Peter Obi,
answered

Peter Gregory Obi was born in Onitsha on 19 July 1961 into a trading family. He built an import and distribution business, Next International, and chaired the board of Fidelity Bank before entering politics.

He won the 2003 Anambra governorship at the election tribunal, took office in March 2006 and served two terms to March 2014. He was the Peoples Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2019, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in 2023, and is the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress for the election of 16 January 2027.

The whole story, decade by decade, with every date linked to its source.

He was the fourth of ten children of Josephat and Agnes Obi, traders in Onitsha. He was seven when his father died in 1968, in the middle of the war, and he was selling at the school gate before he was ten.

His parents settled in Onitsha before the civil war, and it is where the family trade was, where he went to school, and where his only house in Nigeria stands. He launched his 2027 campaign from that house. He is Igbo, and speaks Igbo and English.

He was raised Catholic in Onitsha and two of his siblings entered religious life, a nun and a priest. He attended the inauguration of Pope Francis in 2013 and of Pope Leo XIV in May 2025, and called the second one a deeply spiritual moment.

His giving follows the same line: mission hospitals, church nursing colleges and church schools, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Muslim alike. The ledger is here.

Margaret Obi was First Lady of Anambra State for the whole of his governorship, from March 2006 to March 2014, and works on women’s enterprise and human rights. Their daughter Gabriella married in Agulu in 2022; their son Gregory read philosophy at Bristol and is an actor.

He flies economy even when she is in business class on the same aircraft, which his aides have long since stopped arguing about.

He finished primary school in Onitsha in 1973, went to Christ the King College there, and entered the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1980, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1984. INEC published the certificates in August 2026.

The executive programmes came later, while he was building the business: the Chief Executive Programme at Lagos Business School, two programmes at Harvard Business School, two at IMD in Switzerland, two at Kellogg, and single programmes at the London School of Economics, Columbia Business School, Saïd Business School in Oxford and Judge Business School in Cambridge.

He has taken no honorary doctorate, and he is addressed as Mr Obi. In 2025 he went back to Christ the King College with the old boys and gave it 50 million naira.

The name outlasted the joke. He took the impeachment, the tribunal years and two Supreme Court cases without moving, and the title followed the temperament. The honours are here.

At The Platform in Lagos in April 2017 he held up his wrist and said: “This is the only watch I have; I have owned it for seventeen years.” As governor he did not move into the Government House.

It is not a pose, it is a method. The same discipline is what left savings rather than debt in the Anambra treasury, and what funds the giving. What he has given.

He had joined the Labour Party ten months earlier, a party with almost no structure and no money, and came third with a quarter of the national vote. He took Lagos, the country’s largest electorate and the home state of the winner, and the Federal Capital Territory with 61 per cent, along with Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Abia, Ebonyi, Delta, Edo, Plateau, Nasarawa and Cross River.

Nothing like it had been done in Nigeria by a candidate outside the two established parties. How it happened.

The Nigeria Democratic Congress was registered by INEC on 23 February 2026. He joined it on 3 May 2026, and seventeen members of the House of Representatives and two senators followed within the week. He was cleared unopposed on 20 May, ratified on 29 May and presented at the party’s convention in Abuja on 30 May 2026.

He was a member of the Peoples Democratic Party from 2014, its vice-presidential candidate in 2019, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in 2023, and briefly in the ADC coalition before the NDC. The offices and candidacies.

Campaigning opened on 19 August 2026 and closes on 15 January 2027. He launched from his house in Onitsha on 21 August with a Production First agenda, and he has committed to a single term: four years, not a day more.

The Now chapter and the speeches.

The name is a pun on his own, and nobody owns it. It began online in mid-2022, filled the streets of Lagos, Abuja, Kano and a dozen other cities on the marches that September, and put agents in polling units the party could not have staffed. The London School of Economics called it the force that would shape Nigerian politics beyond 2023.

They fund themselves. The line that followed them around, “we no dey give shishi”, started as a refusal to buy votes.

The manifesto he published on 3 December 2022 was called It’s POssible, and the phrase stuck to the movement rather than to the campaign. He still uses it, and he still signs off with the two letters.

When a court tried to unregister his party in June 2026 he answered in the same register: “Our march to a New Nigeria cannot be halted. A detour, yes, but the destination is certain.”

More of his lines, dated and sourced.

“Nigeria cannot import its way to prosperity,” he said at the launch in Onitsha in August 2026. “We will produce more of what we consume, process more of what we produce, and compete more effectively in global markets.”

He put five questions at the centre of it: are people better off than four years ago; can they afford food, school and a hospital; can businesses produce and hire; can young people find work; can farmers reach their fields safely. He argues the case in numbers, as he always has: more than 140 million Nigerians at or below the poverty line, 35 million needing food assistance, 3.6 million displaced.

He has said he will serve one term. Read him in his own words.

The domain peter-obi.org, still listed in some reference works, is no longer his and now points somewhere else entirely. Do not use it, and do not trust anything published there.

This site is about him and links only to accounts that have been verified. The press kit has the biographies, the approved photographs and how to reach the media office.

Every fact here is stored with the URL it came from, and each page lists its sources at the foot. Photographs carry their credit and their licence, and each one links to the post it was published in. Nothing on the site asks you for money or for your vote.

For statements, appearances and anything official, go to @PeterObi. For corrections to this site, see the press page.