Peter Obi’s Soothing Balm to Nigeria’s Flood Victims

Emeka Alex Duru

It takes firsthand experience of the plight of Nigeria’s flood victims to appreciate their piteous condition. Putting up in a make-shift environment or internally displaced persons’ camp, is not a pleasant experience. It is a life of uncertainty, despondency and of acute emotional imbalance. Every day in such situation, regurgitates the wound of hopelessness and a sense of abandonment by the society.

52 years after the 1967-1970 Civil War, I still recall the night we were evacuated from our home, when it was obvious that that the rampaging federal forces had closed into my Orlu home town. Though as a kid then, that ugly experience jolts each time my mind flashes to those days. Dislocation is not what one would wish even his enemy. It can be shattering.

At that moment any hand of fellowship to the displaced, matters. Such gesture gives the people a ray of hope and sense of belonging. It lifts their spirit and makes them feel valued. Any person that does so, is hardly forgotten. He is seen as a man of the people, in fact, a hero.

That was what played out on Thursday, October 20, when the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, visited the flood victims’ camp in Benue state. Recall that Obi had suspended his campaign to enable him visit and sympathize with Nigerians going through intense pains as a result of the natural mishap. In Anambra, Bayelsa, Taraba and other states he had visited, Obi boosted the morale of the distressed, and assured them that all was not lost. His visits to the camps served as soothing balm to the distressed inmates. The victims in turn, appreciated his show of concern.

But the Benue episode was quite spectacular and spoke loudly. As he arrived in a canoe paddled by the jubilant youths to identify and sympathize with them, Obi clearly brightened up the mood of the victims. When they sighted him in the canoe the people momentarily forgot their pains and shouted ‘Obikererenke’, Obi’s popular campaign song, declaring him there and then; ‘President of the People’. For effect, they kept thundering, “Our President is here. You are our President”. That may mean much, in the long run. In Latin, it is said; ‘vox populi, vox Dei (The voice of the people is the voice of God).

The LP candidate has bright chances in the 2023 election. He has the capacity, the character and the carriage – three essential requirements for leadership. He also has an antecedent built on trust and judicious management of human and material resources. Elsewhere, those rare qualities are enough to guarantee him the office. But you cannot take things for granted in a skewed system as ours. Many factors come to play in elections here.

Nevertheless, Obi has made his marks on the people. He has etched his name in their minds. He has shown empathy to them when they needed it. That falls into the definition of leadership, by late African statesman and former South African President, Nelson Mandela, in his great work, “Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela”.

For Mandela, “A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the nimblest go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

In suspending his campaign, visiting the flood victims, feeling their pains and offering them hope, Obi has taken the front line. And the people have responded in the affirmative.

Few Nigerians like the late Gani Fawehinmi, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had created such impacts and had received similar acclaims from the people. For his doggedness in defending the rights of the ordinary Nigerians against the arbitrariness of the government, Fawehinmi was named the Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM), even before the legal authorities conferred him with the professional rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).

In appreciation of his dedicated leadership to his Yoruba kinsmen especially in areas of education and good governance, Awolowo remains a sage to his admirers.

For the Igbo and other Nigerians with sense of justice, Ojukwu (Ikemba Nnewi), remains an icon, even at death. When duty called, he stood at the front, bared his chest and absorbed the bullets in defence of his people against the injustice of the Nigerian system. Such men are not easily forgotten by the people.

Obi is following their example in his pan-Nigeria project. He offers himself as the metaphorical scape goat, upon whose head are symbolically placed the sins and transgressions of an entire community, bearing the burden of atonement for sins it did not commit. He has repeatedly stressed that he is not desperate to be president but desperate to see Nigeria change for the better – from consumption to production. That is the message.

The system, he admits, is broken but can be fixed. He does not shy away from stating the facts as they are. “Today, Nigeria tops the list of fragile, failing states and ranks third on the list of most terrorised countries in the world. We have, since 2019, become the world poverty capital.

“We now have an army of 50 million out-of-school children, out of which about 60% of them have not been to school at all. Nigeria is now the most stressful country to live in, according to the stress level index”, he said in one of his outings, stressing that unless critical decisions and actions are taken by Nigerians, the country is headed for deeper crisis.

But it is not all about lamentations. Obi also has programmes and agenda at reversing the trend. The other day at Harvard University, he gave a vivid picture of what his government would do in all critical areas, including his top three priorities, if elected to office. He listed his priorities as;  Production-centered growth for food security and export; Securing and Uniting Nigeria; and Leapfrogging Nigeria from oil to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR); Effective legal and institutional reforms (rule of law, corruption and government effectiveness); Expanding physical infrastructure through market-driven reforms (unleashing growth-enabling entrepreneurship and market-creating innovations); Human capital development that empowers competitiveness; and Robust foreign policy that restores Nigeria’s strategic relevance.

Achieving these would require addressing the menace of corruption, seen as a major obstacle to Nigeria’s development. Obi has an answer; “We will have zero tolerance for corruption; block leakages and cut the cost of governance. Our total commitment to transparency and accountability in government business is the only credible way to achieve limited to zero corruption. The policies required to fight corruption already exist; it is the political will to implement them that has been lacking.”

He has also pledged to revitalize the economy, address youth unemployment, tackle insecurity and deal with the contentious subsidy issue in the petroleum sector, by addressing the two elements involved – the corruption component and the real subsidy component. That is what leadership entails. It is a job to be done, not a prize to be won.

Duru is the Editor of TheNiche Newspapers, Lagos