TRAGEDY, POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM

JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA argues that Peter Obi’s visit to Benue was ill-timed

When the news broke that Peter Obi’s convoy had been stopped in Benue, my first reaction was the one most Nigerians had. Another round of killings. Another set of families burying people they should not be burying. And on top of it, a presidential candidate prevented from performing the ordinary human act of turning up.

Two things then became clearer.

The first is that the blockade was indefensible. On Tuesday 8 September, less than two kilometres from Makurdi airport, along the Gboko Road near the Air Force Base, a crowd of young men with sticks stopped a presidential candidate from travelling on a public highway. The Benue State Police Command confirmed it had been notified of the movement in advance and had provided security. The state government says it knew nothing, and its Information Commissioner has accused Obi of ignoring protocol and courting trouble. Obi says a government aide mobilised the crowd. The police say the matter is under investigation.

Let the investigation run. The principle does not require its outcome. No Nigerian, candidate or citizen, should be turned back on a federal road, or any road for that matter, by men with sticks, and any argument about the motives of a visit becomes secondary the moment the visit is stopped by force. A country that settles questions of political taste with a roadblock has answered a much larger question about itself. That is not the country we want to be.

The second thing is what made the day complicated, and it is the part most of the commentary has skipped.

The destination was Yelwata, in Guma Local Government Area, where an attack on 13 and 14 June 2025 killed a very large number of people. Reported figures range from more than 100 to over 200. Obi himself puts it at more than 270. That massacre happened almost fifteen months ago.

Fifteen months is a long time in grief. Visit someone fifteen months after they buried a child, arrive in convoy, and the more forthright among them will ask the question politeness usually swallows. What exactly is this visit about? There is the part where you are reopening my pain. What are the other parts?

When you arrive in campaign colours, nobody needs to ask what those other parts are. The answer walks in wearing the answer. The elephant in the room, dressed in campaign colours.

This is the uncomfortable centre of the matter. It is one thing to be a candidate whose politics is animated by national tragedy, and there is nothing dishonourable in that. Even though there are better alternatives to being seen as the tragedy candidate, agbotikuyo as some have called it. One who is excited about news of death. It is another thing to keep a tragedy in the present tense long after the people who suffered it have been trying to move it into the past. People are entitled to closure, or at least to be spared the public performance of condolence timed to somebody else’s calendar. Grief runs on one clock. Elections run on another. When the second clock starts driving the first, something has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong even if every word spoken at the scene is sincere.

The Independent National Electoral Commission has lifted the ban on campaigning. Everybody understands what season this is. That is precisely why the timing invites the question rather than settles it.

So what separates solidarity from harvest? Not the presence of cameras, since a candidate travels with them whether he wants to or not. The honest test is narrower. What is left behind when the convoy departs. Whether the visit produces anything the families can use, or only footage the candidate can. And whether the same attention is available in the weeks when there is no election in view, when there is no road to be blocked and no video to be shared, and when a family in Guma is simply a family in Guma rather than a stop on an itinerary.

That test is worth applying to Peter Obi, and it is worth applying to everyone else in the field. He is not the only candidate who will stand beside grieving Nigerians between now and 2027. He is simply the one whose politics is most defined by it, which is why the argument is being conducted around him.

Here is the part we should be most ashamed of. A massacre from June 2025 can still be politically fertile ground in September 2026 for one reason only, which is that nothing has been resolved. The displaced are still displaced. The killings have not stopped in Benue or elsewhere. If those families had been rehoused, compensated and protected, if Yelwata were a place people had returned to rather than a place they fled, no candidate could mine it, because there would be nothing left in the ground to extract.

Meanwhile the young men on the Gboko Road have handed Obi something no scripted visit could have produced. A grievance, a video and a narrative of persecution. He left Benue with more than he arrived hoping for.

Note, though, how quickly the reading would have flipped. Had another candidate been turned back by the same crowd on the same road, the story would have been that the youth had rejected him. The same people calling these young men hired thugs would have called them the conscience of a generation. In Nigerian politics, a crowd is authentic when it obstructs your opponent and purchased when it obstructs you, and the ‘new Nigeria’ they keep invoking is never defined closely enough to expose the contradiction.

As the elections get closer and some stare the ugly face of defeat at close quarters, there will be outlandish promises and desperate attempts at using Nigerians as political tools. Those who will play by this should take heed: Nigerians are wiser than they have ever been. With the public square now effectively democratised, the people will pick what counts and simply reject every attempt at playing to the gallery. Time to change tactics.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing