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Public intellectuals on national television carry a special burden: their words are measured not only for accuracy but for internal consistency, intellectual honesty, and the long-term damage they can inflict on their own standing.
The recent exchange on Arise TV involving Professor Femi Otubanjo, a Research Professor at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, and journalist Rufai Oseni illustrates the point sharply. Otubanjo argued that Peter Obi “lacks the oratorical power to sell his vision,” describing his delivery as flat and his campaign as bland beyond ethnic representation of Southeast aspirations.
When Oseni asked whether President Bola Tinubu possesses that same power of oratory, the professor replied that oratory “doesn’t matter” or “is not important,” pivoting instead to Tinubu’s “proven record as a political force in Nigeria” dating back decades.
The sequence is easy to reconstruct and hard to defend on logical grounds. A trait is first treated as a meaningful deficiency in one candidate, then dismissed as irrelevant once the comparison turns to another.
Viewers noticed the shift immediately. Clips circulated with the exchange framed as selective standard-setting: oratory matters when criticising Obi; it does not when the subject is Tinubu.
Otubanjo’s broader point—that political longevity, organisational strength and a track record of influence can outweigh rhetorical polish—is a legitimate argument in Nigerian politics.
Tinubu’s long career as a political operator is a matter of public record and is routinely cited by his supporters. Obi’s more policy-and-numbers style of communication is equally a matter of record and is routinely cited by his supporters as substance over style. The difficulty arises when the same analyst appears to apply the criterion unevenly in real time.
This is where the deeper issue of stature and credibility enters. A professor appearing on national television is not a partisan spokesperson or a social-media activist.
The academic title, institutional affiliation and assumed habit of rigorous reasoning create an expectation of even-handedness. When that expectation is disappointed—whether through apparent double standards, ethnic framing (Obi reduced primarily to Southeast aspirations while Tinubu is elevated as a national force), or failure to grapple with long-standing controversies surrounding credentials and public records—the audience does not merely disagree.
It begins to question the reliability of the voice itself. In a polarised environment already saturated with tribal and regional suspicion, any statement that can be read as ethnic defence of “one’s own” president invites caricature.
The professor becomes, in the eyes of critics, less a dispassionate analyst and more an illustration of how even high academic standing can appear subordinated to identity or political loyalty.
Nigerian public discourse has seen this pattern repeatedly. Intellectuals who once commanded respect for analytical clarity later find their interventions discounted because earlier appearances were judged inconsistent, selective or tribal.
Integrity is cumulative; it is also fragile. One televised exchange that prioritises defence of a preferred side over coherent application of standards can overshadow years of prior work.
The mockery that follows—“even if you are Albert Einstein, the moment you put on this cap…”—is crude, but it reflects a public that has grown weary of credentialed voices that seem to abandon the very standards of logic and evidence they are expected to uphold.
A balanced assessment does not require declaring one candidate oratorically gifted and the other deficient, nor does it demand that every analyst treat Tinubu’s record and Obi’s record as identical.
Political force, governance outcomes, policy proposals and communicative effectiveness are all legitimate subjects of scrutiny. What it does require is consistency in the tools of evaluation. If oratory is relevant to selling a vision, it is relevant across the board or it is not.
If ethnic representation is a limited selling point for one candidate, the same lens should be applied to others. If long-standing questions of documentation and personal history are dismissed for one figure, the dismissal must rest on transparent reasoning rather than selective silence.
Professors and senior analysts retain the right—and the duty—to offer robust opinions. They forfeit the presumption of elevated credibility the moment those opinions appear driven more by loyalty than by the standards of the academy they represent.
In a country where public trust in institutions is already low, the cost of that forfeiture is not paid only by the individual.
It is paid by the broader culture of informed debate that Nigeria still desperately needs.
-Pamela O.
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