Broooo!!! It is difficult for him to have any close allies. He operates in a system where an overwhelming majority of the political class is deeply entrenched in the stealing of public funds. Those you call โstakeholdersโ are often negotiating positions for their own selfish interests upon emergence. He is not playing that game. He is not paying anyone billions of naira to secure their support for the primaries.
Not just that, he consistently refuses to make promises to people in exchange for their support for his presidential ambition. Wike mentioned this. I think he was recently asked what he would give Atiku if Atiku stepped down, and he immediately responded that there was nothing to share. He is regarded as โMr. No Shishiโ in a political terrain where people make fortunes from politics. Our predominant political values are fundamentally at odds with Obi. By necessary implication, an average politician has little incentive to pitch their tent with him because there is no material advantage in doing so. And he makes that clear every day.
Seeing the kind of society we live in, Obi is not even supposed to have any significant political relevance because he is opposed to almost everything our politics has come to stand for.
That is why he prefers to go directly to the people to solicit their support. He understands that he has a better chance of winning over the people than he does relying on self-serving political stakeholders.
You know that episode of Rick & Morty where Rick reveals that there is an entire civilisation of people living inside his car battery who don't know that the sole purpose of their whole existence is to generate electricity to power a mad scientist's wacky space adventure car?
That is where Nigeria is right now, and that's why I am militant to the point of putting myself in trouble by talking about why Nigerians need to stage the most bloody and violent revolution Africa has ever witnessed. Because entire future branches of history are being wiped out because young Nigerians are trapped in an economy whose job is to make white people and a tiny Nigerian minority rich at the expense of 230,000,000 people like this.
This 19 year-old kid already has the sagging shoulders of a 47 year-old man with the world's weight on him, and he has already learned to not expect anything good to ever happen to him in life. All it took to show him a fork in his future trajectory was a fucking $47 tile cutting machine, and he's now going to hold on to this new opportunity and make a better life for himself - but there are literally millions of him out there that will never meet a benefactor, or that don't even have the skills needed to maximise this opportunity.
There is only ONE entity in any African country that has the power to carry out interventions like this in people's lives on a large scale - the state! A content creator can change one life like this and get viewed 10 million times, but a government can change 10 million lives like this without batting an eyelid! Only the government has the transformational capital and the incentive to do this in millions of lives!
That is why being led by people who don't work for you is a literal life-and-death matter! When we talk about neo-colonialism, this is what the fuck it is about! When you have a government installed by foreigners, which allocates billions of Naira in public revenues to enrich foreign intelligence assets like Gilbert Chagoury via transnational corruption schemes like the nonexistent "coastal highway" - this is the result!
Nigeria's money is not being used to invest in the lives and betterment of Nigerian people! It is being used to enrich white men in Washington DC who are already richer than God, with a fraction going to their local collaborators in Abuja! This kid and millions like him are the direct victims! Their future possibilities and bloodlines are being extinguished with poverty so that Peter McBillionaireStein and Matthew Von WhiteManBerg in Manhattan and London can increase their Q3 dividend payout by 15%. Neo-colonialism is not a victimless crime!
You are all living inside Rick Sanchez's car battery!
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