UPDATED: Obi Breaks Down In Tears Over Jobless Female Graduate Who Couldn’t Afford N75,000 Oven For Baking

The Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, wept on Thursday while lamenting the country’s state of affairs during his first briefing after the 2023 presidential election.

The LP candidate was narrating the story of a jobless female Nigerian graduate who couldn’t secure a job or purchase a N7 5,000 oven to start a baking business when he became teary.

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“Whenever I meet a young person, I want to know what that young person does. So, you see me every day talking to young people. Just this morning, I went somewhere and a young lady was to boil water for me to make tea and I wanted to do it myself but she said she would do it but I insisted to do it.

“She said to me that she was worried that I lost the election. I asked for her name and where’s from and she said Nasarawa State. Asked where she schooled and she said Nasarawa State University. I asked what she does and she said she had no job (even though) she graduated since 2018.

“I then asked what she was trying to do and she told me she was learning how to do baking. I asked why are you not baking instead of being here to do this and she said she doesn’t have N75,000 to buy an oven,” Obi narrated while breaking into tears, adding “that’s what we get in Nigeria”

The LP candidate was responding to a question on his message to youths allegedly destroying their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) as evidence that they have lost confidence in the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct free and fair elections in the future.

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INEC had declared that Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) polled a total of 8,794,726 to emerge president-elect ahead of his closest contenders, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who got 6,984,520, and Obi of the Labour Party who secured 6,101,533 votes.

The outcome of the election was rejected by several political parties and described as flawed by local and international election monitoring groups.

But Obi assured the youths that, “I am still going to go round appealing to the youths. This is a very long journey and they have to know that I am committed to going on this journey with them. It is not going to be a one-day journey. No matter how long the night is, there would be day and I want to show that there would be day.

“We have to go through darkness and I want o through this darkness with them because I know we are not going to ask these people to leave easily. That’s why they have structures of criminality (and) that structure of criminality cannot go overnight, that structure of destruction cannot go overnight and that structure that created 33 million people living in multi-dimensional poverty can’t go overnight. The structure that has created 95 million living in absolute poverty can’t go overnight. A structure that created over 20 million out-of-school children can’t go out overnight.

“All we need to show is commitment (and) resilience (by) using all the resources we can, all our energy and everything. All I assure them is that I will be at the forefront and we would work through this darkness until daybreak,” he said.

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