Are you being mad or something?
Why are we quick to abuse humble privileges.
You invited Tinubu's aide to speak on his behalf.
You invited Atiku's aide to speak on Atiku's behalf.
Instead of inviting Obi's aide, you are calling Obi out in public.
You must be high ooo
Since I started using social media, I don’t think I have ever been insulted, dragged and looked down on the way some people who call themselves Obidients dragged me a few days ago.
What was my crime?
I wrote an open letter respectfully appealing to H.E. Mr. Peter Obi to kindly give me the opportunity to interview him.
The reason for making the letter public was simple: I wasn’t sure our previous invitation letters ever got to him. We are Nigerians. We know how access to prominent people sometimes works. We know how people around powerful figures can become gatekeepers, sometimes without the principal even knowing who is trying to reach them.
It was not a call-out.
It was not me saying Peter Obi must honour my invitation.
It was simply a humble request from a podcaster to a man he respects and would love to have a conversation with.
People do this every day when they are trying to get the attention of someone they otherwise cannot reach.
Because I have always believed in the humility and accessibility of H.E. Peter Obi, I decided, in the most respectful way I knew, to write an open letter, tag him and hope that either he would see it himself or someone close to him would help bring it to his attention.
The letter was written with as much respect as I could possibly express.
I was not accusing him of refusing my invitation. How could he have refused or accepted an invitation if I wasn’t even sure he knew that we had invited him?
This was simply a podcaster trying to interview someone he deeply respects.
But what followed shocked me.
There is almost no name I was not called.
There is almost nothing I was not accused of.
It became a campaign against an innocent Podcast Platform that was just reaching out to a respectable prospective guest.
A podcast platform that reaches almost 50 million people monthly and is valued at hundreds of millions of naira was disparaged as “too small.”
My open letter was described as “see finish.”
And some of these attacks came from people who proudly identify themselves as Obidients.
But the insults and derogatory remarks are not why I am writing this post.
Far from it.
I am built to ignore that kind of noise because, whether the noisemakers like it or not, I WILL INTERVIEW H.E. PETER OBI SOMEDAY.
The reason I am writing this is much bigger.
Almost every person I have listened to who once sympathised with Peter Obi but later turned against the movement has pointed to the behaviour of some Obidients as one of the reasons they became angry and walked away.
And this is where I disagree with them.
Because inside the same comment section where I was dragged, mocked and insulted, there were thousands of other Obidients defending me, encouraging me and appealing to Peter Obi to grant the interview.
That taught me something important:
Not every Obidient is stupid.
And not every Obidient is sane either.
But guess what?
That is true of every political camp.
There are reasonable Obidients and unreasonable Obidients.
There are reasonable BATists and unreasonable BATists.
There are reasonable Atikulateds and unreasonable Atikulateds.
Every large movement will eventually attract intelligent people, foolish people, decent people, fanatics, thinkers and noise-makers.
You cannot judge an entire political movement by its loudest idiots.
And even if every Obidient were exactly as terrible as some people from opposing camps describe them, I would still refuse to reject a candidate I consider good simply because some of his followers are insolent.
That reasoning is too small for me.
It would be like hating God because greedy and wicked men use His name to perpetrate evil.
Or hating an entire tribe because some members of that tribe committed terrible things.
I refuse to reduce myself to such a narrow and myopic interpretation of human behaviour.
But there is also an important lesson here for those who genuinely love Peter Obi:
Continue 👇🏾
You are starting from zero, that's the core of it.
Meaning you have absolutely nothing, not even a penny.
So how do you begin, and you said you will start washing cars.
Are you washing the cars under somebody? If NO
How did you get the space to start with?