Soludo’s triumph, Obi’s humiliation

As this column predicted before the November 8 , 2025 governorship election, Chukwuma Soludo , an economics professor, won with a healthy margin . He did better than that, he won with a landslide – all the local governments and nearly all the wards . The performance was so commanding and clearly so one sided that it left no one in doubt who was the winner and who were the losers. The media looked out for how both the Labour Party (LP), often associated with former Anambra governor Peter Obi, and the African Democratic congress (ADC), now intextricably linked with former vice president Atiku Abubakar, would perform. Both did very poorly, the LP more shockingly so. The ADC, which took only 8,208 votes out of 595,298 votes cast, was a non-starter, and is likely to remain a non-starter in every election nationally henceforth. But Mr Obi, down to his polling unit which his candidate lost to All Progressives Congress (APC), proved surrealistically inexistent. The LP candidate, George Moghalu, secured a meager 10,576 votes .

Overall, Prof. Soludo took 422,664 or 71 percent of the votes, a ringing endorsment of his style, capacity, and campaign . He and many of his supporters intercept the unalloyed endorsment as also a total repudiation of Mr Obi, the Teflon politician and former LP Presidential candidate. With coruscating with the victorious governor dismissed Mr Obi’s politics, adding that even though LP leader was not on the ballot, he lost his polling unit in Agulu Ward 11. Hundreds of kilometers away in lagos , some busybody APC politicians sarcastically couselled Mr Obi to abjure his presidential ambition and go home and rest because his time was over and had lost his so called Midas touch. Mr OBI may have become irrelevant in Anambra for obvious reasons , but nationally , especially as he embarks on cobbling together a sizable political platform on which to run for president, his dismissal may be premature. Those who support him are not discerning or discriminating. They love him, down to his flaws which they fine masochistically endearing . Should he eventually get a platform on which to run for office, no matter how flimsy or tenuous it is, they will flock to his side and give his campaign fresh . He will of course not win, and indeed cannot conceivably win, but his obsession has never been about winning. To him, politics is a insecrutable game, and only he can disentangle it .