Vital Obiter, from the Diary of a Roving Public Interest Counsel

Peter Obi granted one interview on Channels, and at once the knives were out, inaccuracy, inaccuracy, roast him alive.

Let me pause the excitement with a single question.

Since when did an interview win or lose an election in Nigeria?

Because if we are honest, this fury is not really about Obi. He is only today’s occasion. The thing on display is older and more dangerous than any one candidate, and it belongs to all of us.

It is our hypocrisy.

Consider the same voices now demanding flawless precision from a man in a live interview. Were these not, in another season, the very people who assured us, during the “balablu” moment that we were not searching for a president perfect in speech?

So which standard is it? Perfection when it wounds the one we oppose, and grace when it shields the one we favour?

That is not analysis. That is a double standard wearing the costume of principle.

And here is the fact that should end the conversation. We are litigating an interview in a country whose last two presidents would not even show up to be questioned at all.

In 2019, President Buhari stayed away from the national presidential debate. In 2022, ahead of the 2023 election, Bola Tinubu skipped the presidential town hall entirely, sent no representative, and his camp announced he might attend no debate at all, having already passed on the platforms of the Bar and others.

Peter Obi attended that debate. He stood to be questioned.

Sit with the irony. The man we now roast for granting an interview is the same man who showed up to face scrutiny, while the one who would not face it at all ascended through a process whose credibility was, and remains, gravely contested.

Let me be plain about what I am not saying.

I am not defending mediocrity. I am not asking that we lower the bar or excuse our leaders from the duty to speak with competence and truth. A gaffe, where one is truly established, is fair to note.

I am saying something narrower and harder to hear.

In the arduous business of nation-building, hypocrisy, with its twin, the double standard, and their Siamese sibling, blind prejudice is a cancer. It flatters us with the feeling of winning an argument while it quietly rots the ground beneath the argument.

It moves us nowhere.

And nowhere is precisely where a nation at this bend in its journey cannot afford to arrive.

Judge every candidate. Judge them hard. But judge them all by one ruler, or admit the ruler was never the point.

But what do I know?

I am only a roving counsel.

This has been my Vital Obiter.