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A former Minister of Information and National Orientation, Labaran Maku, has explained how the Labour Party Presidential candidate and his supporters otherwise referred to as 'Obidients,' sprung a surprise on the two opposition parties in the just-concluded presidential election.
The Minister, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain in Nasarawa State, said many people in his party and also in the All Progressives Congress (APC) underestimated Obi and his supporters because they were convinced he lacked political structure.
The former Minister made this known while responding to questions on the outcome of the 2023 general elections on a Channels Television programme, 'Sunrise Daily' on Tuesday, March 28, 2023.
Recall the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on March 1, 2023, announced the APC candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, as the president-elect having polled a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Obi who finished second and third respectively.
Despite his third-place finish, the Labour Party candidate polled 6,101,533 votes, a feat Maku believed proved that “the youths were not joking.”
Maku's words: “What happened in the presidential election as you could see was that there was this wave of young people, the ‘Obidients’ that we all took for granted and we were thinking Peter Obi was a joke. Where would he go?
“So, both PDP and the APC, we were thinking ‘This man does not have structure. He will not be able to do so much’.
“But the young people seized the initiative from the politicians. And for the first time – what we saw in Nasarawa, Edo, several other places, and in Delta State where the PDP vice presidential candidate comes from – we saw that young people were serious about what they were doing and they took advantage of social media to project a programme which has shaken the nation.”