The supporters of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), have continued to express their indignation over Sam Omatseye’s editorial piece on their preferred candidate.
Omatseye, the chairman of the editorial board of The Nation (a newspaper owned by Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu), had written a column in the newspaper on Monday titled “Obi-tuary”, wherein he portrayed Obi and the emerging Obidient movement as a narrow ethnic (Igbo) affair and as a separatist militancy in disguise.
“Obi has turned out to be an excuse for even closet Biafrans to betray open emotions about Biafra without being accused of it. This includes intellectuals who did not show mercy to him while he reigned in Anambra as a pharisaic chief executive. It is like wearing a colour beneath another colour. Obi has become a shelter for both miscreants and activists of the crowd,” part of the essay read.
About Obi’s supporters, Omatseye wrote: “They call themselves Obidients but they obey only one call: the sound of the east. Those in south-south have been seduced as by the cooing of Obi’s voice as by evangelism of the Biafrans. Mind you, they have not abandoned Kanu. But their icon has no power for now. Obi is like Zik, Kanu like Ojukwu. One is a flair, the other a flare”
On Obi’s chance of victory at the 2023 polls, he stated: “While Obi hops from church to church and beclouds the hypocrisy among political pastors, the nation watches as his sectional army taunts and harangues others. But Obi will do nothing to restrain his rabble because he knows they are doing a good job in keeping the faithful within their own bubble where they reinforce their own self-delusions. That will last until their last call at the polls. This is not the time to properly interrogate in details the false intimations of Obi’s agenda and hypocrisies. But it is safe to say one thing. Before he peters out and hurtles towards an electoral Obi-tuary, the country knows the content of the crowd and its origin. They are a caterwauling group trying to seduce, without much success, those outside its ethnoreligious tent.”
Omatseye’s essay elicited sharp criticism from supporters of the LP candidate, who considered it a vitriolic attack on Obi.
They launched a bitter diatribe against the editor, which has resulted to Obi-tuary trending on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter.
As of the time of writing this report, Obi-tuary trends with 7,399 tweets.
Meanwhile, the journalist has asked the presidential candidate to call his supporters to order as a result of the backlash he has been receiving on social media since publishing the essay.
“Mr. Peter Obi, call you [sic] supporters to order. They are calling and issuing death threats. If anything happens to me, you will be held responsible!!!!”, he tweeted on Tuesday.
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