There is a story I have carried with me for years about a man who was famously rich, famously generous, and for that reason almost magnetic in the way people gathered around him. Yet even his admirers would whisper about one fault: he did not know how to speak. Not in the polished, oyibo way that makes a room lean in, not with the kind of address that is logical, empathetic, civic, and timed to the moment.
He was not unintelligent. When pressed he could defend himself sharply. But he knew the gap, and he named it himself with a kind of humility that disarmed people. “God does not make anyone complete,” he would say. “He gave me money, He gave me the gift of business, He gave me the reward of generosity and public service. If He gave me everything, what would be left for others to bring to the table?”
That tension between abundance and absence has stayed with me, because it is the same tension I see when I think of Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, Peter Obi’s running mate in the 2023 presidential election under the Labour Party.
On paper, Datti is the kind of figure political textbooks call a complete package. He is presentable in a way that registers instantly. He holds a PhD, which in our public life still functions as a social shorthand for wisdom and seriousness. He was a senator, which speaks to influence, to being chosen, to surviving the rough theater of elections. He built Baze University and a teaching hospital, institutions that touch real lives and that place him in the class of entrepreneur-statesmen Nigeria rarely produces. He has a family, and in many cultures that is still read as evidence of capacity for love, for patience, for living peacefully with others. By all conventional measures, he should have had nothing left to prove.
Yet Datti’s public life keeps circling one stubborn question that political communication scholars have studied for decades: which intelligence matters most in the first ten seconds of politics? Aristotle called it ethos, pathos, and logos, but modern research keeps reminding us that voters often decide on ethos first. The impression of coherence, the sense that a leader can frame a problem and hold it steady, does more work than policy papers. In Datti’s case, that is where the friction appears. Here is a man of obvious intellect who often struggles to sound logical, coherent, consistent, and emotionally attuned at the same time. The words come frequently, and with conviction, but not always with the architecture that makes them stick.
That friction became public property because Datti chose a very visible relationship with the media. He is almost always in the news, commenting, warning, clarifying, and sometimes contradicting himself a week later. Sociologists of media call this the “availability heuristic” in politics: the more often a voice is heard, the more weight it carries, but also the more chances it has to be misremembered or to cancel itself out.
I have written about this before, in pieces like “Deconstructing Dr. Datti Baba-Ahmed” and “Datti Baba-Ahmed and the Parable of the Saviours Who Wouldn’t Save Themselves,” trying to track not just what he said but the pattern underneath. Nigerian politics rewards tactical ambiguity, double speak, and strategic inconsistency, and to some extent all politicians play that game. But when the performance becomes too frequent, too loud, and too detached from a clear through-line, the public begins to treat the inconsistency itself as the message.
Consider the arc from 2022 to 2026. When Datti emerged in July 2022 as Obi’s running mate, the Labour ticket was sold as a break from the old order, a pairing meant to speak across region and religion and to center competence and constitutionalism. It was powerful symbolism. Yet even then there was a seam in the story. Datti had a history in the CPC and had contested elections before, but by 2026 he was saying plainly, “I’ve held political offices. I have contested political offices, yet I am not a politician. I am a lover of Nigeria.” Political scientists would call that identity work, an attempt to separate the role from the person. It can work. But it becomes complicated when the same speaker turns around and criticizes others for acting politically, while claiming an outsider’s purity for himself.
In February 2023, during the campaign, Datti made one of his sharpest arguments against the Tinubu-Shettima Muslim-Muslim ticket. He said it could not work anymore, that Nigeria’s diversity made the pairing inappropriate, and he even invoked a theological logic about God placing different peoples together. It was an argument rooted in structure, not just strategy. Months later, however, Datti would rail against reducing politics to religious or regional math.
That shift is not automatically hypocrisy. Circumstances change, and leaders are allowed to change their minds. But the burden, as communication theorists like Kathleen Hall Jamieson point out, is on the speaker to narrate the change, to show the principle that connects the two moments. Without that narrative bridge, the audience fills the gap with doubt.
The most intense moment came right after the 2023 election. On March 22, Datti told President Buhari not to hold the inauguration and told the Chief Justice not to “partake in unconstitutionality.” He was arguing, in effect, that the constitutional requirements had not been met and that swearing Tinubu in would be unlawful. It was extraordinary rhetoric, far beyond a standard legal challenge. Later, when the courts ruled and Obi acknowledged the end of the judicial process, Datti’s earlier certainty hung in the air.
Psychologists studying cognitive dissonance, starting with Leon Festinger, would say this is the classic test: when a strongly held public prediction collides with reality, does the speaker adjust the belief, adjust the facts, or add a new explanation? Datti chose to keep arguing, and that is his right. But the record now invites a question about how he weighs constitutional principle against political legitimacy over time.
The relationship with Obi is where the story gets most intricate. In May 2024, Datti defended Obi fiercely against Wole Soyinka, insisting that intellectual stature did not license insult. By January 2024, according to Datti’s own account of a meeting at Johnwood Hotel, he had already urged Obi to think about 2027 alliances, mentioning figures like Kwankwaso and El-Rufai. So he was, by his own telling, pushing Obi toward the very kind of strategic engagement he would later criticize. When Obi did move toward the ADC coalition, Datti recoiled.
In August 2025, Datti called the coalition deceptive and declared, “I am a Labour Party man… I am Peter Obi’s man,” while also saying there were only two people he could deputize for, and Obi was one of them. A few months later he said Obi could return to Labour and contest with or without him. Then Obi left, and Datti began questioning whether the defection was even formal, asking the party to check for a returned membership card.
By January 2026, Datti announced his own presidential ambition on the Labour platform, reminding people that he had aspired before Obi did. In April 2026 he left Labour himself and joined the PRP. In May he asked, “If there is a quarrel in Nigeria, will you walk away?” arguing that a president-in-waiting should stay and fix a troubled party. The question turned back on him almost immediately. In September 2026 he went further, saying he had warned Obi at the Yar’Adua Centre that the coalition was “not a place for you,” and claiming vindication when Obi later left the ADC. In the same month he said that none of the major challengers to Tinubu, including Obi and Atiku, had the capacity to improve Nigeria. “Including Peter Obi,” he said. Yet he also said, “I miss a good Nigerian,” speaking of Obi with personal warmth even as he dismissed his political utility.
This is where a theoretical lens helps more than name-calling. Erving Goffman’s work on impression management reminds us that politicians are constantly performing different versions of themselves for different audiences. What looks like contradiction can be an attempt to manage multiple roles: loyal deputy, party loyalist, independent thinker, future candidate. Robert Jervis, writing on political judgment, warned that leaders often overestimate how consistent they appear to others, because inside their heads each shift feels justified by new information. And research on voter perception shows that inconsistency is not always fatal, but unexplained inconsistency is. People can forgive a change if they are given the principle behind it.
That principle is what Datti has not yet fully articulated. He seems to be moving toward a coherent philosophy: that Nigeria needs something genuinely new, not a rotation of PDP, APC, ADC, and other familiar brands. If that is the core, then saying Tinubu should leave but Obi and Atiku cannot replace him makes sense. Saying he advised Obi to talk to Kwankwaso but not to surrender to him makes sense. Saying he left Labour because the party became unfixable, while criticizing Obi for leaving, could also make sense, if the difference is explained.
But without that explanation, the public record reads as a series of reversals: defend Obi, then distance from Obi; urge engagement with Kwankwaso, then question the alliance; condemn defections, then defect; declare a president unconstitutional, then later describe him as politically unbeatable.
The Shettima cap episode is smaller but illustrative. Datti made a categorical factual claim that was quickly challenged by photographs. In the age of instant verification, categorical claims are high risk. Political communication research shows that one easily disproven detail can erode credibility more than a dozen abstract disagreements.
So what are we left with? Not evidence of instability, but evidence of a politician navigating a very fast-moving landscape with a style that prizes immediacy over narrative control. The most generous reading is that Datti is trying to carve out space for a new politics, and that the zigzags are the cost of that attempt. The most critical reading is that his standards shift depending on where he stands in the moment, and that he has not yet reconciled his own movements with the standards he applies to others.
It brings me back to the man in the opening story. Generosity bought him influence, crowds, and tolerance. But it could not buy him the first impression that comes from knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it so that it lands with sense and feeling. In politics, we do not begin every encounter by announcing our degrees, our businesses, or our philanthropy. We begin with language.
As research on leadership perception consistently finds, coherence and emotional intelligence are not luxuries. They are the basic currency of trust. Without them, even the most accomplished record can feel unfinished, like a gift waiting for its final wrapping.
*Bagudu Mohammed* is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of People’s Daily
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
