HOW PETER OBI LOST THE CHRISTIAN VOTE AND IS NOW CHASING THE MUSLIM VOTE_ By Jesutega Onokpasa

This year, the Christian fasting season of Lent came, only for the Muslim fasting season of Ramadan to end up coinciding with it.

Watching the antics of Peter Obi, spectacularly failed candidate of the ever increasingly disintegrating Labour Party, you might wonder whether he is Christian or Muslim.

In one video that recently went viral on social media, Mr Obi had himself recorded in a mosque, purportedly breaking fast with Muslims and eating with a little boy in a manner capable of being deemed quite problematic from a public health point of view.

Equally disturbing was the fact that Obi seemed to be rather greedily helping himself to much more from the plate than he was feeding to the young lad.

Undoubtedly, the compulsive importer and facilitator of consumption in Nigeria, longtime supermarket seller, addicted trader, and stingy man per excellence, who never gives “shishi” but keeps collecting and accumulating into his own pocket, has consulted his ledger, balanced his books and come to the conclusion that however much he cashed out, thanks to his naive donors and fanatical supporters, the last election cycle, he might have done far better for himself had he been able to discern and embrace a more viable path to the presidency of our country.

In short, Peter Obi fully knows and truly understands exactly how and why he lost the last election, even as he secretly and very deeply regrets the fact of his loss, and most painfully resents the mindboggling folly of his most idiotic approach to nationwide politicking, an entirely misguided misadventure that saw him weaponising religion and ethnicity into horrid tools for the otherisation of those of his countrymen and women who happened not to share either with him. 

In the process, he most narcissistically further deepened the cleavages, chasms and divisions we have long been striving against in the arduous decades-long process of nation building in this country.

We do not have clearcut statistics but can assume that half of those who voted in the last election were Christian and the other half, Muslim.

If all the Christians had voted for Obi, as he had hoped, he should had ended up with a tally of between 12 and 13 million votes or thereabouts and handily won but he actually barely crossed 6 million votes!

Funny enough, quite a few Muslims, who happened to be disenchanted with both the All Progressives Congress, APC, and, the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, voted for Obi in spite of his unhinged religious posturing.

I would estimate that up to between one fifths and one quarter of his votes may have come from Muslims, in which case, only between 4 and 5 million Christians ended up voting for him.

Therefore, the majority of Christians actually voted for either President Bola Tinubu or former Vice President Atiku Abubarkar, thus effectively rejecting Obi’s religious politics!

While Obi is obviously not very bright, he is certainly not some buffoon either and I suspect he has long come to terms with this inescapable calculus of his excruciating failure, hence his ongoing desperation to entice Muslims into his web of deceit, aided, of course, by the compliment of his sugarcoated tongue.

Let me take the liberty of hyperbole at this stage: unfortunately for him, we have long uploaded both the “Religious War” and “Church Take Back Your Country” audios unto Spotify and other streaming services with strict instructions for them to be released and go viral next campaign cycle.

This is still the Holy Week of the Most Holy Passion of The Christ, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus, who died to save mankind, so I must even be more especially careful to be truthful.

Truth is, we don’t understand this game like the back of our hands: we understand it like the front of our hands and we are so good at it that Peter Obi, who aimed to become President with a campaign team of jokers who had either never won elections or severally and, or, serially lost them is simply no match for us.

I guess we are so good at winning, we no longer know how to lose – certainly not with someone like Bola Tinubu leading the way.

At the risk of sounding boastful, that’s how thoroughly good we are at what we do and how miserably politically illiterate Obi and the clueless rabble he has brainwashed into a personality cult around him are at the same game.

I interact with his supporters regularly and all they showcase is regret, anger, bile, gall, bitterness, insult, hate, rejection, insurrection, unpatriotism and what not, indeed, anything but political intelligence.

I have never seen a bunch of pathetics like “Obidients”!

The late musician, Majek Fashek, once sang that “religion is politics”; I really don’t know about that but what I’m pretty sure of is that politics is not religion, certainly not in Nigeria, and that was demonstrated conclusively last election cycle.

Indeed, Peter Obi proved to be so pitiable a politician and so pathetic an excuse for a presidential candidate that not only did he get merely a miserable minority of the Muslim vote, he also could not even get a majority of the Christian vote he had most crookedly sought to appropriate all to himself!

During the campaign, Obi was prostituting himself from church to church; this time around, he is vagabonding from mosque to mosque – what a hustler!

Indeed, if he likes let him seek to hoodwink Nigerian Muslims by pretending to have changed his religion and become a Muslim; I’m sorry but Peter Obi will still NEVER be President of Nigeria.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.