Soludo’s Silence Vs Obi’s Optics: The 2022 Meeting That Exposed The Propaganda

If there is anything I know and pray to covet from Soludo, it is his ability to be fair-minded and his courage to state his views — whether they resonate as compliant or dissenting is totally the call of critics and analysts. Nwa Mgbafor cares less.

In the build-up to the 2023 general elections, long before Soludo’s now historic treatise, “History Beckons, and I Will Not Be Silent”, various aspirants — some of whom later became candidates of various parties — visited Gov. Soludo at the old, unbefitting Governor’s Lodge. Peter Obi was one of them.

On the day Peter visited, the atmosphere was warm. The compulsive liar, Valentine Obienyem, came with him alongside a few others. After the usual formal open-house protocol, both Soludo and Peter went into a closed-door session that lasted a little over 45 minutes. While we expected brotherly compromise, Peter and his team came for deceitful optics, subterfuge, and a well-oiled propaganda machinery waiting to announce screamers — of course they did.

After the meeting, Peter’s convoy had barely reached Amawbia Roundabout when the headlines came blazing: “Soludo is now Obidient.” Wow. Just wow. We were first hesitant to issue a counter, but knowing Valentine Obienyem for who he is — a serial liar — we threw a few soft rebuttals. Truth is, Soludo held all they discussed to his chest until the video surfaced a few days later from Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital. Peter, who had come to Anambra State a few days earlier to request a “winner takes all,” was in Rivers State asking his supporters to support Wike, trading off all the candidates of the now defunct Labour Party in exchange for Wike’s support of his dead-on-arrival presidential ambition.

In an election that has bottom-to-top consequence, you asked for a “level playing ground” in Anambra and went to Rivers State to reach a compromise that never happened. In this story, two things are apparent. First, it’s either Soludo was obviously caught with the milk of brotherly kindness or he was indeed not the kind of politician deserving of a space in Nigeria’s political circle. I will take the former.

Let me stop here and go to Church… Happy Sunday!