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Commentaries
September 18, 2025 by Hardball
Hooray! Peter Obi just visited former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Olubadan-elect Oba Rashidi Ladoja, former elected governor of Oyo State (2003-2007)!
But what do these visits add to his political profile — the penetration of a key demographic, en route to 2017?
Well, not an illegitimate prospect, though a tad dreamy. Obi’s clatter on X has been a regular fare now: joy to his Obidient zealots — who unflattering Obi foes call zombies. But plain irritation to the Obi-sceptic, who wince at his many infantile hyperboles and sweeping generalizations: to project his personal distemper, and keep droning about his preferred bad news!
Well, again, that’s hardly a crime. Obi is in opposition. Like many in his clan, in these climes, they haven’t developed the ability to distil problems and come out with clinical solutions. So, all forms of bogeys and jeremiads would do to veil a lack of penetrative thinking.
Still, what Obi wants folks to draw with visits to Obasanjo and Ladoja is not clear. Okay, perhaps he is still super-grateful to Obasanjo over services rendered in 2023?
Didn’t Obasanjo call on the late President Muhammadu Buhari to cancel the election, just because Obi, who he backed, was losing, or had lost?
For the one that kids himself as the father of modern Nigeria, the irony of another annulment, after the tragedy of June 12, 1993, was totally lost on him. PMB ignored him — and just as well!
But that futile call showed Obasanjo’s near-absolute lack of soft power: beyond his periodic mischief to pull down others. So, a sortie to Baba Iyabo adds nothing to Obi’s political relevance, beyond the already converted. But from the 2023 results, those converts are still painfully short.
Oba Ladoja? Interesting! If tomorrow the former president prostrates full length, in glorious “idobale” before the new Olubadan, know it’s the “Seriki monafiki” in him having a ball! The new Oba would, of course, take that, with fulsome thanks.
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Indeed, Oba Ladoja, as Olubadan, seems one of the many spectacles the Almighty appears to have kept the former president alive to see, as divine caution to anyone never to play God! Did President Obasanjo not reduce Governor Ladoja, elected as himself, to nothing!
The imperial president gruffly ordered Ladoja to obey his Oyo garrison commander, the late Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu — or go jump (and get drowned) in the nearby Ogunpa River — even if that was untrammelled political corruption!
For that, the garrison-commander staged one of the many Obasanjo-era “simple minority” impeachments! Of course, the judiciary would throw out that nonsense and restored Governor Ladoja — the very first in Nigerian history — though the PDP froze him from second term.
But it’s great the Obi visits remind us all of the bare-faced recklessness of Obasanjo’s PDP, in this day of political revisionists. Obi too was governor then, though under APGA. But after his Anambra tenure, it was to this same seedy PDP that Obi ran, to run for Vice President.
So next time Obi starts his old wives’ tale that he is new, and different from the class he has striven so hard to discredit, just point to this link — a priceless umbilical cord he just gifted the polity.
There’s certainly a limit to being clever by half!
English (US)