Obidient Movement To Begin Registration Of Members – National Coordinator Tanko

The Obidient Movement is set to embark on the registration of members, newly appointed Interim National Coordinator of the group, Dr. Yunusa Tanko has revealed.

The presidential candidate of the Labour Party, LP, in the 2023 general election, Peter Obi, whose supporters became known as the ‘Obidients’, leading to the emergence of the ‘Obidient Movement’, had on September 3, appointed Tanko as the Interim National Coordinator of the group.

Before the appointment, Tanko was Obi’s spokesman, and served as the media director of the defunct Labour Party Presidential Campaign Organisation.

Outlining the way forward for the Obidient Movement in an interview with THE WHISTLER, Tanko said the registration exercise is in line with moves to transform the group into a formal, structured organisation.

With the group’s future tied to the political fortunes of Peter Obi, who is being linked to speculations of proposed merger ahead of the 2027 general election, there are suggestions that the Obidient Movement will not always be associated with the Labour Party.

Obi and Abia State Governor Alex Otti played key roles in the recent stakeholders meeting where a former Finance Minister Nenadi Usman was appointed the chairperson of the LP caretaker committee, marking the end of the reign of the Julius Abure-led National Working Committee.

However, the move has deepened the crisis in the LP as Abure is insisting that he remains the party’s national chairman.

In the wake of the development, Abure has announced that the LP presidential ticket in 2027 will no longer be reserved for Obi.

Tanko did not directly address these issues while outlining the way forward for the Obidient Movement but he noted that the group would, after formalising its structure, ‘determine its fate’.

Tanko said, “The next step for the Movement is for us to do registration. We are commencing registration and at the same time we are going to get other leaders and we will then cascade the leadership down to the states and from the states down to the wards so that we will be represented accordingly.

“The most important objective of this Movement is to ensure that we have a well structured organisation. You remember during and after the 2023 elections people were accusing us in the Labour Party that we are not structurally mobilised, that we don’t have structure and all that and that we are only converging on social media.

“The truth is that we actually said at that time that the people are our structure, which we still maintain. But now we are trying to organise those people into a formal, structured organisation. That way it could be easily accessible, we know our people, we know our numbers, we know who is who in every ward, so that we know who we connect with so that when we send our message it will resonate in one direction with everybody, so that we don’t have an amorphous organisation that does not have leadership.

“That is the main target and at the end of it all, it is that organisation that will determine its fate, concerning what it wants to do in the future.”

Tanko further noted that the Obidient Movement is part of the Labour Party ‘at the moment’.

Asked whether the group is an integral part of the LP, Tanko said, “Of course we are members of the Labour Party, at the moment we are.”

He added, “But then you can belong to a political party but you can have your own grouping. You can see some support groups are also members of the Labour Party, even the Constitution of the Labour Party permits it. You can come in as a group.

“Remember the days of the Peoples Democratic Movement, PDM. The PDM moved in and strengthened the Peoples Democratic Party.

“So we too are moving in to strengthen any political party that we are in.”

He said members of other political parties, who share in the ideology of the Obidient Movement, are welcome to join the group.

“Those who believe in what we are championing are welcome to join us. We are championing the issue of good governance, good leadership, principled leadership based on accountability and a united country that is devoid of you being segmented to be from one tribe or the other. A country based on fairness and equity for all. That’s our target.”

Obidient Movement To Begin Registration Of Members – National Coordinator Tanko is first published on The Whistler Newspaper