Seun Kuti did not pick a favourite when Orina of Sell Afrika To Afrikans asked whether there is any difference between Peter Obi and President Bola Tinubu. The Afrobeat musician folded both men into one charge and then aimed past them at the public that keeps waiting for a saviour.
Oluseun Anikulapo Kuti, youngest son of Fela Kuti and leader of Egypt 80, has spent his career treating politics as part of the music. On the live video chat he refused the 2027 framing that treats Obi as the opposite of Tinubu.
“They’re all the same. These are capitalists, exploiters, and oppressors.”
The sentence is already travelling because it denies the comfort many voters want: that one big man is the clean break from another.
He then widened the argument from two politicians to a habit he says Africa was taught.
“Nigerians, like the rest of Africa, have been indoctrinated into what I call Bigmanism. The religious and spiritual slavery of Africans has a big role to play in physical enslavement.”
In his view, Abrahamic religion trained people to look up for an anointed figure instead of across at one another.
“This their Abrahamic god has a thing for having anointed special people. It always picks a messiah. It never see everyone as equal to share his message with. It always picks a special person to be the Messiah.”
That training, he said, emptied people of their own authority.
“Africans have been indoctrinated away from their power. We don’t believe in our power. Most African working and poor people don’t believe they have the power to do anything. We don’t even believe we have the power to fix outright roads or to build our schools. We believe in a Messiah. In the big man — the chosen man. That’s why I call it Bigmanism.”
The punchline is the pity he says the continent waits for.
“They say ‘if this person does not come and cast his pity gaze on us and turn our problem into his problem, none of our problems can ever be solved as Africans. If foreigners don’t come to Africa, our problems can never be solved.’”
Seun has criticised Obi before, including after the former Anambra governor moved through party alliances, and he has never spoken like a campaign surrogate. His politics still run through the Movement of the People revival he tried to rebuild from his father’s old party.