Aisha Yesufu, a key member of the Labour Party’s 2023 presidential campaign, has stated that Peter Obi, the party’s candidate in the recent general election, was not the founder of the Obidient movement.
According to Yesufu, the Obidient movement emerged as a result of the fallout from the EndSARS protests and the subsequent killings. She emphasized that the movement was driven by the collective anger of Nigerian youths, and Peter Obi merely became a beneficiary of this sentiment.
In a post on X, Yesufu wrote: “Nobody created the Obidient movement. After the #EndSARS killing by the APC government, many became interested in politics, having been mocked and told to vote for those who killed the protesters. There was a collective anger to vote out APC. Peter Obi was a beneficiary of that collective anger of the people.
“When he announced his presidential run, many who shared that collective anger supported him, and from there, the name was coined to fit the candidate, following the Nigerian habit of naming supporters after the person they support. The movement was already in place before the name OBIdient was coined.”
