Olu Allen
Yesterday, a curious image surfaced from Imo State: Peter Obi, former governor and perennial object of elite scorn, was seen serving food at a burial.
To the inattentive eye, it was mundane, perhaps even desperate. But to the trained strategist, it was something else entirely: a calculated gesture, rich in symbolic power, designed to confound enemies and capture hearts.
Obi is not campaigning. He is waging psychological warfare.
Understand this: power is not seized only at the ballot box, it is seized in the minds of the people, through symbols, emotion, repetition.
And in this, Mr. Obi is playing a long game, quietly deploying what military historians once called “Shock and Awe”, a strategy of overwhelming dominance not by brute force, but by unpredictability and relentless movement.
While his opponents launch daily attacks, “He worked with Abacha!” “There were no computers in 1996!” “He’s sharing food?!”
Obi does not respond. He evolves. Each assault is met not with defense, but with redirection. They aim arrows; he presents a feast. They bring ridicule; he returns humility. The crowd, watching, cannot help but wonder: Who is this man they cannot stop speaking about?
History has seen this before.
In 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon not with armies but with the intention. The gesture was symbolic, reckless, and irresistible; it seized Rome’s imagination.
In the 1970s, Muhammad Ali, outmatched in the ring, taunted George Foreman into exhaustion with rope-a-dope tactics, winning not with fists but with theatre.
Today, Peter Obi channels this same energy.
He is not fighting back. He is baiting them, knowing full well that in the age of attention, visibility is dominance.
His opponents make noise; he makes memory. They curse him; yet with each insult, they etch his name deeper into the public mind. He has become their obsession and their inadvertent marketer.
This is not accidental. It is the hallmark of a trader who understands the law of compounding attention. While others spend fortunes buying billboards and headlines, Obi invests in silence, gesture, and timing.
His every move, photographed and shared, is worth more than any paid campaign. Like a chess master three moves ahead, he stays unpredictable and thus unstoppable.
Here lies the lesson:
In politics, as in war, the one who controls the narrative controls the outcome.
Peter Obi has chosen his battlefield, not in debates or manifestos, but in optics, emotion, and repetition. And while his enemies exhaust themselves in criticism, he expands his presence, inch by inch, into the soul of the nation.
They mock him now. They may kneel before him later.
