THIS DAWN — In politics, the most dangerous assumption is that what you cannot see does not exist.
Nigerian campaigns, in particular, reward those who mistake opacity for incompetence and subtlety for softness.
It is against this backdrop that recent critiques of Peter Obi’s 2027 posture miss a crucial point: what is being read as a vacuum of strategy may, in fact, be a deliberate refusal to play an old game on old terms.
The argument that Obi is surrounded by “fans” rather than “cold-blooded tacticians” sounds persuasive because it borrows the language of hard politics.
It invokes wards, governors, collation centres, and structures—fetish objects of Nigerian electoral commentary.
But it rests on a flawed premise: that strategy must always be loud, visible, transactional, and indistinguishable from the methods that have produced Nigeria’s current political crisis.
That premise deserves interrogation.
The Rise of Peter Obi
Peter Obi’s political rise did not occur because he mastered the traditional machinery of Nigerian politics. It occurred precisely because he disrupted it.
In 2023, he ran without sitting governors, without an entrenched national party apparatus, without the patronage pipelines that have historically defined “serious” candidacies.
Yet he shattered voting patterns, flipped urban centres long considered unreachable, and rewired political participation among demographics that had long disengaged from electoral politics.
That outcome was not an accident. It was strategy—just not the kind many commentators are conditioned to recognise.
The obsession with governors, defectors, and backroom bargains reflects an old theory of victory: that elections are won exclusively through elite capture.
That theory explains past elections, but it does not fully explain the last one. Nor does it adequately prepare anyone for the next.
The Paradigm Shift
The “structure” argument assumes a static Nigeria. Nigeria is not static. Demographics are shifting.
Voter psychology is shifting. Information flows are shifting. Legitimacy—arguably the most underrated currency in politics—is shifting.
Obi’s core strategy has been to bet on these shifts maturing faster than the ability of traditional machines to suppress them indefinitely.
This is not naïveté. It is a calculated risk.
Critics warn of echo chambers, but they overlook a more significant reality: the old political class is itself trapped in an echo chamber of transactional thinking.
They assume every opponent can be neutralised with inducement, every community controlled through intermediaries, every election “managed” into predictability.
That assumption is precisely why the system now expends unprecedented resources to control narratives, limit transparency, and blunt voter mobilisation. It senses erosion.
Obi’s continued emphasis on civic energy, moral contrast, and public accountability is not a substitute for logistics; it is an attempt to alter the cost-benefit analysis of manipulation itself.
When scrutiny rises, when turnout surges, when legitimacy becomes contested terrain, rigging becomes more expensive, more visible, and more destabilising.
That is not theatre. That is pressure.
Obi’s Greatest Asset
It is also incorrect to assume that a quieter public posture implies the absence of tactical planning.
Serious campaigns do not litigate their counter-structures on social media. They do not announce negotiations before they mature.
They do not telegraph every institutional engagement to satisfy an online audience hungry for reassurance.
In fact, one of the costliest mistakes opposition figures make is confusing public performance with operational depth.
There is a reason professional political operations value compartmentalisation. Noise invites pre-emption. Silence buys time.
Moreover, the fixation on aligning with existing power brokers ignores a central constraint Obi must manage: credibility.
His political asset is trust—fragile, conditional, and easily squandered.
Wholesale absorption of the very actors Nigerians blame for state failure may expand short-term reach but collapse long-term belief.
In an environment where voter cynicism is already high, moral incoherence is not a neutral trade-off; it is a strategic liability.
Transformed Nigeria Versus Manipulated Nigeria
The choice, then, is not between “fans” and “strategists.” It is between two competing theories of change.
One theory says Nigeria cannot be transformed; it can only be managed. Therefore, victory requires out-manoeuvring incumbents within their own corrupt architecture.
The other theory says Nigeria must be transformed; therefore, victory requires altering the incentives, expectations, and participation of the electorate itself.
Obi’s politics has consistently aligned with the second theory.
This does not mean structure is irrelevant. It means structure is being reconceived.
Networks are not only governors and godfathers; they are professional associations, diaspora funding pipelines, faith-based civic blocs, youth-led polling unit guardianship, and technology-enabled parallel reporting.
These are slower to see, harder to map, and easier to underestimate—until they are not.
History is indeed full of popular men who mistook applause for architecture.
It is also full of movements that were dismissed as unserious because they refused to look like the systems they were trying to replace.
The early civil rights movement was mocked as emotional. Anti-apartheid mobilisation was called impractical.
Even Nigeria’s own pro-democracy struggles were derided as noise until the ground shifted beneath the incumbents.
Absence of Visible Strategy
The real danger for Peter Obi is not that he lacks tacticians.
It is that, under pressure, he might abandon the very strategic patience that distinguishes his project from conventional opposition politics.
The temptation to “look serious” by embracing the aesthetics of the old order is far more threatening than the risk of being misunderstood by commentators.
Absence of visible strategy is not always absence of strategy. Sometimes, it is a refusal to fight on the enemy’s preferred terrain.
Passion may start a fire. Structure may sustain it. But legitimacy decides whether the fire spreads—or is extinguished by force.
That, ultimately, is the wager.
