By Hafiz Garba PhD,
Secretary General,
Northern Youth Assembly,
(Majalisar Matasan Arewa)
The IPOB Question That Will Not Go Away: Why Peter Obi’s Unretracted Defence of a Proscribed Terrorist Organisation Remains His Most Dangerous Liability in the 2027 Northern Campaign
In Nigerian politics, the most dangerous statements a presidential candidate can make are not the ones that generate immediate controversy, attract swift condemnation, and are quickly walked back through press releases and media appearances. Those statements are managed, contextualised, and eventually absorbed into the permanent background noise of the political cycle. The most dangerous statements are the ones that are never retracted, never formally revisited, and never replaced by a position that more accurately reflects the gravity of what was originally said. They are the statements that sit quietly in the public record, accumulating relevance with every passing month, waiting for the moment when the political stakes are highest to reveal themselves as the most consequential and most damaging liabilities in a candidate’s entire profile. For Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate of 2023 and now the presidential flagbearer of the Nigeria Democratic Congress for 2027, that statement was made on Channels Television on October 1, 2017, and it has never, in the nine years since it was first uttered, been retracted, corrected, or replaced by anything that could be reasonably interpreted as a changed position.
The statement is on record, verified by multiple credible outlets including Vanguard, Legit.ng, Guardian Nigeria, and Channels Television itself. Speaking on the programme Politics Today, Peter Obi said, in his own words: “The only thing I disagree with is naming IPOB terrorist. They are not terrorists. I stay in Onitsha, and I can tell you that they are people I pass on the road every day. I meet and live with them. In fact, I usually see people gathering, and I have never had the sense of threat or molestation from them, even when they gather.” The context of the statement was the Buhari administration’s September 2017 proscription of the Indigenous People of Biafra as a terrorist organisation, a designation that the Federal High Court of Nigeria had formally endorsed, that the United Kingdom government had accepted by May 2022 and used as the basis for excluding IPOB members from its asylum programme, and that successive Nigerian security and intelligence assessments had supported on the basis of documented violent attacks, enforced sit-at-home orders, and killings attributed to the group and its Eastern Security Network affiliate across the South-East of Nigeria.
The political significance of the statement did not end in 2017. It resurfaced with devastating effect ahead of the 2023 presidential election, generating widespread outrage across Northern Nigeria and deepening the already substantial trust deficit that Obi faced in a region whose communities had borne disproportionate suffering from organised political violence and whose voters demanded, as the absolute minimum threshold of political credibility, that any candidate seeking their support be willing to call those who threatened their lives and communities by the legally designated names that the Nigerian state had given them. The contrast that northern commentators, political analysts, and ordinary voters repeatedly drew was stark and inescapable: northern political leaders had consistently and without hesitation called Boko Haram and bandits terrorists, accepting the moral and political responsibility of that designation regardless of its domestic political cost. Peter Obi had not extended the same moral clarity to IPOB, and the question of why he had not was one that his campaign never satisfactorily answered.
When the pressure to address his IPOB position finally became politically unsustainable in July 2023, Obi issued a statement on insecurity in Nigeria that his critics rightly identified as a masterclass in strategic evasion. The statement emphasised killings in the North Central zone while describing the criminal activities of IPOB in the South-East as merely a disruption of business and social activities, a characterisation that the families of security personnel killed by the group, the communities subjected to economic strangulation through enforced sit-at-home orders, and the ordinary South-Eastern residents who had been living under a climate of fear and intimidation for years would have found not merely inadequate but deeply insulting. The statement referred to sit-at-home orders as purported reports, a qualifier that effectively called into question the documented experiences of millions of people, and it conspicuously declined to call for the investigation of IPOB or the arrest of those responsible for the violence attributed to the group. It was not a retraction of his 2017 position. It was a careful and deliberately constructed restatement of it in language that was marginally more diplomatic but substantively identical.
The political context of 2027 makes this unresolved liability significantly more dangerous for Obi’s northern ambitions than it was in 2023. In the intervening years, the humanitarian and security consequences of IPOB’s activities in the South-East have accumulated to a point where the group’s designation as a terrorist organisation is no longer merely a legal technicality or a political contestation but a lived reality for millions of Nigerians across multiple regions. The sit-at-home orders, backed by violence and intimidation, have cost the South-Eastern economy hundreds of billions of naira and disrupted the education, healthcare, and daily economic activity of communities that IPOB claims to represent but demonstrably harms. The Eastern Security Network’s documented attacks on security forces and civilian infrastructure have produced a body count and a pattern of organised violence that any serious presidential candidate is obligated to address with the moral clarity and the institutional seriousness that the scale of the harm demands.
Peter Obi has not provided that clarity. His campaign for 2027 has focused on economic management, governance reform, power sector development, and the strategic deployment of Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso as his running mate in a bid to address the northloded credibility deficit that his 2023 campaign exposed with devastating electoral clarity. Those are legitimate and important dimensions of a presidential campaign. But they do not substitute for the fundamental question that northern voters, whose communities have consistently been on the receiving end of organised political violence and whose tolerance for presidential candidates with ambiguous positions on terrorist organisations is, for entirely understandable reasons, essentially zero, will ask before casting their votes in 2027: does Peter Obi consider IPOB a terrorist organisation, yes or no? Until he answers that question with the directness, the specificity, and the moral clarity that the question demands, every rally he holds in the North, every promise he makes to northern communities, and every calculation his campaign makes about the Kwankwaso running-mate’s ability to deliver northern votes will be shadowed by the nine-year-old statement that sits in the public record, waiting.
The North does not forget statements about terrorism easily. It cannot afford to. It has paid too high a price in lives, in livelihoods, and in the accumulated trauma of communities that have lived under the shadow of organised violence for too long to extend the benefit of the doubt to a presidential candidate whose most clearly stated position on a proscribed terrorist organisation has never, in nine years of opportunity, been corrected, retracted, or replaced by anything approaching the moral seriousness that the security realities of northern Nigeria demand. Peter Obi’s IPOB problem is not a campaign management challenge. It is a character and credibility question. And in the North, where the cost of ambiguity on terrorism has been measured in blood, it may ultimately prove to be the question that his 2027 presidential ambition cannot survive
Hafiz Garba PhD,
Secretary General,
Northern Youth Assembly,
(Majalisar Matasan Arewa)
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