When some Yoruba voices dismiss Igbo support for Mr. Peter Obi as “ethnic bigotry,” it borders on the exceedingly ridiculous. The charge collapses under the weight of history, logic, and elementary political arithmetic.
The question is then forced: Where were these self-appointed custodians of nationalism when Professor Humphrey Nwosu, an Igbo man, staked his life to conduct Nigeria’s most transparent election in 1993? Where were they when, with a gun to his commission’s temple, he insisted on continuing to announce results that showed Chief MKO Abiola winning? By their current logic, Professor Nwosu must have been an “ethnic bigot.” So too must the millions of Easterners who gave Abiola his mandate.
For clarity: Abiola ran with a Northern Muslim, Baba Gana Kingibe. His sole opponent, Alhaji Bashir Tofa, chose an Igbo man, Dr. Sylvester Ugoh, as running mate. Yet Ndi Igbo ignored “their own” and voted the man they judged most competent. That is not bigotry. That is republican virtue.
Let us not exhume the entire ledger of the Igbo voting culture, but the pattern is consistent. This is a people who, left to their own judgment, vote best candidate on the ballot. The numbers are public record. In 2003, the Southeast gave Obasanjo 65%, Ojukwu 28%, and Buhari 7% despite Buhari running with an Igbo vice presidential candidate. In 2007, they gave Umaru Musa Yar’Adua 97% and Buhari 3%, again when Buhari had an Igbo running mate. In 2011, Goodluck Jonathan received 98% in the Southeast while Buhari took 2%. Jonathan again took 93% in 2015, Atiku Abubakar 89% in 2019. The only two presidential candidates to lose the Southeast since 1999 were Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And judging by the economic indices, security statistics, and social disintegration under both presidencies, who would fault the instincts of the Igbo voter?
Against those two, Ndi Igbo voted for Atiku Abubakar in 2019. Only in 2023 did they vote overwhelmingly for their own, Mr. Peter Obi. To lift that single data point and call it “tribalism” is to confess a poverty of analysis. If voting your son is bigotry, then every region in Nigeria stands indicted. But we know it is not. We know that in a multi-ethnic republic, the right to prefer competence, even when it wears your face, is the beginning of citizenship, not its betrayal.
These mischievous ethnic baiters now brand anyone with an Igbo name who writes positively about PO a bigot. The slur is designed to silence, not to debate. It is the last refuge of those who cannot contest Obi’s record in Anambra, his fiscal discipline, his refusal to borrow for consumption, or his thesis that production, not sharing, must anchor Nigeria’s economy.
Now let us deepen the conversation and test the bigotry hypothesis against non-Igbo witnesses.
Nigeria has two living former presidents. Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba man. Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijaw man. Both have publicly supported Peter Obi’s presidential ambition. Neither is Igbo. Neither owes the East any filial debt. Their endorsement flows from a calculus of competence and character in a nation hemorrhaging both.
Beyond them stood the late Pa Ayo Adebanjo, erstwhile leader of Afenifere, the Yoruba sociopolitical conscience. May his patriotic soul continue to find peace. Pa Adebanjo did not merely endorse Obi in 2023. He campaigned vigorously, begging Nigerians to elect Obi so that he might witness, in his lifetime, a presidency defined by prudence, justice, and competence. Millions heeded that elder’s voice. But Professor Mahmood Yakubu and INEC denied the sage his last civic wish. History is unforgiving to those who thwart the will of a people at their most hopeful.
Then consider Dele Farotimi, one of Nigeria’s most erudite public intellectuals, a Yoruba man, a lawyer, an activist whose pen has spared no corrupt edifice. Is his uncompromising support for Obi since 2022 also “Igbo bigotry”? Is Aisha Yesufu, a patriot from Edo, bigoted? Is Datti Baba-Ahmed, a Fulani academic from Zaria who chose to be Obi’s running mate, a tribalist?
And most recently, the Kwankwasiyya Movement that chants Obi/Kwankwaso in millions draws its strength from Kano and the Northwest, not the Southeast. The movement’s spokesperson himself declared that only Peter Obi and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso enjoy “organic followers” rooted in personal conviction. That is a Kano voice, a Northern voice, placing Obi alongside their own principal as the two leaders Nigerians follow without inducement.
Add also the National Coordinator of the Obidient Movement Worldwide, Dr. Yunusa Tanko. He describes himself as “a Hausa man supporting an Igbo man,” saying his loyalty to Peter Obi stems from conviction, not ambition. Is Dr. Tanko, from Kano State, now to be called an ethnic bigot for backing competence?
The philosophical error here is category confusion. Aristotle warned us against it. To support a man because he is yours, irrespective of capacity, is clannishness. To support a man because he is capable, even if he is yours, is citizenship. The first is a retreat into the tribe. The second is the tribe rising to the republic.
What Ndi Igbo are accused of is not bigotry, but discernment. In a marketplace of failed options, they queued behind the candidate who spoke of turning Nigeria from consumption to production, who showed receipts in governance, who refused to weaponize poverty for politics. That is not ethnic sentiment. That is enlightened self-interest, which Adam Smith himself understood as the engine of commonwealth.
The true bigot is the man who sees a nation of 250 million drowning and still asks, “What tribe is the lifeguard?” The true patriot is the man who says, “If he can swim, let him save us.”
Peter Obi’s appeal transcends his ethnicity because Nigeria’s decay transcends ethnicity. Hunger has no tribe. Insecurity does not ask for your state of origin before it kills. The naira’s collapse is not a regional policy. Therefore, the search for remedy cannot be regional.
To call Igbo support for Obi “bigotry” is to invert morality. It is to punish a people for having a memory of better governance and the courage to demand it again. It is to insist that, for the sake of false balance, they must sometimes choose incompetence.
A republic cannot be built on such ethical cowardice.
Ndi Igbo did not invent Peter Obi. Nigeria’s failure did. And until Nigeria produces alternatives of equal competence, equal frugality, and equal moral force, the moral burden is not on those who support him. It is on those who, having seen the darkness, still curse men for lighting a candle, simply because of the hand that holds it.
By Tai Emeka Obasi
Obasi writes from New York.
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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