Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), has been urged by President Bola Tinubu’s Special Advisor on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, to give up hope that he will win the 2023 election after losing the elections.
Bayo Onanuga has said Peter Obi should stop living in denial, insisting that the former Anambra State governor came a distant third in the 2023 presidential election.
He was reacting to Obi’s recent television interview in which the Labour Party’s 2023 candidate claimed he had actually won the election but was rigged out.
In a signed statement, Onanuga described the interview as a public relations disaster for Obi.
He said two issues in particular stood out to him. First, when the interviewer questioned Obi over his political nomadism, Onanuga said Obi appeared dismissive of the question, likening his political journey to that of President Bola Tinubu.
Onanuga rejected the comparison, arguing that Tinubu, unlike Obi, has remained consistently within the progressive political fold since joining party politics in 1991/92, recalling that Tinubu began his political career with the Social Democratic Party, on whose platform he won a Senate seat with the highest number of votes recorded by any candidate in the country at the time.
On the second point, Onanuga said the interviewer had given Obi a clear opportunity to address the outcome of the 2023 election, but argued that Obi ultimately lost that election despite performing creditably as a politician without a formal structure in the states, relying instead on vocal support from followers on social media.
He expressed surprise that more than three years after the Supreme Court dismissed Obi’s petition, the former governor remains unwilling to accept the loss, continuing instead to hold on to the belief that he won, a sentiment Onanuga said Obi’s supporters online continue to echo.
He urged Obi to accept the reality of his defeat and stop insisting on a victory he said never happened.
