Obasanjo's actions are not unexpected. He comes from a region that has a long history of betraying their own people. Awolowo, Abiola, Ige, the list goes on. Even Osibanjo was betrayed by Tinubu himself so it's a lifestyle for them.

Obasanjo is a retired politician…


He is an elder statesman and as such has a right to endorse who ever he pleases.

He wasn’t speaking on behalf of the party which he was a former member.



Lamido’s speech sounds like blackmail!

Obasanjo dont care about better Nigeria or not.

He only wants a political puppet . A presidential toy. Someone like Yaradua (God rest his soul)

He endorsed Buhari in 2015 after Jonathan wiseup and stop been his puppet. After Buhari won, The Northern cabal chanced him. He switch back to his enemy, Atiku in 2019 out of desperation. Atiku lost.

Now he knows Obi is a weakling, a very dull not sharp person. So he is lining up at his back too. He is craving for that godfather position again so bad. Since Goodluck put him to his place in 2015

Lamido is in order here.
But if an ethnic group with a bias mind towards this country to the extent of designating it a zoo wants us to vote in their own, they are joking.

Tinubu is the next president of Nigeria.

I said it first!!!!!

lhordspy:
Obasanjo dont care about better Nigeria or not.

He only wants a political puppet. A presidential toy.

Shameless amala and ewedu miscreant. Nigerians are wiser. They won't fall for propagandas masterminded by online charlatans who do the bidding of a demented drug criminal for stipends.

Criminals and thieves that have held the country under the spell of corruption and embezzlement are springing up from every corner.

Their greatest fear is that looting, embezzlement and corruption will be locked when PODATTI takes over.

Nigerians, rise up with your PVC'S and take back your country.

Tinubu will obviously and convincingly win the coming election and succeed Buhari

dey play

Yes nah. If na you nko Lamido? Do you know how many times Tinubu and his boys have defeated and humiliated Obasanjo and his boys?

Igbos are bunch of funny people with many stupid individuals consistently promoting foolish ideas.
How on earth will Igbos believe Obi can defeat, either Tinubu or Atiku in a general election?

OBI ruled Anambra state, the second smallest state in Nigeria for 8 yrs and today Awka remains the worst state capital in Nigeria, no good road network or any meaningful infrastructure, and he told you he saved money.

Then you foolishly called that man the best to pull Nigeria through…A man who gave laptops to secondary school children to pass Waec and then denied them university education by increasing tuition fee by 200%.

Any other Lamido apart from the Sanusi wey I know reach house na counterfeit

Well, let's be factual here,I think this dude has a point here..... Perhaps Obj is looking for a puppet whom he'd easily toss around like a coin . And obi wey I know reach house for Anambra no go gree for am just like Uncle Jona did to him back then

Old age they say should come with wisdom. The wisdom that is attained through years of experience, unfortunately, has come to be an abomination to many of our senior citizens in Nigeria. The Jonathan government was marred with insecurity and so a set of "Progressives " came with a Change Mantra and the youth bought into it. We never knew we are signing our fate for years of penury, unemployment, ritual killings, and the worst insecurity in the history of Nigeria.

Sometimes we wake up with empty stomachs and no one to give us hope. We trek the streets of Lagos to Anambra to Jos and to Katsina looking for jobs, jobs whose pay is not enough to give mama and papa a befitting burial.

As a man who gets erected every morning, with no wife to curdle and to mate with. Where is the money? Can a jobless man get a wife? Will he endure a house filled with kwashiorkor- infested kids?

Our marriageable spinsters, your children are clocking 40 with no husband. They are casting and binding the devil in mosques and churches. They are still waiting, hoping that the monthly savings from a potential suitor can take them out of their father's house. Many die in withered hope.

Now we patronize herbalists and pastorpreneurs, thieves on cloaks to save us from excruciating poverty and deprivation. They reap us of our meager earnings, they tell us that our sins made us poor. They tell us our oracles and deities made us poor. They tell us our mothers are witches and so they made us poor. They tell us our fathers practice occultism and so we are poor. Then they ask us to raise sacrifices, sometimes blood sacrifices.

Now we patronize human part dealers. Now we are into fraud. Now we sleep with corpses. Now we kill our loved ones for money. Now we die in our primes. Our girls are into "hookups", they get rammed so they can make up for papa's inability to put food on the table. Now our little girls mount our grandfathers for bread and braids.

The police shoot us when we protest injustice. Our voices are the echoes of a subjugated young generation. They haunt us in beer parlours where we are drunk and our clothes soaked in wretchedness, they also wait for us at gaming centres. They pack us in buses and we bail ourselves with our mothers and sisters already tired bodies.

Dear Senior Citizens of Nigeria, your failures of yesterday are the hopelessness we are suffering today. You voted leeches in power. You voted with hatred and with LONGERTHROAT! You voted wrongly to spite one another. You voted foolishly!

Tell me, who will take care of you when your pension will not be paid? When Glaucoma and cataracts begin to eat your weary eyes away, who will pay for your surgeries? Who will pay when prostrate infirmities begin to rear their ugly heads? Now you are about to waste another eight years of our lives, our young vibrant lives, who will feed you when you are old and gray? When your only life-support is merely a stick and your ears are deaf, deaf so you don't hear the gunshots and clinking knives from ethnic and religious wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
On whose strong shoulder will you place your wrinkled old hands for support? The same hand you used in voting in vermin of questionable characters in power.

Then we will look at you and say in our hearts, "It is your fault", before striking down our victims.


We are still dusted, our shoes cracked from covering painful kilometers in search of the millions of jobs promised.
"Where are the jobs? ", We lament as we squeeze the "pure water " into our mouths under heart-wrenching volcanic sun rays.

We ignore your calls in shame, for we know we have nothing to send to you. Our accounts are in debt and Loans reading like a pendulum nonstop.

We treat our sick bodies with cheap local herbs and by our mid-thirties, we seek donations to manage our kidney problems.

We queue in immigration offices and sleep even in embassies of warring countries for visas. Those of us who are lucky will get a rare opportunity of washing the white man’s toilet, even with our envious educational portfolios. After all it is better to get paid in dollars than a dwindling naira.

Yet our problems persist.

You vote for life political predators who use our intellectual property rights to win elections, the one you paid through your nose by sending us to school. They pay us in kobo so they can reap away our future in Naira and dollars and pounds and Euros. We share the kobos and you dare to say it's not enough to balm your cracked waist?!

They stash this monies away in GP and sewage tanks. They bury it deep so we can't see it. They spit at our hungry faces and call us "Lazy Youths" who queue at their gold-pleated gates for monies while they live in affluence and influence. We dare not profess love to their children for we know that 'shoe get size ‘.Their tinted cars and overzealous drivers break our bones and their police escorts threaten us to settle our own case or get convicted of a felony. Our policemen and security officers drop their guns for their designer bags and umbrellas.

They are back again, the scavengers of the nation. They are back with their mouth-watering manifestos, and now we see our senior citizens rallying to vote for calamities again, to torture us till we are not strong enough to fend for ourselves.They are back again to waste our years of strength, of lifting bags of cement, and of standing half-naked on dangerous nightie streets. They are back again with their divisive style of politics, so we insult each other and fight to pave way for their heirs to rule over our children.

They tell us religion doesn’t matter as long as it suits their bloodthirsty quest for absolute power.

They are back with same old stories they fooled you with but we, the youth will not be cajoled to vote as you have voted.

We are going to take back our country from sick and mentally impaired politicians, political ritualists, religious and ethnic terrorists, egomaniacs, and kleptomaniacs. We are going to effect a positive change this time around. We are no longer going to eat the crumbs from our collective wealth.

Our "Early morning salute" will be attended to by our wives, wives of our youth! Our girls will grow as girls but not as women of easy virtue.

We are going to vote, this time for ourselves and our unborn generation so they can pick our calls when we are old and gray.

We are going to correct your mistakes and we urge you to be our backbones and support us.

As the election date draws nearer, remember your vote is very necessary. Don't dim our esprit anymore. For this generation of youth are soldiers, freedom soldiers.

Vote for a strong-willed candidate. Vote for a candidate who represents us well without delegating his powers to healthier subordinates. Vote the one who balances and respects our diversified religious affiliations. Vote for justice, fairness, and the youth.


We are the true leaders of today. Vote for our tomorrow.

Written by
Liana-Lois Apeh.

Perfect assessment of OBJ.

Una still dey for this OBJ endorsement matter! Seems the endorsement of Peter Obi by OBJ is a big uppercut because I don't understand why you guys are still having headache and bringing it up if it's not that serious!

Rubbish talk.... Has Lamido made his own down payment for the roasted corn?

“He is doing it because he is angry with Tinubu and Atiku. What is their crime? Tinubu has a strong character and personality, so also Atiku. The fear of having people, who are very strong in character, is what is haunting him. With Atiku or Tinubu, he will not have the monopoly he is having over Nigeria.”


Lamido also subtly saying he prefers either Atiku or Tinubu ...but never a Peter Obi

Exmilitant:
Lamido is in order here.
But if an ethnic group with a bias mind towards this country to the extent of designating it a zoo wants us to vote in their own, they are joking.

Tinubu is the next president of Nigeria.

I said it first!!!!!

Nonsense and senseless talk

lhordspy:
Obasanjo dont care about better Nigeria or not.

He only wants a political puppet. A presidential toy.

Oh, good. Thank God you've finally seen the light and have come to terms with the actuality of an Obi Presidency. Thank you for finally giving up and accepting reality.


You see, two can play that game.

AderonkeOlaniyi:


Shameless amala and ewedu miscreant. Nigerians are wiser. They won't fall for propagandas masterminded by online charlatans who do the bidding of a demented drug criminal for stipends.

Gibberish see painment

ganisucks:

Oh, good. Thank God you've finally seen the light and have come to terms with the actuality of an Obi Presidency. Thank you for finally giving up and accepting reality.


You see, two can play that game.

See anamubulas light.. see painment

thesicilian:
Obasanjo's actions are not unexpected. He comes from a region that has a long history of betraying their own people. Awolowo, Abiola, Ige, the list goes on. Even Osibanjo was betrayed by Tinubu himself so it's a lifestyle for them.

But when he supported Buhari he wasn't betraying his people?

Are we still on this matter.

Strong characters or strong thieves?
Lamido is the grand patron of thieves because together with all his sons the were arrested by the EFCC for looting.

Afraid of them not giving him contract or what? Afraid of them wiping away his achievements or what? History is written already. ...the growth of the economy and achievements during his 8 years as civilian president wont be forgotten, it has not been matched, even if Atiku and BAT become joint president, OBJs effort will still be up there....the man isnt perfect, terrible in some ways, but he has no reason to be afraid. OBJ doesnt care.
In 2015 Buhari vs GEJ he endorsed Buhari, for obvious reasons, failure of GEJ, u people said he was a good man and elderstatesman
In 2019 he saw failure of Buhari and how things have south, Buhari vs Atiku, the man endorsed Atiku(and he carefully selected his words, he said considering the options available, Atiku is the better one), u people didnt say he was afraid of Atiku, Buhari people said he was jealous of Buhari
Now confronted with Atiku vs BAT vs Obi, he endorsed Obi, suddenly the Atiku he wasnt afraid of in 2019, he is now afraid of him

Obasanjo Instigates Youths

Idowu Akinlotan

January 8, 2023

Contrary to what many supporters of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo think, those who chide him for his unusual and intemperate letter endorsing the presidential candidacy of Labour Party’s Peter Obi are not doing so because they regret his refusal to support their own candidates. He has the right and pleasure to support anyone he wishes, regardless of the bad choices he has made over decades. What the complainants quarrel with is the tone of the endorsement letter, its instigation rather than logical persuasion of the youths, and the former president’s unbelievable deployment of mediocre philosophy of leadership. He is free to support anyone he likes, whether his critics like it or not, but it was expected that he would do it with the dignified poise of a leader, the decorum associated with great leadership, and with balanced, even-tempered and unassailable logic. He had all of 85 years to develop and hone that poise and maturity, and over 11 years as head of state and president to acquire the experience needed to set the right example for the nation. Now, all those years seem a horrible waste.

Somehow, as is customary of him, his letter of endorsement was full of hysteria: hysteria against his imaginary foes, hysteria against his successors in office, and hysteria against his compatriots and God whom he sometimes gives the impression is permanently at his beck and call. Mr Obi, a sophist like no other, probably deserves Chief Obasanjo’s support. The two sophists are thus obsessed with specious reasoning, and roundly complement each other. For whatever the endorsement is worth, no one should begrudge the controversial former president from backing Mr Obi’s candidacy. It was perhaps too far-fetched for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, to expect Chief Obasanjo’s endorsement. Too much had soured in their relationship to realistically expect even a grin from the ex-president. Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) would have been unable to fathom any endorsement from Abeokuta. That left the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, and LP’s Mr Obi to vie for the bilious old man’s attention. It would have been incongruous for the APC, as the party knows very well, to receive the nod from their old and unforgiving antagonist and sparring partner.

All the leading candidates for the 2023 presidential election had visited Chief Obasanjo in Abeokuta, more as a courtesy than necessity; but it would be hard to gauge what value they would have attached to his endorsement had he deemed them worthy of the gesture. Even Mr Obi who finally got the nod has remained nonplussed. He is uncertain what to do with the endorsement, especially seeing that the repeated hurrahs he had got from the politicised churches of Nigeria had not given his candidacy the needed boost. The streetwise LP candidate knows by instinct that Chief Obasanjo is long past his expiry date. In fact, much more, he knows that all that is left of the phlegmatic old warhorse from Abeokuta is his nuisance value. But better not to draw the ire of the sleeping bear: if he cannot be for you, at least make him indifferent to you. That was why Alhaji Atiku and Asiwaju Tinubu visited him. Both men were too smart not to know where Chief Obasanjo leaned; but they thought they could lessen the pungency of his vitriol. Alas, the former president remains as incandescent and malignant as ever.

When Chief Obasanjo first gave the solid hint mid-December that he might endorse Mr Obi, this column challenged him to defend his suppositions about the LP candidate. It is unlikely the former president read the challenge, for he is too cocksure of everything to care what anyone writes, and too narcissistic to bother about any interest but his. However, he has finally explained his choice, though the explanations do not do credit to his long years in office, nor to his vaunted statesmanlike ability to see the woods for the trees, to see from the mountaintop, and to light a lamp to the national feet. He rests his support for Mr Obi on two main but leprous legs, one of which is discernible from his attempt to prequalify the candidates. Hear him: “From interaction and experience, and as mentees as most of them claim, I will, without prejudice, fear or ill-will, make bold to say that there are four major factors to watch out for in a leader you will consider to hoist on yourself and on the rest of Nigerians in the coming election and they are what I call TVCP: Track record of ability and performance; Vision that is authentic, honest and realistic; Character and attributes of a lady and a gentleman who are children of God and obedient to God; and Physical and mental capability with soundness of mind as it is a very taxing and tasking assignment at the best of times and more so it is at the most difficult time that we are.”

This prequalification of presidential candidates is clearly pedestrian, and it is hard to imagine that it comes from a former president. How he equated those who visited him – for after all, they also visited other past rulers – as his mentees remains baffling. How could a man whose politics is in constant flux have mentored anyone when he had no identifiable ideology, no private or public principles, and is capable of the most corrosive mendacity any liar anywhere could subscribe to? The simple answer is that it is customary of Chief Obasanjo to exaggerate his recollections and be infatuated with his own tall stories. Having read very little of any serious stuff since he left office, and thus failed to improve himself, it is unsurprising that he embraces flighty ideas and panaceas. Just reading books on Julius and Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Deng Xiaoping, and Charles de Gaulle, among many other great leaders in Asia, Africa and Europe would have helped sharpened his perspective on leadership. But even using the crude four-way test contained in his letter of endorsement, it is hard to explain why he cannot see that his choice failed all but one of the tests. He then went on whimsically to denounce the emi lokan (my turn) slogan popularised by Asiwaju Tinubu, insisting that leadership does not admit to such principle, but turned round to embrace awon lokan (their turn) to underscore Mr Obi’s bid as an Igbo man. As customary, the contradictions are lost on him.

 But there is an even more pernicious and infinitely more pedestrian, instigative and divisive second leg for Chief Obasanjo to stand his endorsement of Mr Obi: the LP candidate’s youth, a factor embedded in the former president’s four-way test. Why he smothered the third of the four-way test – that of obedience to God – whatever that means, is equally hard to fathom. In any case, he has zeroed in on the youth factor. So, hear him at his sentimental worst: “My dear young men and women, you must come together and bring about a truly meaningful change in your lives. If you fail, you have no one else to blame. Your present and future are in your hands to make or to mar. The future of Nigeria is in the same manner in your hands and literally so. If for any reason you fail to redeem yourself and your country, you will have lost the opportunity for good and you will have no one to blame but yourselves and posterity will not forgive you. Get up, get together, get going and get us to where we should be. And you, the youth, it is your time and your turn. ‘Eyin Lokan’ (Your turn). The power to change is in your hands. Your future, my future, the future of grandchildren and great grandchildren is in your hands. Politics and elections are numbers game. You have the numbers, get up, stand up and make your numbers count.”

To hear a former president instigate this sentimental and comical revolution is truly troubling. He and many others in his generation were heads of state in their youth. What did they do when they were given the opportunity to lead the country? What did they bring into leadership? What constitu tional structure for leadership recruitment did he, in eight years, institute to help produce the right leaders? Both as a youth and elder, he led Nigeria without character, morality and principles. Now, in his infatuations, he is advocating a beguiling and suffocating return to emptiness. Mr Obi whom he touts as competent, but whose errant ears must be continually pulled, supposedly by Chief Obasanjo and his ilk, had the opportunity to lead Anambra for eight years; has the state become a destination for youths and elders, or has it showcased visionary leadership? And how is it possible, even in the closing years of Chief Obasanjo’s life, when he should be wiser and less given to histrionics, that he cannot appreciate that leadership is not about age but about character, discipline, intuition, intellect, and vision etc.? Neither he nor Mr Obi possesses any of the attributes he speaks dreamily about; it was, therefore, a trifle too easy for him to pontificate grandly as the grand mentor of political heavyweights, including, untruthfully, Mr Obi himself.

INEC statistics suggest that Nigerian youths dominate the voting population; it is understandable why Chief Obasanjo has tried to instigate them against the rest of the country without caring what qualities or character the aspirant or candidate possesses, or what the consequences of division might be. Using the age segmentation tool is, however, a mask for the former president’s other insidious objectives, as indicated in this place on December 18. Some analysts have snidely speculated he is not quite the Yoruba man he has all along pretended to be, but given his unbridled narcissism and messianic fervour, the ethnicity or religion a candidate belongs to hardly matters to him. He is neither a federalist nor a democrat, and if he tolerated the rule of law, which as president he treated as an inconvenience, it is because he had encountered a greater force he could not resist. He works hard, but he is incapable of any kind of altruism, and his leadership style has been as self-indulgent and ad hoc as his perspectives have been desultory. How such a man can now pretend to nobility in the selection of the next president, when he more than thrice bastardised that process in the past, is beyond comprehension. After ruling Nigeria for more than a decade, and having done nothing to reform or restructure the system to create a more durable constitution and viable democracy, it is shocking that he still sees nothing wrong in instigating and promoting division.

It is fortuitous that Chief Obasanjo has openly endorsed Mr Obi with the same questionable judgement he openly schemed for third term in 2006. His nose will be put out of joint in the coming weeks, as it was in 2006. Had he offered plausible reasons for endorsing the LP candidate, the country would have had to grudgingly respect his choice, despite his customary self-centredness. The APC is fortunate he did not endorse their candidate, for they would have had to lie in bed with a demanding stranger and cocquet. They gave him the courtesy of a visit, as they gave other past Nigerian rulers. Surely it could not be because he had done stupendously well as president, as he erroneously seemed to believe; yet he tries to constitute himself into a sort of national lodestar from which future leaders must take their reference. Courtesy is nothing more than courtesy, no matter what anyone reads into it. In the years ahead, such courtesies would not be given anyone but the electorate who, hopefully, can acquire the education and judgement needed to discern and vote for leaders with character.

lhordspy:
Obasanjo dont care about better Nigeria or not.

He only wants a political puppet . A presidential toy.

How will tinubu ensure a better nigeria much more than Obasanjo?

You mean strong thieves?