2023: What Peter Obi Can Learn from Buhari – Farooq Kperogi

Media scholar, Professor Farooq Kperogi, on Saturday said Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, can “learn” from President Muhammadu Buhari’s ‘intentional and strategic transcendence of his ethno-religious base’ to win a national election.

Obi came third behind Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February 25 election.

The Professor said the former Anambra State governor “ran the Christocentric version of Buhari’s Islamocentric pre-2015 campaigns”, which wasn’t sufficient to hand him victory.

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Kperogi wrote in his weekly column: “The best possible outcome for Obi in the election was for him to marginally win the popular vote— both because three Muslims divided the Muslim vote and because Obi’s supporters were more energized than others— but fail to be declared winner because he fell short of getting the required spread in about half of the country.

“In a runoff with Tinubu, Obi would be severely trounced because most Atiku and Kwankwaso voters would gravitate toward Tinubu since the election was about identity and, historically, candidates who rile up a narrow primordial base of the electorate without tact never win a national election. It took Buhari’s intentional and strategic transcendence of his northern Muslim base to win a national election in 2015.

“I hope Obi can learn from that. Some of us his early supporters who saw merit in electing someone from the Southeast in the interest of national integration found that we had no place in his exclusionary political universe where he is the hero that must be worshiped and the messiah that must be “obeyed,” where uncouth, vituperative, intolerant, mouth-breathing automatons reign. He ran the Christocentric version of Buhari’s Islamocentric pre-2015 campaigns.”

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