FOOL ME TWICE
Peter Obi, Political Structure and the Refusal to Learn

What happens when a political movement refuses to examine its own mistakes? A reflection on Peter Obi, the 2023 election, political structure, the Obidient movement and the danger of repeating yesterday's strategy while expecting tomorrow's miracle.

Dear Eustace,

To answer your question: Do I hate Peter Obi?

Why would I?

I ought to assume that he does what he does from the bottom of his heart. I ought to. But as time has dragged on, I increasingly find that I cannot. Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether much of this is simply a game of politics and self-service.

I'll come back to that.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Am I angry with Peter Obi? Yes.

Because I believe his lassitude, his political know-it-all-ness, and his failure to confront his own strategic deficiencies contributed enormously to Tinubu's victory in 2023.

Had he settled down, looked beyond the excitement surrounding his candidacy and subjected his own campaign to ruthless analysis, he might have seen the obvious weaknesses. Geography was not in his favour. Political structure was not in his favour. The entrenched machinery of the parties he sought to defeat was certainly not in his favour.

And enthusiasm was never going to be enough.

One of our problems as a people is that we do not pay sufficient attention. I fully understand that not everyone is given that grace. I regard discernment itself as a grace. But if you do not see something, at least listen to those who might.

Don't reduce every warning to hate, envy, jealousy or tribalism. Because then we remain trapped, consistently trying to solve problems at the same level of thinking that created them.

I remember some legislator in Abuja once suggesting that the solution to militancy in the Niger Delta was essentially to absorb the militants into the armed forces.

Think about that. What rank would you give those who already call themselves "General"? And if unrest continued, what next? Absorb everybody into the Army? Who pays their salaries?

Meanwhile, ideas such as legislators pooling even six months of constituency allowances to establish food-processing industries, create agricultural value chains and make farming commercially viable do not cross his closed mind.

We keep treating symptoms because systems thinking is hard.

Which brings me back to Peter Obi.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Perhaps Peter Obi did not fool us the first time. Perhaps he fooled himself.

Perhaps he genuinely believed that a half-tepid, half-timid, blunt, unsharpened and ultimately inadequate campaign strategy was sufficient to prise power away from a ruthless and deeply entrenched political establishment.

"WE HAVE MASTERED THIS GAME"

Before the 2023 election, I attended a church event where I spoke with an APC chieftain from Edo State about Peter Obi's chances.

He laughed me to scorn.

"We have mastered this game," he told me. He explained that party organisation went right down to election-day behaviour. Then he waved away my optimism about Obi:

"Leave dat tin! We lose no sleep over Peter Obi."

I wrote about that encounter immediately afterwards.

Go and verify. 😊

And as the campaign progressed, I became increasingly strident in my criticism of Obi's lukewarm, half-here, half-there approach.

WHEN THE STARS ALIGN

When the stars align, I think one of two things may be happening: Divine judgment or Divine grace.

For divine judgment, sometimes all that is required is the withdrawal of light. Darkness follows, discernment disappears, and people become capable of believing falsehood with extraordinary fervour.

There is an eerie biblical description of something like this in 2 Thessalonians 2:11, the "strong delusion" by which people come to believe what is false.

But when grace provides an opening, there will always be forces determined to misalign the stars.

Which is why I have said it before, and will say it again:

Obama's 2008 campaign remains one of the royal standards for refusing to waste a political moment.

You roll up your sleeves and traverse the country. Crucially, you don't spend all your time where everybody already loves you.

You go where the language is different, where the culture is different, where the religion is different. You go where people may distrust you and where you may receive a hostile reception.

You may not win their love, but you may win their respect.

Who remembers Joe the Plumber, the man who confronted Obama with difficult questions?

That encounter mattered because politics cannot merely be a procession of believers applauding their candidate. A candidate seeking to govern a complicated country must deliberately encounter people who do not already believe in him.

Peter Obi, by contrast, ran what became largely a populist campaign. And, astonishingly for a man seeking to wrest power from two enormous political machines, he repeatedly appeared to dismiss the importance of political structure:

"The people are my structure!"

"The people will defend their mandate."

"I don't need a manifesto. Go and see what I did in Anambra State."

Let us examine those propositions.

1. YOU NEED STRUCTURE

An army of one million people without formation can be defeated by 10,000 disciplined, organised and properly commanded soldiers.

Numbers are not structure. Enthusiasm is not structure. Virality is not structure. Crowds are not structure.

Peter Obi could have made one simple announcement:

"I need 100 volunteers from each of Nigeria's 774 local government areas."

That gives you 77,400 people. Ask each one to recruit another ten volunteers and suddenly you have the beginnings of a nationwide political army approaching 800,000 people.

Then tell the movement:

"Obidients, we now have nearly 800,000 volunteers nationwide. We need your donations more desperately than ever to train them, coordinate them, equip them and keep our operations running."

What could be simpler?

You begin converting enthusiasm into organisation, organisation into presence, presence into intelligence, and intelligence into election-day capability.

Instead, we heard repeatedly that structure was unnecessary.

We've seen how that panned out.

2. "THE PEOPLE WILL DEFEND THEIR MANDATE"

How?

"The people" cannot defend a mandate merely by being numerous any more than an amorphous army of one million can necessarily defeat 10,000 disciplined soldiers operating under a coherent command structure.

Who coordinates them? Who trains the polling agents? Who gathers intelligence? Who communicates when something goes wrong? Who collates results and documents irregularities? Who gets evidence to the right place quickly? Who provides transport, food, legal support, communications and logistics?

That is what structure means.

It is not merely a collection of party grandees sitting in Abuja.

Structure is the machinery that converts political preference into political action.

3. "GO AND VERIFY WHAT I DID IN ANAMBRA"

Fine.

What exactly did you do?

More importantly, what parts of that record constitute a replicable governing philosophy for a federation of more than 200 million people?

A presidential campaign cannot simply be:

"I governed Anambra. Go and check."

Nigeria is not Anambra multiplied by 36.

A candidate for president owes the country a coherent theory of government: what he believes, what he intends to change, how he intends to change it, what systems he intends to build and how those systems will survive him.

FAST-FORWARD TO 2026

Anyway...

Fast-forward to 2026.

Peter Obi wants the same office. And from where I sit, I am seeing far too much of the same script.

That is where my problem lies.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

What troubles me even more is that, four years later, many of his most passionate supporters still seem unable to identify one consequential thing Peter Obi himself got wrong.

Not one.

Everything was somebody else's fault: INEC, APC, PDP, the judiciary, tribalism, religion, rigging, the establishment.

Perhaps some, or even many, of those criticisms have merit. But surely a serious political movement must also possess the intellectual courage to turn the mirror upon itself and ask:

WHAT DID WE GET WRONG?

Where was our strategy deficient? Where did our candidate miscalculate? Which constituencies did we fail to reach? What organisation did we fail to build? What assumptions turned out to be false?

And, most importantly:

What must we do differently?

That is what learning looks like.

Instead, we appear ready to do the same thing again: support the same candidate, using substantially the same methods, making substantially the same assumptions, dismissing substantially the same warnings, and expecting a miracle.

I truly wish I could simply believe that the outcome will somehow be different this time.

I cannot.

That is not hatred. It is not envy. It is not bitterness. It is the refusal to surrender one's judgment to a political movement simply because one once believed in it.

I supported Peter Obi. I wanted him to succeed.

But support must never require the suspension of thought, and loyalty must never become an excuse for refusing to learn.

Independent thinking is a privilege. I cherish that privilege.

And I reserve the right to change my mind when the evidence before me changes.

I rest my case.

Don Kenobi

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