On Peter Obi’s strategy, by Simbo Olorunfemi

Once in a while, I find myself asking what the game plan is for Mr Peter Obi. Not even the politics, confusing as that is, but the quality of engagement on social media.

Well, I get it. He has a sizeable base here, and the need to keep the base happy, even if that means pandering, as long as that sits well with the strategy box, so be it. The end justifies the means.

Yet, I often wonder, even if doing that publicly is not what anyone wants to do, as ‘professional review’ of his politics or strategy is not something that his supporters take kindly to.

Every question asked is taken as an attack. It is like it’s a scarilege to query his ways or express the tiniest doubt about his capacity or query the belief that he won the last election and will overwhelming win again.

Yet, I wonder between him and his media ‘handlers’ about his strategic course of action.

That eagerness to latch on to whatever is trending out there as a prop for political mileage seems to have boxed them into a corner where they don’t think through some of the things they hastily push out.

Often, they don’t verify before they run with stuff, only for facts to later emerge that they ran with the fake.

I can’t imagine what could have prompted them to latch on to President Trump’s phrase – “now disgraced country”.

How does a man seeking to be President of a country become a vuvuzela for a disparaging phrase used by a foreigner to describe his own country in such an unfriendly way?

What is the point Mr Peter Obi is out to prove in using those words, not just in one press statement but two, as of this moment?

To make it stick? For political advantage?

In an intervention elsewhere, I had argued, in response to the point the words are in quotes, that I don’t see how importing and employing demeaning words, used in a derogatory manner against one’s country can be excused under the guise that they are in quotes.

It is the context in which he used them that matters. He didn’t use them in repudiation of the unfriendly assertion, but in affirmation.

The only ‘acceptable’ context in which it could have been used by a Nigerian, especially one running for such a high office, would be in contesting or condemning the description, not in piggybacking on the phrase to talk down on the country that he seeks to govern.

As a student of politics, I am only out here to learn. It just might be that what I see as a strategic faux pas is a masterstroke that would create a new path or lubricate the old path to victory.

Who knows?

What we see as unforced errors might be aces in the hands of the man who we are told is assured of victory in 2027.