by Mohammed Bello Doka
The Facebook broadside by Bayo Onanuga against Peter Obi is not a political argument; it is a carefully layered exercise in propaganda, riddled with fallacies, historical amnesia, selective outrage, and outright distortion. Strip away the insults and chest-thumping, and what remains is a brittle case that collapses under minimal scrutiny.
Onanuga begins by branding Obi’s 2023 presidential bid as “ill-fated” and mocks his movement across parties—APGA to PDP to Labour and now ADC—portraying him as a “wandering politician.” This line of attack is not only lazy; it is breathtakingly hypocritical. Onanuga’s principal, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is one of the most prolific political cross-carpeters in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Tinubu’s political journey runs through SDP, AD, AC, ACN and finally APC—often not just by defection, but by orchestrating mergers, dissolutions and rebranding exercises to suit evolving ambitions. What Onanuga condemns as instability in Obi is celebrated as genius and “strategy” in Tinubu. This is the textbook definition of double standards.
Having exhausted the defection trope, Onanuga pivots to insult. Obi is described as bitter, delusional, an “abysmal failure,” a mere “successful importer,” capped with an offensive slur about consulting a “madman in Onitsha.” These are not arguments; they are ad hominem attacks, deployed precisely because evidence is absent. When personal abuse replaces data, it is a confession of argumentative bankruptcy.
Onanuga then asserts—without naming a single study, institution or dataset—that “empirical analyses” proved Obi could not have won the 2023 election and was “fortunate” to emerge third. This is propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Nigeria’s 2023 election was contested precisely because of documented irregularities: BVAS failures, result transmission gaps, and procedural breaches acknowledged even by INEC. The courts ruled on legal thresholds and timelines, not on a forensic recount of votes. To invoke unnamed “empirical analyses” is a classic appeal to anonymous authority—evidence claimed, never produced.
The contradiction deepens when Onanuga mocks Obi for citing books, professors and international examples. He warns that Nigeria cannot “copy and paste” from Indonesia or the United States and needs “homegrown solutions.” Yet the Tinubu administration he praises is implementing policies drawn directly from global neoliberal playbooks: subsidy removal, FX liberalisation, IMF-style fiscal tightening and World Bank-endorsed reforms. Learning from global models is derided as intellectual fraud when Obi does it, but rebranded as courageous reform when Tinubu follows the same orthodoxy. The inconsistency is glaring.
Onanuga’s dismissal of Obi’s Anambra record as an “abysmal failure” is another act of historical revisionism. He offers no comparative data, no fiscal metrics, no governance benchmarks. What he omits is as telling as what he asserts: Anambra’s low debt profile under Obi, the savings left behind, the prioritisation of salaries, pensions and education spending. Even critics acknowledge Obi’s fiscal restraint. Onanuga’s silence on these facts is deliberate cherry-picking.
The post then morphs into a victory chant for the Tinubu administration: the economy “restructured,” subsidies gone, oil dependence reduced, gas attracting investment, reserves rising, exchange rate stabilised, inflation decelerating. These sweeping claims are presented without timelines, baselines or acknowledgement of lived reality. Nigerians grappling with historic inflation, naira volatility, collapsing purchasing power and crushing debt servicing are expected to accept triumphalist declarations on faith. Selective macro indicators are weaponised to paper over widespread economic pain.
Infrastructure is treated the same way. Announcements of the Lagos–Calabar and Sokoto–Badagry superhighways are paraded as achievements, with no mention of completion status, financing clarity, procurement transparency, environmental concerns or cost controversies. Future promises are counted as present success—an appeal to imagined glory rather than delivered outcomes.
Finally, Onanuga descends into pure speculation, predicting that Obi will become Atiku’s running mate in 2027. No evidence. No statement. No agreement. Just political wish-casting dressed up as insight. This fortune-telling adds nothing except revealing the anxiety beneath the bravado.
Throughout the post, dissent is pathologised. Questioning election outcomes becomes “bitterness.” Criticising government is recast as “small-mindedness.” Accountability is framed as animosity. Power is moral; opposition is diseased. This moral inversion is the hallmark of authoritarian propaganda.
In the end, Bayo Onanuga’s case against Peter Obi fails not because it is too harsh, but because it is too hollow. It rests on insults instead of evidence, hypocrisy instead of consistency, and proclamations instead of proof. Most damning of all, it condemns party mobility while defending a president whose rise was built on serial political migration and elite coalition engineering.
In trying to diminish Peter Obi, Onanuga succeeds only in exposing the intellectual fragility of incumbency propaganda. What is mocked in opposition is canonised in power—and Nigerians are expected not to notice.
Abuja Network News
Tags
opinion