Winning Without Losing Nigeria.
A recent online intervention by Geh-Geh (who self-styles as the greatest financial adviser Nigeria ever had) and one other young man, featuring reflections on Peter Obi’s supporters, has revived an old but urgent question in Nigerian politics: How does one truly win elections in Nigeria? Closely aligned with this conversation is Ivor Ekpe's broader argument, which appears to lean toward a philosophy of “winning by any means necessary.” While often defended as political realism, this outlook is not merely flawed, it is dangerous.
It mistakes brute force for political intelligence and confuses electoral success with democratic legitimacy. And, more serriously, risks normalising the very dysfunction that continues to hold Nigeria hostage.
At its core, democracy is not simply about producing winners. It is about how winners emerge. It rests on freely expressed choice, ballots cast without fear, and outcomes accepted without coercion. When votes are manipulated, polling units militarised, citizens intimidated, and violence becomes routine, what results is not democracy. It is organised coercion.
No amount of so-called realism can dignify that.
In the Geh-Geh video and similar commentaries, supporters of Peter Obi are often reduced to a crude binary: “academic elitists” on one side and “roaming herds” on the other, with the latter portrayed as the authentic engine of political change. This framing is misleading and downright unfortunate, to say the least.
Nigeria’s electorate is not a caricature. It consists of market traders and lecturers, artisans and lawyers, students and civil servants, rural farmers and urban professionals. It is a mosaic of experiences, interests, and aspirations. No single group holds a monopoly on political wisdom.
To suggest that political intelligence resides only in desperation or street-level anger is to romanticise poverty and weaponise frustration. The young man, and many others like him, in despair, sometimes self-styled as Nigeria’s greatest adviser, whom commentators celebrate as a symbol of “real politics” deserves empathy, opportunity, and inclusion. He does not deserve to be instrumentalised for electoral violence.
The most troubling element of the “win-at-all-costs” philosophy is its moral emptiness.
That logic has already devastated Nigeria. It has produced ballot snatching, mutilated ballots, armed thugs at polling units, vote buying, judicial manipulation, post-election violence, and deepening ethnic and religious mistrust. Each stolen election becomes a precedent for greater theft. Each act of intimidation invites more brutality next time.
Eventually, politics becomes war by other means. No society survives that trajectory.
Support for Peter Obi, and similar reform-minded movements, has largely been driven by a desire to break this cycle. His appeal rests on the belief that governance should be accountable, elections credible, and power earned rather than seized. It reflects a longing for normalcy in a system long deformed by impunity.
To argue, therefore, that such movements must imitate the very methods they seek to dismantle is to hollow them out from within. You cannot defeat political decay by reproducing it.
Some critics suggest that “intellectual” or “middle-class” supporters lack practical strategy. This is an unfair generalisation. Serious electoral strategy exists outside violence and manipulation. It includes grassroots party building, voter registration drives, polling unit mobilisation, agent training, legal preparedness, parallel vote tabulation, civic education, and coalition-building.
These are the tools through which democracies consolidate power lawfully. They are slow and can be very tedious, and require patience and discipline. But they endure.
Thuggery is faster. It is also terminal.
The Nigerian voter is not a pawn. He or she is neither a weapon nor a disposable tool. Every citizen, whether comfortable or struggling, possesses equal political worth.
When people queue for hours under the sun, despite insecurity and hardship, they are making a moral statement; my voice matters. Any political philosophy that tramples that voice in the name of “victory” is anti-democratic, however “pragmatic” it pretends to be.
Anger is understandable. Frustration is justified. Despair is real.
But democracy exists precisely to channel these emotions into peaceful change. When politics abandons principle, it becomes predation, and when passion abandons ethics, it becomes mob rule.
Nigeria has tasted enough of that.
The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether Peter Obi, or any candidate, can win. The real question is whether Nigeria can win. Can it build a system where votes count, citizens are safe, power alternates peacefully, and leaders are accountable?
If the price of victory is intimidation, bloodshed, and moral collapse, then the nation has already lost, even if someone is sworn in.
It is true that Nigerian politics demands realism, but realism without ethics is cynicism. Strategy without democracy is tyranny; victory without legitimacy is failure.
The task before Nigerians is not to perfect electoral brutality, it is to perfect electoral integrity.
Anything less is surrender.
