike’s overspeeding train carrying 200,000 political advisers. If Peter Obi were an old wily Nigerian politician who uses shishi and wuruwuru freely to attain loft political objectives, no one would raise an eyebrow. But this is St Peter Obi.

Since Atiku returned from America, where he attended only closed-door meetings, where pictures couldn’t be taken, he has been relatively silent. That picture that showed sixteen black men, including a former vice president, being seen off by a single white lady didn’t lend any dignity to the Waziri and his crew. But Waziri’s men are working overtime. They have been excavating narcotic archaeological sites in Chicago. So Waziri can work behind the scenes recruiting elders to mend ‘intigrity’ fences.

These are exciting times.