THE hitches and glitches that accompanied the 2023 polls have been accentuated by the presidential and governorship elections in Lagos won, lost and met by the All Progressives Congress (APC) with mixed feelings and signals. Worse happened elsewhere, but social media fury catalysed by south-eastern political voyeurs and religious fanatics gave the impression that the whole elections were imperfect and irredeemably flawed. The country is unlikely to make the mistake of cancelling or annulling the elections, as some people advocate, for the crises it would trigger would be unmanageable, far beyond the romantic catharsis insinuated into such undertaking. The world, despite their initial misgivings accentuated by social media fantasies, has since congratulated the winners and moved on. They see the elections as concluded, notwithstanding some imperfections. Nothing will change the outcome of both the February 25 and March 18 polls except minimal judicial interventions.
Both the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) standard-bearers in the February poll are loth to accept the result, especially given the way their scalps were filleted by the APC and their reputations openly sullied. Both candidates are also conflicted about the National Assembly results, and are even more hesitant about the state elections; but their victorious governors and lawmakers in the February and March polls are resolute in keeping the birds in hand. Messrs Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi know they didn’t win the presidential poll, and could not have won, given the implacable divisions in their ranks; this is why they hedge their legal challenges with calls for poll cancellation. They wish to be declared winner, but failing that, they would not mind annulment or an interim contraption. They have thus embarked on street activism despite knowing that neither the legislature nor the executive could do anything about the poll results, for the matter is now exclusively in the hands of the courts.
Since neither the former vice president nor the former Anambra governor is ignorant of the constitutional stipulations concerning defective elections, it is now clear that what both gentlemen want, especially instigated by powerful shadowy figures such as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, is interim government. How they hope to manage the composition and structure of an interim administration, and by whom, is impossible to fathom. President Muhammadu Buhari may have his failings, some of them interwoven with his difficult, sometimes narrow and controversial worldview, but he is dead set against any tenure elongation or involvement in the murky waters of interim government. He may not be as self-conceited as, say, Chief Obasanjo, but he is smart enough to know that once he embarked on that slippery road, no one, not even the malevolent former president, could tell where that treacherous path would lead to.
Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi carelessly and casually suggest interim government; but even they may not be prepared for its consequences. Surely those who won the presidential poll and took a majority of the state polls would not be of one mind with the proponents of annulment. The PDP and LP candidates remind everyone of the case adjudicated by the Israeli king, Solomon, who ordered the bisection of a baby in order to discover its real mother. The disturbing reality emerging after the elections is that neither Alhaji Atiku nor Mr Obi is really a democrat. They are not averse to extra-constitutional arrangements to mollify the shame they felt being defeated in an election they stood no chance of winning as a result of their political miscalculations. Both contestants as well as the many powerful individuals and baleful religious leaders in the background unused to having a strong president in office will continue to campaign, malign, sponsor propaganda against the polls, and engage in street protests in order to lessen the chance of a peaceful transfer of power in May.
President Buhari will not buckle. Nor will heaven. The inauguration will come and go without any incident. Those who have the gift of reading the signs of the times know this. The PDP and LP candidates and their political menagerie of instigators will continue to threaten fire and doom, but their wishes will be delusional. The social media, long deployed as a feral beast to harass and to heckle, will continue to lunge at everyone; but in the end, nothing will come out of their attacks. The military will not contemplate any action, for they are not fools. If they didn’t get away with the Ibrahim Babangida interim government contraption, and barely avoided another civil war in the 1990s, why would they repeat the folly? After all, they still teach history in military academies. Protesters egged on by bribes will also soon tire out, for no patron, regardless of his wealth, will be able to afford the unending flow of slush money needed to pacify drifters. The continuing effort by politicians and their media hacks to discredit the polls will soon peter out into fatuous and ineffective effusions.
Apart from inviting his co-contestants to join hands with him in pacifying the country and helping to sustain democracy and the rule of law, the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, can do little else. He will expect President Buhari to remain firm in the face of subterranean buffetings and political machinations. He will also expect Nigerians who detest both the unconstitutional manoeuvres and the influence peddling of northern and southern cabals to resist the plot by unprincipled and desperate PDP and LP candidates to scuttle democracy. But once inauguration is held, the new president will enunciate policies and ideas to heal and unite the country, knowing full well that the journey ahead would be long and hard. His immediate concerns will be the recalibration of the economy and the restoration of peace and security all over the country. Given the way he campaigned, and the way he has spoken after his victory, he will not embark on political vendetta, nor design policies and programmes to exclude one group or another.
But some of his biggest healing challenges will revolve around the irritating residues of presidential and governorship politics. He successfully built a tensile coalition involving the Northwest, Northeast, North-Central and Southwest, with smatterings of support from the South-South and a token from the Southeast; yet he may underestimate the potential damage the PDP and LP may have exposed the country to in whipping up regional, ethnic and religious sentiments during the campaigns. Alhaji Atiku, for instance, attempted to exploit ethnic sentiment in the old political North. Fortunately, it was less successful than feared. The APC secured a majority of votes in the old North. However, looking at the difference between the presidential and governorship polls, it is evident that ethnic politics still played a significant and stultifying role. Mr Obi did the most damage, and he did it remorselessly. Not only did he lather his presidential bid in the Southeast with ethnic colouration, perhaps believing that he stood no chance otherwise, he exported that crass narrowness to the Southwest and every pocket where the Igbo people congregate and do business. He was unabashed and relentless. It was, therefore, not surprising that his brand of ethnic politics came full obnoxious circle as well as played out to the hilt in Lagos during the governorship poll.
Much worse, and in an unprecedented manner, Mr Obi cashed in on the smouldering religious discontent all over Nigeria and gave it unparalleled energy. In the past, religious sentiment was exploited subtly and nervously in politics; but the LP candidate simply threw caution to the wind and made an open and obscene show of pitching for church votes. He traversed churches, indifferent to what Muslims thought or felt; and though he did not possess any doctrinal fidelity to the gospel, and may in fact be impliedly either atheistic or syncretic at bottom, he launched into the most consuming and ferocious farming of church votes ever. In so doing, he took the church down with him into the murky and sacrilegious waters of politics. If contrition is still possible, it will take a lot of efforts and time by church leaders to regain the trust and confidence of beleaguered worshippers long accustomed to the moral and judgemental infallibility of priests.
How a President Tinubu will heal these ethnic and religious divides remains to be seen, especially because his haters appear to be implacably opposed to his strong and confident personality, and especially as the peculiarity of his Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket also appeared to be the trigger for such hatred. He will hope that the graciousness, if not suavity, with which he related with and disarmed the Lagos chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), thus making them trust him implicitly, will be replicated at the national level. Should he prove capable of doing that, the religious divide may be obscured or obliterated. Going by his antecedents, he seems capable of doing just that. But what will not be as easy is erasing the fault lines religious politics has inspired and entrenched in the Southwest where they were least visible and inconsequential for centuries. Even more precariously, President Tinubu will make heavy weather of attenuating the ethnic fault lines Mr Obi’s unorthodox and desperate politics has calcified in Lagos and, ominously, in the Southwest. (See Box). Except he can, together with national lawmakers, find a constitutional formula that harks back to the federalism of the early 1950s, the scar the battle for Lagos has etched in the psyche of many people may be difficult to remove. At the core of that dissonance in Lagos and the Southeast are the cultural ossifications of the Yoruba and the Igbo. Those ossifications are not inspiring, nor do they conduce to healing, peace and stability. In the absence of a cultural formula to mediate that conflict, and as the society modernises and complexifies, it will get increasingly difficult to engender the trust and friendship needed to maintain peace in highly competitive milieus.
2023 poll: The battle of Lagos
AFTER winning the March 18 governorship poll in Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu declared that there was no victor and no vanquished. It was in an inaccurate and perfunctory depiction that does not mirror the reality of contemporary Lagos. The fact is that someone was vanquished, and someone was a victor. Even more, the resentment that flowed from the poll will linger for far longer than anyone dared to think. The resentment was caused by the fact that the victorious and defeated camps were nearly neatly divided in two: on the one hand is Mr Sanwo-Olu, his party the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the Yoruba who rallied behind the banner of reclaiming the state from ‘invaders’; and on the other hand are the Labour Party (LP), its governorship candidate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, and the Igbo who rallied behind him. The division is of course oversimplified, for there are some Yoruba who voted LP, and Igbo who voted APC.
But analysts have suggested that the acrimony and ethnic bigotry that accompanied the 2023 Lagos governorship poll was a throwback to the story of Lagos and the Western Region in 1951, when the Yoruba and Igbo also squared up for the regional diadem. Then, as now, the outcome was predictable, despite tons of painful, inciting and provocative rhetoric which pitched the Yoruba against the Igbo. If a constitutional solution that transcends Lagos and the Southwest is not found to mediate ethnic and religious politics in Nigeria, the crisis Lagos exhibited in unsightly colours in the 2023 elections will repeat itself and even get exacerbated. The Igbo have settled in large numbers and prospered in Lagos; it is unlikely they will not persist in their demand for more political inclusion. It is also unlikely that given the way the Igbo circle the wagons and vote en bloc – often against the dominant faction – that the Yoruba will not be alarmed that plans are afoot to dispossess them of their economic navel. So, it is not just the resentment between the two ethnic groups that will linger, their cultural worldview and political attitude to Lagos, and indeed the Southwest, will also harden. Sermonising and political counseling will not change these dispositions in any fundamental way.
One of the reasons that led to hardening of ethnic dispositions in Lagos is the environment in which the governorship poll was held. Lagosians have tried to isolate and insulate themselves from the wider Yoruba politics, insisting that they would not be swamped by the rest of Yorubaland. The Yoruba have of course ignored the protest and have insisted that the larger Lagos State, not to be confused with the former Lagos colony, was Western Region, which they have an obligation to defend and to integrate. Had they not done so over the decades, they insisted, the state, not just the colony, would have been overrun by the more business inclined and aggressive Igbo. It was, therefore, not difficult to situate the ambition of Mr Rhodes-Vivour within the context of the competing and existential struggle between the Igbo and the Yoruba. He did not help matters by his disinterest in Yoruba language and culture, dispositions worsened by the insular manner the Igbo rallied behind him, owned his ambition, and loudly and garishly proclaimed that ambition as inviolable. They then argued that within Nigeria’s constitutional stricture, not to say the cosmopolitan nature of Lagos, anyone, including the Igbo and the half-Igbo Mr Rhodes-Vivour, could aspire to any office.
If the Lagos quandary blindsided the constitution, and the document had no answer to the fears and apprehensions of the Yoruba, nor the desires and aspirations for inclusiveness of the Igbo, the social media was even less helpful. Incendiary rhetoric swpt the internet and amplified hate speech and disharmony to such a point that civil unrest or bloody skirmishes were not too far-fetched. Leading Igbo and Yoruba rhetoricians unabashedly promoted discord, while few rational analyses and discussions took place. The constitution did not anticipate that only a few states in the country would prosper so extraordinarily, thus triggering episodic influx of migrants, nor did it constrain week-old migrants from registering to vote in prosperous Lagos and other large cities. Lagos then became a victim of its success. More damningly, few people paused to wonder why, despite the pacesetting and unprecedented infrastructural development in Lagos, anyone would want to vote out Mr Sanwo-Olu or denounce the template inspired by president-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Worse, Mr Rhodes-Vivour was inexperienced, and had neither a governing or ideological template, nor the temperament and judgement needed to manage the fifth largest economy in Africa. To support his ambition as a few Afenifere leaders and the sullen Bode George and most Igbo did was nothing but suicidal.
What emerged from the last governorship poll was a determination by the Yoruba to be deliberately biased in favour of Lagos and their kin. Perhaps if Mr Rhodes-Vivour had played his politics well, distanced himself from ethnic extremists, demonstrated managerial or at least ideational competence, and refused to ride on the coattail of the equally ethnically divisive LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi, he would have been seen as credible. The mantra ‘Lagos for Lagos’ will get more diminished, and the larger Yoruba, having been sensitised to what they interpret as Igbo invasion, will loom much larger over the state going forward. The Southwest sees other regions protecting their own, and resisting incursions to dilute their heritage; they will feel more maternally inclined to protecting Lagos and resisting the diffusion and weakening which unregulated multiculturalism and untrammeled migration promote. Few multiethnic or multiracial countries are spared these enervating contradictions and conflicts: Belgium, Canada, United States, Switzerland, India, Russia, China, etc. The problem is widespread. It is thus futile pretending that such sentiments and rigidity are unique to Nigeria, or that multiculturalism, democracy and cosmopolitanism will extirpate primordial sentiments and attachments. It is urgent for Nigeria’s political leaders to develop a constitutional arrangement to arrest the drift towards chaos. The country escaped this fate by whiskers in the last polls. It may not be so lucky next time.
