Letters from Stockholm
Dear Mr Obi,
I write this letter with sadness, because I have wanted to give you a fair chance. For the better part of four years I have directed my political fire at Bola Tinubu, at Atiku Abubakar, and at the financial networks that surround Nigerian power. I have deliberately left you out of it, in the hope that Nigeria might at last be ready for an Igbo president and that you might be the man to deliver it. That restraint is now ending, and the reason is not you. It is the people who march under your name.
Anyone who debates you, questions you or criticises you is set upon. Not answered. Set upon. Insulted, mobbed, taunted, threatened and hounded across every platform until they either fall silent or fall in line. I have reviewed the attacks directed at me and at others, and they do not come from a broad national coalition. They come from a narrow, organised and increasingly sectarian mob that has convinced itself that loyalty to you is a substitute for argument, and that anyone outside its circle is an enemy.
Let me tell you what that mob has done to my family.
My father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, was Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General and the first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. During the civil war he served as General Gowon’s special representative to the United States, and his work as an international diplomat helped bring that bloody war to an end. He defended Isaac Boro in court, for free, against a charge of treason. He later did the same for Ken Saro-Wiwa. That is the record of the man your supporters have called a baby killer and a traitor. I have had his name and my family’s name slandered by your people more times than I can remember. A man who helped stop the killing, maligned as a killer, by people who were not born when he did it.
I am Kalabari Ijaw, not Igbo. I believe in a united Nigeria, as my father did before me, and no amount of rubbish from your supporters will deter me or stop me from writing freely.
Understand the difference. I have received six death threats from Tinubu supporters. My late mother and father have been insulted by them. But those are trolls, idiots being paid to attack anyone who opposes Tinubu, and I treat them accordingly. Your people are something else. They are unpaid, they are organised, and they are sincere, which makes them far more dangerous.
Consider this. I sat down, wrote a song and made a video in an effort to help free Nnamdi Kanu, an Igbo Biafran leader with whom I have no relationship and whose cause I do not support, because his legal rights are being trampled and I fight for legal rights. That is what my father would have done. In return I am maligned by idiots in your camp, Mr Obi. That is the gratitude of the Obidient movement towards a Kalabari man who stood up for an Igbo prisoner.
And I am not alone. Let me put names to it, because you cannot dismiss all of us as agents of the opposition.
Wole Soyinka has said he knows for a fact that you encouraged Obidients to attack him and others with opposing views online before the 2023 election, and that your supporters wear their refusal to accept constructive criticism as a badge of honour. He has said he hopes for the sake of the nation that you do not run again, and when you visited him and called it a reconciliation, he publicly denied that any reconciliation took place.
Abike Dabiri-Erewa, chairman of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, said this April that you raised monsters and that the Obidients will be your downfall if you do not call them to order.
Reno Omokri has said he is a target of sustained online harassment by your supporters, and this is a man who nonetheless put up his own money to hunt down those who threatened your family.
It is not only Yoruba voices, and it is not only your opponents. Chimaroke Nnamani, a serving Igbo senator and former governor of Enugu, has described your supporters as rude and disrespectful. Dave Umahi and Emeka Ihedioha have fallen foul of the same mob. Only yesterday Ugochukwu Afuba, who says openly that you are his preferred candidate, wrote that Obidients throw insults at him while intentionally avoiding the substance of the matter. Even the ADC, when your supporters adopted an “Obi or nothing” line earlier this year, had its publicity secretary Bolaji Abdullahi caution them against inflammatory rhetoric.
A Nobel laureate, a federal commission chairman, a serving Igbo senator, two former Igbo governors, one of your own supporters and a coalition party spokesman. That is not a conspiracy. That is a verdict.
And your response, each time, has been to deflect. When Pastor Adeboye was attacked, your media office blamed a campaign of calumny from opposition ranks and insisted your supporters were not involved. After the Soyinka affair, you told your supporters to bear the attacks on them as sacrifices for a new Nigeria. Not once have you looked your own base in the eye and told them to stop.
I am not writing from the streets. I have a large platform, and I am telling you that your lack of leadership within your own organisation is causing Nigerians a problem the likes of which I have never seen. Not even Tinubu, with all the money of the Nigerian state behind him, commands an organised online mob like this one.
This is not democracy. Democracy is the willingness to be disagreed with. A movement that cannot tolerate dissent before it reaches power will not tolerate it afterwards. If you cannot discipline your supporters today, what should a country of 230 million people expect from you in Aso Rock?
The arithmetic is not complicated. You won a quarter of the vote in 2023 and came third. To win in January you need Yoruba, Northern, Niger Delta and Middle Belt votes, and every one of those voters is watching what happens to people who question you. Your supporters are not winning you converts. They are manufacturing your opponents. Tinubu must be laughing. Atiku must be laughing. Neither of them needs to lift a finger when your own people are doing the work for free.
I have my own quarrel with you, and I will state it. You have never once, to my knowledge, gone after the Chagoury family and the corrupt intimacy between that family and the Tinubu machine. It is the clearest line of attack available to any serious opposition candidate in Nigeria, and you have left it untouched. But even that is secondary, because a candidate whose movement drives away every ally he will ever need does not get the chance to prosecute anyone.
So here is my position. I cannot support you unless you publicly and unambiguously distance yourself from the people conducting this campaign of intimidation in your name. Not another media office statement blaming the opposition. A direct, personal instruction that this stops, backed by consequences for those who continue.
The behaviour of your base is a greater danger to your candidacy than anyone threatening your life. Assassins you can guard against. This you cannot, unless you choose to.
Shut it down now, Mr Obi. Show the Nigerian people who you really are, or go your way. We do not need another four years of trouble.
Kio Amachree
Founder and President, Worldview International
Stockholm
