Several weeks ago, in the heat of the 2023 campaign, I commissioned two social scientists conversant with Nigeria to help me map out the DNA of an Obidient. They went to work. Periodically, they sent me their findings. After stating that deep down, the Obidient movement is not about Peter Obi and Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, Scientist #1 propounds that Obidients are desolate, dejected, and dislocated hitchhikers who saw a shiny wagon on a muddy road and hopped on.
Long before I was born, my family used to fight with the spirit of Ogbanje. I didn’t know this until I received the first chapter of the uncompleted manuscript of my father’s autobiography. This piece is the story of my quest to understand how my family defeated the Ogbanje spirit in us.
When I started reporting and analyzing Nigeria in the 1990s, I was unsure of the monster before me. Looking at the Nigerian political class from an up close and personal range, I could not rationalize their driving force. I witnessed the deceit they received at the hands of Ibrahim Babangida and wondered what force could be so powerful and blinding.
There is a joke in America that every citizen of the US has an FBI file. That might have been the dream of the first FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, but he could not accomplish it. For now, the typical people with FBI files are activists, troublemakers, and those involved in illegal activities. So, people who deal in financial fraud, murder, drug trade, etc., are guaranteed a robust FBI file. Once the US Justice Department has an adversary encounter with you, the FBI opens a file for you. That means Nigeria's president-elect, Bola Tinubu, has a rich FBI file.