Peter "Sherlock" Obi Solves Nigeria

Peter Obi tries to solve Nigeria. I struggle to find who would be convinced.

This is the third and final part in a series of Substacks looking at the performance of the three presidential candidates at the NESG in 2023. I chose the NESG as a fair platform to judge their ideas on because A) The audience are educated Nigerians asking tough questions on economic policies, and as such there should be no contaminant of mainstream nonsense meant to serve the larger electorate B) Their answers are off the cuff and is the best test of their intellectual mettle.

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When Peter Obi left the PDP to contest on the platform of the Labour Party in 2022, I was certain of two things; He would come third, and would get less than two million votes. In fact, two million was an optimistic figure in my mind, and I never saw him as a serious contender. He, of course, proved me wrong by getting over six million votes.

My shock, however, did little to change my mind about him. Most of his campaign was built on two unsteady sentiments. The first was the apparent betrayal of the South East by the PDP by picking Atiku, and the second was the sentiments against the APC Muslim/Muslim ticket. I didn’t think those sentiments gripped enough of the nation to force a win, and I knew he would only act as a spoiler by splitting the opposition. My prediction on that indeed came to pass, as Tinubu ascended to Abuja with only 36% of the votes, the lowest percentage a winning presidential candidate has ever gotten in Nigeria since 1999.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the prevalent sentiment amongst young educated Nigerians who felt the elections were about intangibles like “corruption” and “integrity”. Many even seriously argued that the man had the best “ideas” to move the country forward. While ideas and such may influence some voters to vote, it is hardly the needle that moves numbers in Nigeria.

Asides from that, I didn’t think the man was any different from the regular Nigerian politician, given his performance in Anambra. But many of my friends disagreed. In fact, they were of the opinion that he was so cerebral that not voting him in would represent a “lost chance” for Nigeria.

I have never been convinced of this, but I am willing to admit that I could be wrong on the matter. That is why I have decided to review his appearance at the NESG in 2023, just like I reviewed that of Tinubu and Atiku. Both of the candidates I previously reviewed were extremely underwhelming in their answers, so I do not think it would be too difficult to outperform them, given that he is younger and seems to have more wits about him.

This is a review of his appearance at the NESG in 2023.

Obi at the NESG

The first question is about priorities. What are the key things citizens should expect to see from a Peter Obi presidency? Particularly, what will he do in the first hundred to two hundred days? Well, Obi’s answer to this is “insecurity”. He says that our enemies are not more formidable — and mentions that he has been to some of the worst hit places in Nigeria. At this point, he segues into some anecdote about how he buried twenty Anambrarians (yes, that is what they are called) who died in Mubi. All of this to say the issue of insecurity would be the first problem to solve.

I am not sure how I feel about the answer. First, I am happy that he seems to appreciate the incredible levels of insecurity in Nigeria, but his answer seems to be a misunderstanding of the question. Are there any details here? Anything he might do that the present Buhari government wasn’t doing? Or will he just “focus harder”?

Thankfully, he later gets into it by saying he is the only presidential candidate who has interviewed all the security chiefs because “I want to see everything from outside so if I know its not possible let me stay back”. The room laughs, and I suppose this means they took it like an actual joke?

First of all, there is no security chief in Nigeria who would grant a presidential candidate an audience to discuss security. In fact, if he meets them informally somewhere, and he brings the matter up, he would be given a stern rebuke, not as a political matter, but as a matter of national security.

A presidential candidate has the same level of security clearance as any random on the road. So anyone discussing any sensitive issue with him would be breaking the law — and I hope he isn’t here boasting about breaking the law? Importantly, they would hardly discuss institutional gripes with him either, given the Nigerian political environment. Even the man himself repeatedly said that people no longer pick his calls or speak to him because he is running to be president — are we then to expect this general disposition would not exist with security chiefs?

Secondly, a serious person doesn’t need to discuss with the Nigerian military to have insight into the security problems we face. There are very many Nigerian-focused OSINT researchers who publish literature on the question yearly. In fact, one would expect a serious candidate to have a working understanding of these, and may expect an excellent one to commission his own private research to have an understanding of the sort of solutions the problem requires.

The Low-Hanging Fruit That Isn’t

But it gets worse. During this period Obi also says he will focus on other “low-hanging fruits” like “ensuring the rule of law” and implementing “law and order”. First of all, if you think “implementing rule of law” in Nigeria is a “low-hanging fruit”, you either do not know what the problem is, or grossly misunderstand the term “low-hanging fruit”.

Let us take the Nigerian police, where most people encounter a “lack of rule of law”, for instance. What is the main problem of the Nigerian police? Why are they consistently corrupt and awful? Does the Nigerian police force have a factory where they create all these insane monstrosities? No, they don’t. It is a human capital problem.

Most police officers regular Nigerians interact with are drawn from a really pitiful pool of some of the least educated and most wretched Nigerians alive. To make things worse, conditions in the police; low pay, horrible benefits, and terrible infrastructure deficit, means that by the time the policeman meets you, he has no incentives to behave like a proper human being. He has gone through years of horrible dehumanization in his personal and professional life. Why wouldn’t he behave like an animal?

We know, from the experience of the previous Inspectors of Police, that even getting ordinary officers to adhere to widely publicised orders is a tall task. The only change can be systemic, for this is a systemic problem, not an issue with each individual officer. Given the depth of this problem, and many other issues with “rule of law” in Nigeria (consider that a July 2024 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report found judges received the largest monetary bribes of all public officials in Nigeria in 2023) do you think an answer like “we will implement rule of law” even comes close to addressing it? Does it show a basic understanding of the problem? Is the assumption here that all other presidents simply refused to implement it? Really? And to call the effort in doing that a “low-hanging fruit” is incredible.

Consumption to Production, or the Import Substitution Ghost

The next thing he says he will focus on is moving Nigeria from “consumption to production”. These seem to be the type of big policy talking points that “educated” people like, but I wonder what it truly means.

I suspect that the overarching sentiment behind that idea, and one that Nigerians have fallen for for eons, is the allure of yet another import substitution scheme. If you aren’t caught up, import substitution is the (thrice cursed) economic idea of industrializing by replacing imported goods with domestic production, using tariffs, quotas, outright bans, subsidized credit, and overvalued exchange rates to shield local producers from foreign competition.

There are many things that have gone wrong in Nigeria since independence, but I believe this cursed strategy is responsible for perhaps half of it. It is the reason for the cement Oligopoly led by Dangote, it is the reason Emefiele ruled like a king over the dollar arbitrage (because the CBN now maintains a list of which importers get Fx at the official rate), it is the reason Nigerian Customs (because the most productive economic activity is lobbying for import licenses and smuggling necessary goods) is a cesspool of corruption.

If this policy goal is another journey on that unfortunate road (one which all Nigerian presidents — yes, even Obasanjo) has traveled, I suspect his fans shouldn’t insult our intelligence by harping on it like some sort of change. In fact, if imports are curbed on the altar of local production, Nigerians can expect even more poverty and economic woes. Of course, many educated Nigerians cheer for this — or perhaps it is just part of a general policy “dumbing down” for the Nigerian socio? Who knows! It is certainly not impressive.

The Right Support

Next, Peter Obi is asked about unemployment. How do you plan to fix youth unemployment when you get to office? Peter Obi answers by repeating his Consumption to Production tagline. He then complains about how states only spend what they get from the center, and complains about government advertising spend.

Then, he says what he will do; actually implement the policies instead of just advertising them. And he cannot do all that without fixing power generation. He argues that he will give “the right support” to power distribution and generation. He says that this will lead to growth of the manufacturing sector, which will also create an “agrarian revolution” that can lead to exports. If we do all this, he says, we will fix unemployment.

This answer only exposes him as someone who hasn’t thought deeply about any of the elements to solving this problem. “Fixing Nigerian power”, for instance, isn’t a question of the right support. It is a question of solving deep political (and perhaps even philosophical) questions on just how much subsidy should the state provide, and what are the tradeoffs for doing that?

Importantly, Nigeria’s journey to energy sufficiency is just beginning, and we are at the foundational stage that requires a lot of systemic thinking on the best way to sustainably grow power generation in a third world country. It is ridiculous for someone who wants to grapple with that foundational problem to reduce it to “providing the right support”. That means nothing.

The Land Up North

The host asks our man what areas of the economy he will be focusing on, and he says he will deal with agriculture, manufacturing, and other areas such as entertainment and tech. He then says the fundamental thing is that Nigeria must feed itself because our biggest physical asset is the uncultivated land in the North.

First of all, this assumption that Nigerian land is especially good for farming is just not true. Most of Nigeria sits on highly weathered tropical soils — Alfisols, Ultisols, Entisols — that are old, leached, low in organic matter, and have poor capacity to retain the nutrients you add to them.

Secondly, this idea of food sufficiency reminds me of Buhari a lot. In 2015, after coming to power, Buhari banned the importation of rice through the land borders, and placed a 70% tariff on rice through the sea borders. The CBN also placed rice on its ban list, and refused to give importers who wanted to import it any dollars. The same hammer was applied to wheat, despite the fact that Nigeria only produces 1-2% of the wheat demand of the country. This was done in a misguided attempt to “protect Nigerian farmers” and improve food sufficiency. Wheat was given the same treatment, and what did that lead to?

Higher food prices across board. Bread and other items made with wheat became more expensive, and rice saw the same effect. These policy decisions were driven by a quest for food sufficiency, and it looks like Peter Obi is also on that road. He may just be passing his point across inelegantly, of course, and may truly mean something else. But I also didn’t become a Nigerian yesterday.

Everyone Is Just Poor, Isn’t It?

Next up, Obi launches into a totally unprompted strange story of how he went to a prison in Niger state to meet bandits who informed him they only killed because they had no jobs. His argument here seems to be that the problem of banditry and insecurity is really a problem of poverty. I totally disagree with anyone who holds this ridiculous view, of course, but it is interesting to see that a man praised for his ideas would have such elementary thinking when analyzing serious sociological problems. What next, assassins are driven to murder because they want to feed their kids? What of cultists and armed robbers? Everyone is just poor, isn’t it?

He adds that Kenya and Ethiopia do not have this problem because they employ more people and pay them much better to work on flower and coffee fields. This, of course, is total nonsense. Kenya and Nigeria have roughly the same share of their workforce in agriculture — about a third apiece — and neither is richer than Nigeria; Ethiopia, where the agricultural share is more than double Nigeria’s, is poorer still.

This claim is basically needless as it doesn’t even prove his point, and even worse, untrue. To make things worse, he says Niger state has fertile land that can be compared to the best in the world. This is blatantly false, and no one who has seriously studied the matter would ever say that. None of Nigeria’s major soil types are rated as highly productive — the most comprehensive national suitability assessment finds only 8% of Nigerian cropland is of very high suitability. That ceiling applies to Niger State as much as anywhere else.

However, Obi builds even more fantasies on this land and says Niger has so much good land that is uncultivated, and even compares the agricultural output of the state to the Netherlands. He says since Niger has land that is just as good as the Netherlands, we should be earning just as much from it. But this is just fantastically unscientific thinking and doesn’t survive contact with reality.

To be clear, the main multiplier of agricultural productivity isn’t the quantity of land, much in the same way the main multiplier of outcomes in a football player isn’t speed. At some level, the impact plateaus, and other factors, such as storage, mechanization, transport systems, logistics, and efficiency become more important. Therefore, arguing that Niger state should have better agricultural output than the Netherlands just because Niger state has more land (most of which isn’t even of fantastic quality) is the same as arguing that Adama Traore should be a better player than Eden Hazard because Traore is faster. It is a really bad idea, and anyone who has spent two weeks farming would know how ridiculous the idea is.

How Do We Get Alternative Funding Models

The host asks Obi how he plans to finance his many plans, as our borrowing is unsustainable. Instead of answering the question, he builds his own strawman by saying borrowing is good actually as everyone borrows. But that wasn’t the question. He then argues that he will borrow more, as borrowing isn’t a problem. His argument, it seems, is that this time he will borrow and use the money well.

He later adds that if he becomes president, he will pass a law that all borrowing must be for investment (and capital projects). The shocking thing is that this law already exists. You can find it in Section 41(1)(a) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007. It is either Obi doesn’t know this, which betrays his deep ignorance on the matter, or is lying about this, which betrays something else. The jury is out, but I don’t think the verdict is great.

To further answer this rather simple question, he says he visited the tomb of Tafawa Balewa. Why? Thank you very much for that question. Because, according to him, Balewa was the first borrower in Nigerian history as he borrowed to finance the Kainji Dam power project. The problem, he argues, is that Nigeria has borrowed enough for 150 Kainji Dams. Where are the Kainji Dams, he asks. I don’t know what to say to this, as I am not a fan of defending stealing politicians. But you can surely see this analysis for what it is, can you not?

He surely sees it too, as he, in the same breath, answers his own question by bringing up subsidy. He argues that yes, we do borrow to pay for subsidy, but subsidy is organized crime that must go from Day 1 (he, of course, has been one of the strongest opponents of the Tinubu administration on the quick removal of subsidy — Nigerian politicians for you).

The Pakistan Arithmetic

He gives the example of Pakistan, which he says consumes 50% less fuel than Nigeria, therefore 50% of subsidy is guaranteed fraud. I generally have no qualms with this number, but it is an exaggeration and inference that doesn’t follow. Nigerians do not just use fuel on their cars — they also use it to fuel generators, and Nigeria has a lot more generator sets than Pakistan. Pakistan’s grid is unreliable but nowhere near as absent as Nigeria’s, and its backup power skews to diesel, gas and increasingly solar. A meaningful chunk of Nigeria’s petrol demand has no Pakistani equivalent at all. So this comparison falls flat on its face, and would get zero marks if it appeared on an exam script.

Questions from the audience

The first question from the crowd is from a non-executive director at the NESG. He says he has read through the man’s manifesto, but wants to know if the man has any quantitative performance indicators Nigerians can use to judge his performance.

Obi completely misunderstands this question, and instead says he was waiting to come and learn from the crowd what his key performance indicators will be. This is extremely embarrassing, as he seems to think quantitative performance indicators are just another economic campaign promise, and not a measure of performance. The crowd laughs. He thinks they are laughing with him. I hope they are laughing at him. He rambles on for a few more minutes and adds some folk stories about his meeting with a former American president. Nobody asked him about this. He then adds this gem of a quote to his monologue:

“I can tell you, when I became president of America (he likely means Anambra, but you never know), half of the things I did, I didn’t know it before I came there”

As you may realize, his monologue has shot past the question he was asked, and now he is talking about something else entirely. He adds that Nigeria doesn’t lack good ideas (very wrong — Nigeria has more than enough bad advice, and it is just our luck that some of these horrible ideas were also matched with similarly incompetent administrators who couldn’t seriously implement them), so his own job is just to implement.

Clearing the Ports With Abacha

His example of this implementing genius is working with Sani Abacha to clear the Apapa port. In fact, he argues that the ports were functioning better under Abacha than they are today. This claim is unfalsifiable, of course, but that is the nature of Nigerian political speech. Given the different false claims Obi has made today, I doubt that this idea that he “cleared the ports” under Abacha has any truth to it. I can certainly find no contemporary evidence that this is true. In fact, Tin-Can is more efficient today than it was at any point during the 1990s.

The long and short of his answer to the question of how he plans to judge his own performance (if you can make any sense of the answer) is that he wants people to tell him what metrics to use. If you ask me what that means, who will I ask?

The Agrarian Revolution That Fell Off a Cliff

The next question is from a farmer who wants to know the specifics of his agrarian revolution plan. For example, the federal government doesn’t own farmland, so what exactly can he possibly do to spur this revolution? This question is sort of redundant, as Obi already tells us he will only know 50% of what to do when he gets into power, but he takes a stab at the question nonetheless.

His answer is that the federal government is supposed to meet monthly with all the governors to “decide economically the way the country will go”, and such decisions are supposed to be binding. First of all, this is just not true. You may not believe it, but Nigerian governors are constitutionally independent from the federal government, which is why Buhari’s big idea concerning ranching failed despite most state governors belonging to his party. It is also why it is so unhelpful for Nigerians to only care about who gets elected in Abuja when their governors have a stronger impact on their quality of life.

Obi, of course, hand waves this problem and argues that these sort of meetings will happen. He gives us a (pretty useless) anecdote of Yaradua calling every governor each month to ask about their states and inquire whether “things are working”. Those calls must have been extremely worthless too, as none of these states could ever be described by any sane person as “working”, but Obi insists this will be his magic bullet.

He says the Niger state government told him it is “easy to give everybody land if there is security” and implies that by solving the problem of insecurity, he will get the complete cooperation of the governors. I pause the video and check the frame properly. This room doesn’t look like a beer parlor; what is happening?

He then goes on a totally unhelpful rant about some government plan that wasn’t implemented properly, and says he will definitely do it differently. How? No one knows. You just have to trust the man.

A Question on Multiple Taxation.

The next question is from a woman who complains about how multiple taxations are killing small and medium businesses. This is an issue Obi has spoken about several times in the past, and one would assume that he would have the best answer to give the woman, especially as she gives him the answer in her question herself. She complains about the number of taxes these businesses are forced to pay, and you would expect that Obi would support a bill to simplify the tax code to eliminate these multiple taxes. In fact, she mentions that the answer she wants to hear is already in his manifesto. It would take some work to give the wrong answer here.

Obi first of all takes us to China and informs us about how these businesses are the engine of China’s growth. Then he tells us about Obasanjo going to the West to ask for debt forgiveness and laughs about how we can no longer ask for that. He then says what he has said all day; we need to support SME’s because nobody cares about them. A huge part of his rant is complaining that banks do not lend to these businesses (which betrays an astonishing lack of understanding why banks do not lend money and makes me wonder what he was doing as a bank chairman — did Fidelity behave any differently when he was chairman?).

Asides from that, we need to get to the crux of the ideology powering this sort of answer in the first place. The Nigerian government has invested billions of naira over decades directly into small businesses in terms of loans and grants. Let us even grant that only 50% of these investments went to legitimate business owners, none of that investment has ever built an enduring, nameable firm at scale. It follows that we may see more returns from investing in the environment and making businesses easier to run, rather than supporting the businesses directly through cash injections as those do not consider efficiency and ability.

Go and Check What I Did

It wasn’t enough that he bungled it, later on in the video he also lied about what he did concerning it. After someone brings up the issue of multiple exchange rates, he decides to tackle the question of multiple taxation instead. And his answer is incredibly dishonest. I was governor of Anambra state, he says, go and check what I did concerning multiple taxation.

But that is an incredible thing to say, since he did nothing that I can find. In fact, the present governor of Anambra, Charles Soludo, is the one tackling the problem now with the “Anambra State Taxes, Levies and Presumptive Tax (Approved List for Collection) Law, 2025” — the single-window, anti-multiple-taxation reform, which he signed into law in December 2025. That reform is happening more than a decade after Obi left. If Obi had legislated it, Soludo wouldn’t be introducing it. More importantly, that legislation itself was an offshoot of Tinubu’s larger tax reforms.

To his credit, he says that he would eliminate the multiple exchange rate window and that “this nonsense cannot continue”. Then he continues on a strange journey of anecdotes that seriously sound like campaign fodder to me. We learn about how much Malaysia exports and how the shoemakers at Aba should be able to compete with them (who wouldn’t love to write the thesis for that!), hear complaints about Nigeria using Air Ethiopia which is bad because “Nigeria is at the center” (we are not), and some chest beating about having the best WAEC results in the country in 2014.

Peter “Sherlock” Obi Declares War on Power

On the question of oil and gas, Obi says he cannot tell us what he will do in 100 days, but he will declare “war” on power. Why? Because South Africa, that has more power than Nigeria, declared a state of emergency on it as well. The audience replies “hmm” and I almost wonder if I had been transported to the LOGIC church and the pastor has just dropped some rhema.

Afterwards, he argues that power is actually unsophisticated (it is actually really sophisticated). His argument is that the way to solve the power problem is by “realizing” that power is a critical issue, domiciling it in the office of the president and solving it. That is exactly what they did in Egypt, you see. One day, they woke up and realized how important power was, and worked to fix it. The way they fixed it is by putting an electrometer in the office of the president that measures how much power is generated every minute. What an amazing idea, Peter “Sherlock” Obi.

Verdict

This was a sobering watch. I had suspected that his talk would have little substance, but I was honestly shocked at the number of lies and inaccurate claims he uses to prop his lack of ideas up. The rambling answers, the appeal to Vietnam, Bangladesh, China and Egypt may do well to confuse some people, but a close hearing of his answers would reveal an extraordinary lack of even basic understanding of the questions at hand. I would argue that almost everyone in that room would have better answers than he provides to these questions.

But it is the Nigerian story, isn’t it? Tinubu and Atiku had similarly disappointing appearances, and Obi’s, despite being more verbose, is right at home with them. The interesting thing is that he took even fewer questions than both of them, as he spent most of the time talking about issues that were not relevant to what he was asked. He was either Asia hopping or insulting the present government (without details either), and spent very little time talking about his own ideas with any scrutiny.

Since these three men have appeared again to contest for the presidency, I can say nothing but congratulate the Nigerian goose on being extremely cooked once more. The winner, of course, is already set in stone, but none of the losers are even worthy of being excited about. It is just as well, as that is the Nigerian story.

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