Obi’s Endorsement: Icons Do Not Play God, Tinubu Support Group Tells Obasanjo

In reaction to recent endorsement of the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party by Olusegun Obasanjo, a pressure group, The Patriots Roundtable, has told the former President that icons do not play God.

Obasanjo in his new year message endorsed Obi saying that among the three frontline presidential candidates for the February 25 polls, Obi has an edge when one compares their character, antecedent, their understanding, knowledge, discipline, and vitality they can bring to bear.

He also urged Nigerian youths to queue behind the former Anambra State governor to take back their country by voting him into power.

The Patriots Roundtable, a Bola Tinubu support group, in a statement signed by its Director-General, Prince Uthman Shodipe -Dosunmu, said that Obasanjo who was unjustly imprisoned, but by divine providence, was rescued and become a two-term democratic president of Nigeria, is an icon and should maintain his status as an icon.

The group, however, regretted that in Obasanjo’s quest to remain relevant, he always dabbles in politics with his biased partisan intervention in his choice of the Nigerian presidency.

“In the cyclical human journey , in the twists and turns of hope, in the dashes of despair and in the rising and fall of our ambitions, only a very few are privileged to reach an height where they are perched in the pantheon of genuine statesmanship concreteness.

“Here they must now stand above the fray of partisan coveting, the crude schemings of alliance or the overt flourishing in narrow political identification.

“Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the eventual pacifier of the murderous fields of the shattered Biafra after Benjamin Adekunle had triggered the twilight, flung to martial leadership by the hands of fortune, unjustly imprisoned, resurrected again in a democratic presidency in two tenures- he has become an iconic avatar of national emblem and greater possibilities. He should stay there.

“But Balogun of Owu is often restless, hurried by impatience, spurred by a flawed sense of omniscience, woven in the hubris of the gods, ploughing into every fray without temperance.

“He has done it again. His flawed , biased partisan intervention in the choice of the Nigerian presidency betrays a puzzling insistent on self-perpetual relevance. Icons must always hover above the fray in eclipsed neutrality, never stampeding into the conflict in loud, rambunctious noisome intrusion of an un-instructed neophyte,” the group said.

While noting the right of Obasanjo to support any presidential candidate of his choice, The Patriots Roundtable said that there were better ways the former president could have done that.

“Let lesser mortals rush into the huddle with combative ardor, slinging the darts and arrows in feverish pugilism. Not Obasanjo. Surely he has a right to a presidential choice and preference.
“There are better ways. Icons do not thrash in the mud nor do they play God lest they risk the diminution and the ultimate censure of Robert Frost’s Hired Man: the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride . And nothing to look forward to with hope,” the group added