OPPOSITION AND THE VAGUE AUDITION – THISDAYLIVE

 The opposition could do more to earn the confidence of the people, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

The World Cup in North America has been off to a great start. The global festival of football has often been the platform for new stars to stake their claim for the throne. In that sense, Erling Haaland has laid a marker whilst Kylian Mbappe has simply continued from where he stopped in Qatar. This was not meant to be another World Cup with a Messi-Ronaldo theme. The old guard, having dominated the game for the better part of the last two decades, were expected to filter off at this tournament. Whilst Cristiano Ronaldo is living up to that expectation (like he did in Qatar), Lionel Messi is having a laugh. A hat-trick in his opening game suggests that whilst the new kids on the block are welcome to fight for it, he won’t be letting go easily. You cannot fault the others for not putting up a fight, because they are. Lionel Messi is just too much. The same cannot be said about those looking to replace President Bola Tinubu as Nigeria’s president next year. 

There was a moment in Peter Obi’s interview with Rufai Oseni that should worry anyone seriously evaluating Nigeria’s 2027 alternatives. Oseni asks Peter Obi what he would do, as Commander-in-Chief, about the children still in the bush in Oyo and Borno. Obi declines to answer. Oseni presses. Obi says: “I will not tell you. It is not for you to know how.” When Oseni pushes back, “Nigerians need to know,” Obi replies that only people who don’t know what to do are asking that question.

A man seeking the most powerful office in the country was asked how he intends to address the defining crisis of the moment, and his answer was that the public has no right to the details of his plan. That is a troubling worldview, but it is not even the most important problem with the answer he gave instead.

Obi’s fallback, each time he declined to offer specifics, was his record as Anambra governor. “Go and ask about my record. I confronted insecurity head-on. Notorious kidnappers like Evans could not operate in Anambra.” That claim deserves scrutiny.

Anambra under Obi’s eight years as governor was not the security success story he now presents. His successor, Willie Obiano, has stated publicly that Obi handed over a state with, in his words, zero security, citing over 69 kidnapping cases recorded during Obi’s tenure and noting that many Anambra indigenes avoided returning home because of insecurity. More seriously, the Awkuzu SARS command, operating in Anambra throughout Obi’s governorship, became one of the most notorious police formations in Nigeria’s recent history, with documented allegations of extrajudicial killings and bodies dumped in the Ezu River during a kidnapping crisis. 

Obi’s defence, that Awkuzu SARS was a federal police formation he did not control, is a legally accurate point about command structure. It is also an inadequate answer to the question of why a state chief security officer did not stop, or could not stop, a documented pattern of killings happening inside his own state for years. The hotel demolition and prolonged unlawful detention of Bonaventure Mokwe, carried out without a court order, is a separate and equally serious mark against the rule-of-law credentials Obi now campaigns on.

“Trust my record” is not a neutral deflection when the record itself is genuinely contested, partially documented as a failure, and shadowed by serious human rights allegations that were never fully resolved. Obi is not simply asking Nigerians to judge him by results instead of promises. He is asking them to accept a curated version of those results without independent verification — the same epistemic move he is making, in real time, by refusing to detail his security plan for the country.

The fuel subsidy answer in the same interview is, by comparison, more substantive. Asked what he would have done differently from Tinubu’s subsidy removal, Obi said he supported removal but would have sequenced it differently: engaging industry stakeholders first, addressing alleged criminality in the subsidy regime, coordinating it with exchange rate reform. That is at least a position with content. But it is also offered entirely in hindsight, about a decision Tinubu already made, with three years of outcomes to react to. It tells us nothing about how Obi makes decisions in real time, under pressure, with the same incomplete information any president actually has.

Now to the question: who, among those positioning to replace Tinubu, is doing enough to earn that trust?

The honest answer is nobody yet, and the reasons are instructive. Atiku Abubakar has spent the better part of this year hiring American lobbyists to criticise Nigeria’s human rights record to the US government, a strategy that generates headlines while offering zero clarity on what he would do differently in office. 

Obi, to his credit, submits to hostile interviews more often than most of his peers. That willingness to be questioned is not nothing. But showing up for the interview and answering the question are different acts, and on the two issues that matter most to ordinary Nigerians’ daily survival, Obi wants the public to accept a version of his past that does not match the documented record.

This is not an argument for Tinubu by default. The reform record is real, and it still must be tested against whatever alternative the country is offered. But the alternative on display in this interview was not a fully examined record standing on its own merits. It was a selectively remembered one, deployed specifically to avoid answering what should have been the easiest question in the entire conversation: what would you actually do?

Whether or not Messi goes on to win a third World Cup Golden Ball at this tournament won’t matter much as long as those making a claim for his throne make a fight of it. That is what the Nigerian opposition needs to be seen to be doing too. This is not a moment for taking their word for it. How?

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing