On the trail with the surprise front-runner in Nigeria’s presidential race

By Kinley Salmon

What do I offer you: coffee, tea, water?” asked Peter Obi, the minor-party candidate leading the polls to become president of Africa’s most populous country. Such hospitality is to be expected: in years of interviewing west African politicians, I’ve never known one not to offer refreshments. Usually the Big Man barks out an order, and a couple of minutes later a flunky shuffles in deferentially with drinks.

With Obi, things are different. Though running late and in danger of missing his flight, he ambled over to the kettle himself. “Do you want a big cup or a small one? I’ve brought you a variety of teas,” he said. “It’s not important I have tea,” I protested, not wanting to make him miss a day of campaigning. “Do you need honey?” he asked.

In the egotistical and entourage-heavy world of Nigerian politics, Obi’s humility is refreshing. (When I interviewed Rabiu Kwankwaso, another presidential candidate, I sipped from a bottle emblazoned not just with Kwankwaso’s photo but also a list of his academic titles.) The army of young supporters hoping to propel Obi to the presidency on February 25th, who dub themselves “Obidients”, delight in the fact that he often flies economy class, stands in line and carries his own suitcases. They laud him as an outsider shaking up Nigeria’s venal, aged political class. “He’s a young man,” said Kingsley Onwe, an Obi supporter. “We need young guys to come up and take charge now.”

I sipped from a bottle emblazoned not just with Kwankwaso’s photo but also a list of his graduate degrees

Half of Nigerians are 18 or under, but the presidential candidates of the two big parties are both of pensionable age. The 70-year-old Bola Tinubu of the incumbent All Progressives Congress (APC) is so dogged by rumours of ill health that he felt obliged to tweet a video of himself pedalling an exercise bike. Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is 76 and is running for president for the sixth time.

Obi is a relative whippersnapper at 61. Yet in other ways he is hardly an obvious standard-bearer for young Nigerians who want to upend the political system. He is rich; they are mostly hard-up. Rather than being a complete outsider, he is already on to his third political party. Eight months ago he tried to win the PDP presidential nomination but pulled out just before the primary and soon joined the Labour Party.

Supporters also brush off the fact that Obi, a trader and banker before entering politics, appeared in the Pandora Papers, a leak of the records of financial companies, for owning an undeclared offshore company. Obi insisted there was no deliberate wrongdoing and told reporters at the time, “I am sure you too will not like to pay inheritance tax if you can avoid it.”

Obi’s style wins him plenty of fans. Many admire his ostentatious frugality, and agree with his brutally frank appraisal of Nigeria’s flaws. Plenty give him credit simply for not being either of his main rivals. “The other ones, they are doing it for their own best [benefit],” says Salamatu Abdulaziz, an Obi fan selling stock cubes in a market outside the capital, Abuja. Both Tinubu and Abubakar have been accused of corruption by the American government. In the 1990s the US Department of Justice said there was “probable cause” to believe that money in Tinubu’s accounts was from drug sales. He denied wrongdoing and reached a settlement. And a US Senate committee report in 2010 alleged that Abubakar, a wealthy former bigwig in the Nigerian customs service, was implicated in the transfer of $40m in “suspect funds”. He too has always denied wrongdoing.

There is still much to play for in the campaign. Around 40% of voters remain undecided or refuse to tell pollsters whom they will back. Rival campaigns scoff that Obidients are a paper army that is only influential on Twitter. Many pundits concur.

Three months after my tea I clambered aboard a private jet in Abuja alongside Datti Baba-Ahmed, Obi’s running-mate, hoping to see Obi in action for myself. Our destination was Ondo state in south-west Nigeria and Baba-Ahmed, an economist by training, was keen to manage expectations. Ondo is not an Obi stronghold, he said. He claimed that Tinubu had tried all sorts of ruses to disrupt Obi’s campaign in that part of the country, even using his influence to block planes from landing. The jet touched down untroubled. Some minutes later a gold-and-black helicopter swooped down through the haze. Obi climbed out, his face drawn and his tufts of grey hair more prominent than when we met previously.

“I am sure you too will not like to pay inheritance tax if you can avoid it”

Obi’s welcoming party in Akure, Ondo’s capital, included a bevy of burly, balaclava-clad guards brandishing assault rifles. They leapt into the back of a pick-up, heads swivelling as we went. We did not drive far. A few hundred metres out of the airport the motorcade pulled over. No one, it appeared, knew where we were going. The Labour Party has not had much experience running a serious presidential campaign. At the previous election, in 2019, it won just 5,074 votes out of 28m cast. Before Obi joined it last year, no one in the Ondo branch expected to have to organise rallies.

Eventually, the motorcade rolled up to a student town hall. The long building was only half full but Obi was mobbed by well-wishers. One of the notables who came to support him was Aisha Yesufu, a co-founder of #BringBackOurGirls, a campaign to secure the release of 200 schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram, a terrorist group, in 2014. (Many of those girls are still missing; their families fear they have been forced into sexual slavery.)

Nigerian candidates typically shun scrutiny and stuff long dull speeches with panglossian promises. Obi, by contrast, took unscripted questions from the audience. “We are honoured to have you here. What is your motivation to stand now?” began one student. Yesufu jumped up, wrapped in a powder-blue hijab. “Don’t make it easy! Grill him!” she exhorted the students, grinning.

They gave it a shot. “Have we wasted our time coming to school for years? What is your plan for us?” asked one. The bespectacled Obi noted each question on a tiny piece of paper and answered them in turn. His responses were peppered with technocratic jargon. Factor endowments, the Human Development Index and the money supply all got an airing.

Many admire his ostentatious frugality, and agree with his brutally frank appraisal of Nigeria’s flaws. Plenty give him credit simply for not being either of his main rivals

Yet despite the detail with which he described Nigeria’s woes, it was unclear exactly how he would change things, much as it had been when I interviewed him months earlier. The prospects for students like the ones in Akure are daunting. Nigeria’s oil wealth has made a lucky few very rich. Many politicians enjoy vast villas with soaring columns and eight-foot televisions. But around 95m Nigerians – more than 40% of the population – live below a bare-bones national poverty line of $1.90 per day. The average Nigerian is poorer today than in 2015, when voters chucked out the long-ruling PDP and elected Muhammadu Buhari and the APC. Many also feel less safe: jihadists, separatists and bandits terrorise swathes of the country.

The motorcade grew as local youths roared ahead on bright yellow motorbikes. Obi’s next event was a town hall packed with Christians. He offered a quick history of how the church had helped rid the Philippines of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos but did not otherwise play up his Christianity. “No religion buys bread cheaper,” he reminded the throng, before reeling off statistics about how little food Nigeria produces.

Before the day’s big rally Obi stopped to pay his respects to the local royals of the Akure kingdom. (Courting traditional rulers, who are still hugely influential, is de rigueur in Nigerian elections.) In a large red-carpeted room elderly men in white flowing robes sat on ornate wooden armchairs. In the middle a throne, upholstered in gold with its own curved roof and leopard-print footstool, was flanked by two enormous fluffy toy tigers. No one sat on the throne, however. Many royals in the south-west absent themselves from visits by the Obi campaign so as not to upset Tinubu, Baba-Ahmed texted me, as I looked on.

Obi, unruffled by the cuddly toys and the missing monarch, crouched to the floor in deference to the most senior royal present, who watched impassively, holding a long blond irukere, a horse-hair fly-whisk that symbolises power. Perhaps wisely, Obi chose not to tell the room full of old men that Nigeria belongs to the young. But otherwise, he pulled few punches. Nigeria is a failed state, he said bluntly.

Stepping back into the street, Obi abandoned the cars and strode off, the noise of the rally already audible in the distance. Secret-service agents linked arms around him to keep the crowd at bay. “Obi, Obi, Obi,” they chanted, drowning the music being blasted from the venue. More Obidients were hanging out of windows and packed onto balconies of nearby buildings.

“We want to save Nigeria, we want to build a better place, where you will be proud to say you are Nigerian”

Aisha Yesufu quickly took centre stage, dancing and singing to “Sweet Us”, a popular Nigerian tune, her blue hijab swaying as she went. When a local Labour Party honcho told the crowd it was the turn of the south-east to taste the presidency, Obi turned and angrily whispered to Baba-Ahmed that he should not have said that. (He argues that voters should pick the best candidate regardless of tribal or religious loyalties, and has publicly scorned the commonly held idea that Nigeria’s presidency should rotate by region, even though by that logic it would be the turn of a south-easterner like him.)

“We want to save Nigeria, we want to build a better place, where you will be proud to say you are Nigerian,” Obi shouted, hoarsely. The crowd lapped up the platitudes. A mountain of a man in a bright blue shirt near the front shouted “YES!” in response to every line, no matter what had been said.

“If Ondo is this good I am only more hopeful now,” said Baba-Ahmed, referring to the crowd’s enthusiasm. I caught Obi on the tarmac one last time as he scrambled to get a boarding pass for his flight to Lagos. “I’m feeling great about the passion of the Nigerian people,” he said. Could he really win? “Definitely.”

Yet when I asked if he expected to win outright or if there would be a run-off, he was evasive. Later, as we drove back into town from Abuja airport, the energy of the day started to fade. Staring down at Baba-Ahmed’s car from billboards on every lamppost for miles on end was the image of one man and the same relentless message: “Tinubu is coming”. ■

Kinley Salmon is The Economist’s Africa correspondent

IMAGES: GETTY, AP