Nearly 20 years ago, precisely in November 2004, I had rented my first apartment as a young adult and went to a swanky supermarket in my neighbourhood in Lagos to buy the first item of home appliance that my little home needed at the time – a television set. The TV, though still the tube kind, had a flat screen. The colour was superb and friends and neighbours praise my eye for quality stuff.

Because I wanted every visitor to know that I got me a super brand of television set, I displayed the carton in one vantage corner of my small sitting room. That brand was the reigning one, or so I was thinking until an eagle-eyed visitor arrived one day and on a cursory look at the carton, said rather cynically to me, “Bro IK, this your TV na fake sef.”

I almost threw him out of my apartment. How could he have the effrontery to describe it beautiful Samsung TV as FAKE? I was about to have a go at him when, on a close look, I realised that what I had, for nearly 60 days, thought was a Samsung brand of television was actually a knockoff, with the name of Sansung!

The logo design, complete with the orbit-like blue sphere was there. But the lettering had an N where the M in Samsung was supposed to be!

I have been had, I told myself and I never really enjoyed my TV until a couple of years later, when I replaced it with an LG LCD television.

This summarises the pathetic story of the group of irreverent clowns in Enugu parading themselves as “Obedients” in Enugu, and whose mercantilist mentality has been on display around the social media as their claims of having endorsed the Governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Barr Peter Mbah are being traded like whiskey during the bootleg period.

The people who have ruined our state are putting up a disconcertingly desperate fight, even as the curtains are being pulled on their time by the combined energy of the people. Anyone who thinks they would yield easily needs to read the history of rogue empires all over the world. In many of the cases, their determination to continue to suppress and remain in power sometimes threatens to overwhelm the will of the people to liberate.

As we wound down our campaign for who takes over as Enugu governor, I had planned a different theme for the article I am writing right now. The idea was to close the campaign, Thursday night with an article appealing to our people to vote for the Obidient candidate in Enugu, and that is Chijioke Jonathan Edeoga of the Labour Party. Of course, there can only be only one Obidient governorship candidate, and even those passing themselves off as Obidients know they are mere pretenders, even though they do not know the damage they are doing to their campaign by claiming who they are not.

As the chances of nearly all the parties in the Enugu election continue to diminish with the soaring love the people of Enugu have shown for Chijioke Jonathan Edeoga, the opposition reasoned that the only way to enhance their chances was to noisily appropriate the Obidient title. It is not a proprietary title and, as Peter Obi, the great Nigerian whose surname triggered the movement, said recently, everyone is welcome to the family. But the truth is that while the space is large enough for every Nigerian who wants a new country for us and our future generations, there are some people who certainly do not have to, in the interest of their own political career, adopt a name that is so ill-fitting.

And perhaps that is why even those who recently claimed that they have endorsed the candidature of PDP’s Peter Mbah could not even get their spelling right. Those of us in the movement call ourselves, the OBIdients. But just like all impostors and charlatans, the guys, perhaps in their hurry to make hay off the PDP money machine, cast their spelling wrongly, saying they are the OBEDIENTS.

Could be it was not even a mistake, and just as my knock-off Sansung television, the idea may have been to hoodwink unsuspecting and ever-trusting Obidients into believing that the movement has taken a new turn.

We haven’t. We wouldn’t. We remain the true change agents – the Obidients.

As the message of falsehood spread by the delusional Obedients travelled around social media, I was brought under intense pressure to muster containment responses. Hard as I tried to convince members of my team that the attempt to usurp the Obidient identity was bound to fail PDP, most of my people did not understand, largely because they mistook media content proliferation for believability and conversion. I my book, Pitch: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths, I did discuss this issue in a chapter titled, “Share of Mind is not Share of Market.” This could never be truer. I knew that while PDP was busy populating the media space with their Obedient adherence, somewhere in the minds of the people, what would keep registering must be Chijioke Edeoga, for the simple reason that Obidient is a Labour thing and no matter how much anyone whisks it, the interpretation in consumers’ minds will almost always echo and evoke the Labour Party imagery.

It is simple psychology, but not as simple as people with little marketing commonsense would decipher.

I fully understand the confusion of our OBEDIENT brothers. Again, in using my Sansung television as an example, no one ever clones a brand that is struggling in the market. The target is usually the successful ones, and as a popular Igbo saying goes, only a fruit-bearing three gets hauled with sticks and pebbles. But the task before the tree is to continue to bear fruits, and good fruits for that matter.

Since the whistle was blown for the 2023 elections nearly a year ago, in 2022, Edeoga has had all sorts of debilitating and deadly pebbles thrown at him. Those who do not wish to eat of his fruits have the intention of ensuring that they do not ripen. From being frustrated and milked dry by Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, who egged him on, and actually even funded a dubious and rogue campaign he knew he would truncate at the last minute, to former Governor Chimaroke Nnamani, who attacked him in the open, calling him names in what is now a proven futile effort to cow him, Edeoga has had more than his share of electoral stones hauled at his ripening fruits.

But in all of them, he has been able to maintain a disarmingly rare equanimity that has endeared him to the people as the days passed. Minions and so-called media experts in the opposition have given more time and attention to efforts to “write Edeoga down” and out of the race. The recent attempts included doctoring a video recorded during a radio programme to give the impression that the Labour party Governorship candidate was disparaging the icon and totem of the new Nigeria liberation struggle, Peter Obi. While the false narratives on this vanquished theme travelled around the internet, especially on WhatsApp, the peddlers reclined in glee, believing they were scoring high-value points. But the truth is that those who were helping spread the information were not Edeoga traducers, but actually Obidients (not Obedients) who were seeking confirmation and validation. And once this is done, their faith and love for the Edeoga project get even more reinforced. And so, just as it happened in the Bible during the trying period of the Israelites in Egypt, the more he was oppressed, the more the love for him increased and multiplied and spread abroad.

The people who have ruined our stake are putting up a disconcertingly desperate fight, even as the curtains are being pulled on their time by the combined energy of the people. Anyone who thinks they would yield easily needs to read the history of rogue empires all over the world. In many of the cases, their determination to continue to suppress and remain in power sometimes threatens to overwhelm the will of the people to liberate.

But the people are determined now more than ever to be free, and for sure, they will not yield to any of the later-day persuasions coming in the forms of gifts and promises. The people now know that the termites that eat them cannot change simply because it needs to build a new nest. It was William Shakespeare who wrote in one of his plays, Henry IV, and James Hadley Chase re-echoed it in his eponymous novel, Trusted like the Fox, that, “Treason is but trusted like the fox; who, ne’er so tame, so cherished, and lock’d up, will have a wild trick of his ancestors.”

Treason is Shakespeare’s word for treachery, betrayal and all related words. There is no way those who are known to have oppressed us in the past, looted our commonwealth and occasioned historically dislocating economic and social regressions in our society would suddenly transmogrify to become our redeemers. Wolves don’t become sheep even if they wear the garb of meekness. It is a part of their repertoire of tricks until they pounce!

As the elections draw close, the people who are pretending to be the now semantically flawed “Obedients” with their mouths, are also stockpiling weapons with their hands, in their soon-to-be-futile determination to steal the election.

But there is no bending the will of highly determined and fiercely motivated people. Our agenda for 2023 is simple – ride the Obidient wagon of freedom to a new country, a new nation, and in the case of Enugu, discard the voracious wolfs that have long preyed on us, on our freedom, on our commonwealth and on our love for one another.

Go, my dear Enugu people!

Go vote them out

The door for our freedom will open on Saturday as we vote Chijioke Edeoga and Labour Party.