There is an old, unkind sport in public life. Bait the cub to wound the lion. In democracies and dictatorships alike, detractors discover that it is often easier – and crueler – to claw at a leader through their children than to win an honest argument on policy. Ask the historians of nineteenth-century America. Even Abraham Lincoln, now fondly remembered as a unifier, was pilloried in his own days with epithets so coarse that “The Ape” and “gorilla” were flung at him by hostile newspapers and cartoonists. One 1956 survey of the wartime press catalogued such smears in cold detail; other archives preserve an 1863 caricature of Lincoln literally drawn as a monkey clutching the Emancipation Proclamation. The aim was simple. Disfigure and de-market the man in the public imagination until his cause looked shabby by association.
The pattern gained momentum in the digital age. In 2014, a U.S. congressional aide resigned after a public Facebook harangue against Sasha and Malia Obama, teenagers, who had done nothing more than appear at a routine White House ceremony. As the outcry made clear, a red line had been crossed. Whatever one thought of the president, dragging his daughters into partisan muck was indecent. The years that followed saw a conveyor belt of hoaxes and vitriol about the Obama girls – “Harvard suspensions,” “drug arrests,” “expulsions,” all debunked by fact-checkers but revealing the ravenous appetite for narrative vandalism when political passions run hot.
The foregoing historical excursions bring us home. In Nigeria, we have witnessed the same grim choreography. The children of political figures, who by their personal dispositions are private citizens, become screens onto which political rivalries project their angriest fantasies. Regrettably, the internet, for all its benefits, has been misappropriated by some netizens and turned into a gladiatorial arena of cruelty, where political opponents are not only vulnerable game, but their families too. In recent weeks, the son of Peter Obi, Oseloka, has found himself at the receiving end of unprovoked online trolling. His only “crime,” it seems, is the accident of birth—that he is the child of a man, whose political rise unsettles entrenched power brokers. Like the cub of a lion, he has drawn the attention of hyenas prowling the digital space, eager to wound the father by taunting the son. But as the Igbo would remind us, Ihe agụ mụrụ anaghị ata akwụkwọ – the offspring of a lion does not eat straw.
Nonetheless, before unpacking this orgy of trolling Oseloka Obi and why the lion’s cub will rather opt for politics of grace than eating straw, it is pertinent to underscore the salient fact that personality attacks and mudslinging are as old as politics itself. The higher a political figure rises, the more their lives are dissected—not always fairly—by adversaries desperate to unleash reputational damages. Yet, what is deeply troubling is when this gaze extends to children, who neither hold office nor court political influence. They become soft targets, proxies in wars they never declared, pawns in the hands of those who cannot face the lion, but instead stalk the cub.
In the case of Peter Obi, the former Anambra governor and Labour Party presidential candidate in 2023 general elections, Nigeria has witnessed a phenomenon one might call “Obi-phobia.” His ascetic lifestyle, measured rhetoric, and mass youth following have made him the lightning rod for criticism. Opponents hurl vitriol at him, often needlessly, branding him everything from ‘tribalist,’ ‘religious bigot,’ ‘die-hard-pessimist’ to ‘unpatriotic de-marketer’. Now, even his child – innocent of any political ambition – is not spared. However, it is Oseloka Obi’s measured response that matters most and which forms the thrust of this piece. “I understand that gossip follows those connected to public life. But perhaps let me remind you: my father is the one in politics, not me. To assume that my life or choices are somehow political statements is a flawed and childish calculation…” It is not merely an attempt to tidy the record; it is a modest advocacy for decency in a republic that too often confuses cruelty with courage. Here, Oseloka reminds us that he neither sought nor holds public office; that he is an actor, building a path not financed by his father’s fortune; and that the theatre roles critics trumpet as “evidence” are, in fact, acting – fiction, not confession. He insists that a mature democracy should know the difference.
The temptation, of course, is to shrug and say: “This is politics; brace up.” But that counsel of cynicism withers under scrutiny. If a public figure’s adult child draws scrutiny for the use of public assets, then by all means, report and debate it—fairly, factually, and with distinctions intact. When Seyi Tinubu was photographed using a presidential aircraft to attend a polo event, the criticism from governance watchdogs and the press centred on propriety and the ethics of state assets. That is a legitimate public-interest question precisely because it involves public property; it deserved the daylight Premium Times and others cast upon it, and it also deserved the subsequent clarifications and broader context that followed. What it did not warrant was the torrent of personalised abuse that quickly metastasized online, where accountability talk often mutates into dehumanisation.
Likewise, when conspiracy theories tried to implicate the Tinubu family in the dark night of 20 October 2020 at the Lekki Toll Gate, reputable outlets documented the advertising company’s explanation that the billboard was switched off in line with a state-imposed curfew. Human-rights reporting on the broader tragedy remains searing and contested in parts; yet, in the welter of grief and anger, precise facts matter. Facts are not the enemies of justice; they are its instruments.
There is another strain in our digital agora that should trouble anyone who cares about a more civil public square, that is, the weaponisation of lies about family members. AFP Fact Check, for example, showed how a viral clip was mislabeled as “Tinubu’s daughter” rebuking her father about rigging—when, in truth, the speaker was the activist Adetoun Onajobi. This is not “rough-and-tumble politics”; it is the forging of counterfeit tokens for a rage economy. The antidote is not lecturing our rivals on morality but building a culture of verification strong enough to make lies unprofitable.
Even where the president’s daughter, Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, has been a lightning rod, styling herself Iyaloja-General and “First Daughter,” or urging traders in July 2024 to dissuade their children from joining proposed protests, the critiques that count are the evidence-based ones. Reportage from Premium Times and TheCable captured both the statements and the blowback; fair observers can evaluate them without resorting to invective or dragging in uninvolved relatives. Democratic hygiene requires precisely this habit; that is, separate what belongs in the court of public reason from what should be left out of court entirely.
Why evoke the Tinubu examples in a piece centred on Oseloka Obi? It is because they demonstrate the principle at stake. Children—whatever their age—do not magically become fair game for every species of slander because a parent seeks or holds office. Yes, adults who themselves claim platform and influence must accept rigorous scrutiny; yes, choices that implicate public resources must be thoroughly examined. But the slide from scrutiny to spite, from inquiry to innuendo, is neither inevitable nor excusable.
History helps us keep our bearings. If Lincoln widely regarded as the most lionised of American presidents could be caricatured as sub-human in his own time, we should not be surprised when modern partisans reach for the same toolbox against families. The lesson, however, is not despair; it is proportion. Lincoln answered with steadiness and a relentless focus on work; posterity judged on outcomes, not insults. When Sasha and Malia Obama were targeted, the public across party lines forced a line to be redrawn, and the offending aide departed the stage. Fact-checkers then did the patient labour of inoculating the discourse against repeat infections. Each of these episodes models something Nigerians can practice. Rebuke aimed at the right target, restraint where people have done nothing to earn our ire, and relentless correction of viral falsehoods.
It is in this lineage that Oseloka’s letter sits. There is a dignity in his refusal to “trade in lies” or “indulge false narratives,” a maturity in declining to treat every smear as a duel invitation. He neither pleads for pity nor puffs himself up; he chooses the narrow road: affirm who you are, say what you do, correct what is false, and then turn the nation’s attention back to its actual afflictions – insecurity, a weakened economy, crumbling infrastructure, failing healthcare, and politicians who steal from the people they swore to serve’. That rhetorical pivot is not evasion; it is statesmanship in embryo. It replies to the taunt, “What are you hiding?” with the more urgent question, “What are we all neglecting?”
The deeper threat of personality attacks, after all, is not what they do to a family’s feelings but what they do to a country’s attention. The economy does not mend because our timelines are flooded with photo-shopped outrage. Roads do not build themselves because we have discovered a son’s acquaintance or a daughter’s wardrobe. Hospitals do not stock equipment because hashtags have made us feel momentarily righteous. The saturation of public life with gossip is not entertainment; it is an opportunity cost with national consequences.
None of this means we sanctify politicians or their kin. On the contrary, the way to discipline power is with well-aimed light, not scattershot heat. If a president’s child boards a public jet, the right questions are: what policy permits this, who authorised it, how common is the practice, and what reforms should follow? If a market-leader makes an intervention on protests, we should ask: by what authority, with what mandate, to what effect? And if a company switches off a city-facing billboard during a security curfew, journalists should record the explanation, put it against independent timelines, and go wherever the evidence leads. A mature public square can do all three things at once: investigate, distinguish, and remain humane.
In that spirit, the recent case in Abuja where an activist was arraigned and, later, granted bail after allegedly posting a live-stream cursing Seyi Tinubu and others is sobering. Courts will decide the law; citizens can debate the boundaries of speech. But the record captured in the charge sheets and reported by reputable news outlets confirms a climate where anger too easily curdles into personal menace. Our republic must find a way to protect robust dissent while refusing license for abuse.
The same standard should protect Oseloka Obi. He is not Peter obi, the Opposition politician; he is a working actor who, like countless artists, has portrayed characters unlike himself. Conflating performance with confession is both illiterate and opportunistic. It is also a category error with consequences. When we brand fiction as fact to score political points, we announce that truth is negotiable, and then wonder why governance collapses into theatre.
There is a further reason to choose the higher road; politics changes, the internet forgets nothing, and the children of one camp today may be private citizens far from the glare tomorrow. The norms we normalise now are the norms that will greet our allies and our own families later. The Golden Rule is not soft ethics; it is hard prudence. If we refuse to drag the uninvolved into our fights, we secure a civic cease-fire that makes space for actual argument about policy, competence, and character.
“Like father, like son,” some will say and there is a sense in which the proverb fits. Oseloka’s tone mirrors Peter Obi’s characteristic restraint when confronted by taunts and contrived scandals –calculated, measured, unfussy – confident that composure outlives vitriol. The father has often absorbed invective without returning it in kind; the son now declines the bait of performative fury. This is not passivity. It is the discipline of refusing to let opponents set the terms of your moral vocabulary. “If others wish to go low, invent scandals, or attack me to wound him, they are free to do so. But we will go high, and we will continue to focus on the future of Nigeria.”
To be clear, Peter Obi is not perfect, nor is any other candidate; Nigerians are not obliged to vote for him because his son kept his temper. But the country is entitled to demand that our political wrestling adhere to rules that keep the ring safe for democracy. Those rules include guardrails around private citizens, even when they are relatives of the powerful. They include the habit of citing and cross-checking – like the AFP debunk of the mislabeled “daughter” clip – before the share button becomes a cudgel. They include the adult maturity of criticizing a public figure’s action (say, presidential-jet usage) without anathematizing his child as a proxy. They include the intellectual honesty to read the whole story when an advertising firm explains a controversial operational choice in the context of a state curfew. And they include the civic patience to let courts do their work when alleged cyberbullying crosses into potential criminality.
These are not lofty ideals; they are low fences that keep the herd from trampling the crops. They protect the weak, but they also protect the strong from the temptation to answer every slander with a slander of their own; from the slow corrosion that comes when we start to believe that the only way to win is to wound. And they protect the rest of us from a politics so poisonous that no decent person would dare enter public life for fear that their children will be fed to the crowd.
Will our politics honour such fences? It depends on all of us; on editors, who refuse to publish innuendo as news; on influencers, who decline cheap dopamine from doctored clips; on citizens, who insist on evidence before outrage; on opponents who, in the bitter season of campaigning, remember that there is a country to govern after the votes are counted. It also depends on the targets of the slime on whether they refuse to become mirror images of their attackers. In that sense, Oseloka’s letter does more than defend himself. It offers a template for how to be calm without being cowed, how to correct without being caustic, and how to keep the nation’s gaze trained on what actually hurts and not “idle speculation about what Peter obi’s son is doing,” which in his words, “is a distraction from the real crises that matter to all Nigerians”.
If he holds that line, and if we learn to hold it with him, perhaps our public square can grow up a little: sharper on substance, kinder in speech, more allergic to falsity, and less easily distracted by theatrics. Perhaps, we can build a civic culture where the surest way to lose a debate is to smear a child, and the quickest way to gain respect is to argue the point.
In conclusion, let us return to the Igbo proverb on the lion’s offspring and straw-eating, which captures both the challenge and the promise of such restraint. It is a statement about Oseloka, the lion’s cub and his lineage, yes, but more so about bearing. To be the child of courage is to refuse the fodder of pettiness, to keep one’s diet strict – truth, work, and grace—even when the crowd chants for spectacle. “In our home, as a child, the lesson was always clear: face your work, do it honestly, and contribute to the good of others.” May our politics learn the ropes of internalizing Oseloka Obi’s culinary predilection.
Prof Agbedo is of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, a Fellow of Royal Dutch Institute, and Public Affairs Analyst
