Author: The Nation

NO matter how hard they try, both the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party will be unable to reverse the All Progressives Congress (APC) victory at the February 25 presidential poll. History and the incontestable statistics of the poll weigh heavily against them. They may have resorted to massive display of emotions and street activism, and are inundating the social media with bitter, tendentious and deceptive campaigns to undermine the integrity of the poll, but these too will miscarry. Little by little, as the weeks roll by, they will discover how truly herculean it is to undo a presidential poll result in these parts. In their separate press conferences, the PDP and LP presidential candidates spoke determinedly of their victories at the poll. But surely both can’t be right.

The winner, APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, an ideologue himself, will find it far easier to manage his victory and his party. He is fortunate that most of the governors who worked with him to deliver their states to the ruling party in the presidential poll are fairly ideological and centre-left politicians. The problem the party has had since assuming office in 2015 has been precisely coping with the extreme and countervailing conservatism of President Muhammadu Buhari. With the president’s exit in May, the APC will attempt to reposition itself and produce a tight and ideological party, regardless of the attenuating power of its diluted national spread and pan-Nigerian mandate. On the contrary, both the PDP and LP will probably enter a period of instability occasioned by the lack of ideological purity of their presidential candidates.

Despite his long years in politics, the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has no proven record of managing or leading a party. He is neither ideological nor patient when his goals are truncated. He prides himself a committed democrat, but he is averse to losing any contest within or outside his party. He has a history of defecting to other parties to further his goals. Since 1999, he has contested the presidency five times, thrice on PDP platform, once on Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) platform, and once on APC platform. He can’t bear defeat. At 76, he probably senses that he has run his last presidential race. Whenever he failed to clinch the presidential ticket, he easily lost interest in staying put in the party or contributing to its management and funding.

He will not win his suit to overturn the outcome of the 2023 presidential race. So he will not find remaining in the party attractive at all, especially not at his age. Running a party, as he knows very well, requires a lot of money and time, and even the most ingenious fundraising methods will still end up leaving shortfalls. He will be loth to fill those inevitable shortfalls. The question he will ask himself, given his character and penchant for opportunism and political migrations, is why he should help fund a party that is both fratricidal and regicidal, especially one he can no longer deploy for any future presidential ambition. It will take enormous patience and altruism, not to say funds, to manage and stabilise the PDP in the near future. Even if he possesses any of those priceless virtues, Alhaji Atiku will be uninterested in summoning them for any great cause. Nothing outweighs his interest in the presidency; and since that goal has now also become unachievable, his lack of altruism will not constrain him to invest his brittle talents in coaxing a fractious and difficult party.

The best the PDP can get from him in the weeks and months ahead is his half-hearted determination to ‘reclaim his stolen mandate’. He won’t help purge and reposition the party. After insinuating that his electoral tragedy was due in part to the defection of Mr Obi from the PDP shortly before the primary, Alhaji Atiku seems to be preparing the minds of his supporters for the inevitable judicial loss. He will leave the legal drudgery to his lawyers, of course, though he has proved to be very litigious himself. But overall, after winning only one geopolitical zone and coming embarrassingly short in the other zones, escaping being nearly trumped and disgraced by the upstart LP candidate, the already languid Alhaji Atiku may become despondent as he prepares his mind for political oblivion.

The LP’s Mr Obi is, on the other hand, touted as the revelation of the presidential election. Perhaps he is, especially after winning 11 states and the Federal Capital City (FCT), Abuja. After all, he nearly caused a tectonic shift in Nigerian politics by taking Lagos and the two North Central States of Plateau and Nasarawa. But it is not clear how or why he thinks he won the presidency or that he was rigged out. He had no appeal to the votes-laden Northwest, and barely made a dent in the Northeast. Even his showing in the Southwest was limited to Lagos. Had he won the presidency, he would have been unable to govern, despite the obtrusion, stridency and fanaticism of his clannish and episcopal supporters. He lacks the stoicism of Alhaji Atiku, and despite his pretences and homilies, he is neither ideological nor administratively adroit. He has also spoken fervently, if a little lachrymosely, about ‘reclaiming his stolen mandate’, though there was no conceivable way he could have achieved the two-thirds of 36 states threshold. His fanatical supporters defy gravity and reason in their flight of fancy, and the unscrupulous and increasingly demagogic Mr Obi has inflamed them to frenzy. No matter how much and long they inspect the BVAS and IReV, he will lose in the courts and must ultimately thereafter confront the fate he has tried so hard to evade.

The question he will face after he loses the court battle will be how to manage a Labour Party now inflated obscenely beyond its ideological foundations and electoral strength by circumstances quite unrelated to its structure and ideology. Apart from the Southeast which rallied unquestioningly to his banner, his other supporters, whether they are chafing Christians or cantankerous youths, also filed out behind him in reaction to the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket. Parties are not built on such fickle, impermanent foundations. In the months ahead, as the APC settles into the presidency and begins churning out engrossing and probably populist policies and programmes, the country will forget the ruling party’s same-faith ticket, and the LP, like ex-governor Olusegun Mimiko discovered years before when he rode on the back of LP to Ondo governorship, will have to prove itself in internal party administration and funding. The party will make heavy weather of both. Mr Obi shares no ideological affinity with the LP, and it remains to be seen whether the original founders of the party would let him foist his wafer-thin brand of ad hocism and ecclesiastical jingoism on the party. The race for Aso Villa helped the LP paper over its cracks; the cracks will be exposed soon, and the party’s ethnic undertones and sectarian undertow will emerge in dangerous and conflicting colours. Despite governing Anambra State for eight undistinguished years, Mr Obi has not managed a large party before; it is unlikely he has acquired the wherewithal to do so now, regardless of his affinity for platitudes and theories.

More than the PDP, which will likely be rescued and reconstituted by gritty and gifted men and politicians like Governor Nyesom Wike, the LP will be predisposed to centrifugal forces, its Christian arm withered, and its ethnic anchor calcified. The LP was a special purpose vehicle for the often eclectic Mr Obi; he must now face the unpleasant task of imbuing the party with a differentiating ideology and platform. Having scorned the relevance of manifestos in party politics and made little reference to it even after one was hurriedly cobbled for him, it is hard to see him turn the LP into anything that looks like something. If his presidential votes do not transform into substantial state votes to enable the party produce governors of enough financial heft and girth, and being himself offensively parsimonious without any redeeming impulse of generosity, the party’s leaders will have to create ingenious ways of funding the organisation. Eight years out of office had seen the PDP atrophy, despite producing many state governments; it remains to be seen how the more demagogic Mr Obi will navigate the rapids. The LP candidate has had a great run so far, with his time in APGA nothing but a psychogenic fugue, and he will possibly keep the tempo up as his court case grinds on. Soon, however, the effect of that political amphetamine will wear out. He will hope not to suffer withdrawal symptoms big enough on the Richter scale to cause him to implode, though this fate seems ineluctable.

What Tinubu presidency signposts (2)

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, won the February 25 election. He will preside over the affairs of Nigeria for the next four years in the first instance. Some analysts continue to question the statistical basis of his victory, insinuating that of the little over 25 million people who voted in that poll, only some 8.79 million endorsed him, while the remaining 16.5 million rejected him. That is not only poor statistical analysis; it is also sheer sophistry. What on earth does anyone expect of a four-horse race? Had any of the other ‘favourite’ candidates won, would the statistical validation of the election also be questioned? What is more significant, however, is not whether he won by a huge margin or not, since he won in line with the country’s electoral law, but what the Tinubu administration would mean for Nigeria. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) candidates have sworn to litigate the APC victory; they should go ahead to placate the humiliation they felt. But their suits will not change anything.

What matters more now is what a Tinubu administration will exemplify for Nigeria between now and 2027. To get a glimpse of that, a portrait of the man must be painted. That portrait was attempted on this page last week, but it was done in comparison with the other candidates. It was suggested in this place that while the PDP candidate had name recognition all over the country, seeing he had run for office five times since 1999, he had done little to convince the country sufficiently that he was the man for the job, that he possessed the staying power, the character, the politics, and the transformational skill and competence to turn Nigeria into a mini utopia. With every election cycle, he had become more and more jaded. It was also suggested here that the LP candidate could not have seriously hoped to win, but if he and his fanatical supporters nursed that hope, they were wallowing in dangerous illusions. Not only did he not plan to run for president while he was still in the PDP, and consequently had no working paper or manifesto to back his ambition, he also alarmingly tried to cash in on the frustrations of a section of Nigerian youths, on disaffected and distrusting Christians angered by APC’s same-faith ticket, and on the characteristically insular south-eastern support. It was impossible for him to win, for his methods and strategies invariably left out a huge chunk of voters from the Northwest, Northeast and Southwest, three geopolitical zones populous enough to change and determine the direction of any election.

When the three leading parties forswore alliance and headed into the election with all their hopes and illusions separate and intact, it was clear there could only be one outcome: APC’s victory. Many analysts may resent that victory, and some religious leaders may nurse the sacrilegious hope that God would take sides and turn that victory into ignoble defeat, if not death, but that victory will stand till May 29, and inauguration will take place. Neither the courts nor the world press fed on the toxic quinine of Nigerian social media can attenuate the quality of the victory or diminish the quality and capacity of the incoming administration. Of the three leading candidates in that election, Asiwaju Tinubu stood out in administrative competence, secular orientation, boldness, and consensus building. He is not divisive and clannish like Mr Obi, and is not unprincipled and opportunistic like Alhaji Atiku. Together with his equally modernising vice president-elect, Kashim Shettima, the president-elect will enthrone a truly secular administration in tune with the finest provisions of the constitution.

A few months before the election, the APC candidate met some editors in Lagos. He had earlier been badly excoriated in the press, with many essayists writing him off as infirm, halting, uncoordinated, and incapable of stringing a few sentences together without going off on a different tangent. But he walked briskly into the hall, shook everyone’s hands with boundless joie de vivre, greeted many of the editors by name, and once the discussions got underway, surprised sceptics by staying on point, exchanging banter, cracking jokes and speaking briefly but inspiringly to his manifesto. A few editors asked him questions, and he answered with panache. It was a revelatory evening. What came out that evening admittedly was not the image of an orator; it was the image of someone down-to-earth, someone accessible, a good-natured man without airs, without any complex, someone self-assured, willing to take and give opinions on issues and facts, no matter how disagreeable. In his presence, you could cross your legs without him feeling offended, and you could stand your ground if you felt strongly about your opinion. He will obviously not go into the presidency carrying airs, stifling differences, belittling the less fortunate, or suffocating dissenters.

In more than 35 years in politics, Asiwaju Tinubu never stopped making friends or building bridges, and he has been successful at both. He always rallied to the cause of the underdog, as his many electoral battles in defence of those whose electoral mandates were stolen illustrated. Neither Mr Obi nor Alhaji Atiku had such a record. It is a tribute to the damage caused by Nigeria’s overweening religious leaders and the excesses of social media activists and pillagers that the president-elect did not win by a much huger margin. What matters, however, is that his victory is a testament to his worldview as a fair-minded, tolerant and humanistic politician. To withstand all the arrows shot at him and the invectives hurled at his family and still emerge triumphant is a reflection of his staying power. He will need that resilience in the years ahead, for some diehards will never reconcile themselves to his victory.

By withstanding the darts shot by friends and foes in government and in high places, he also demonstrated his unmatched ability to keep his eyes on the ball. In the presidential election, critics abandoned the ineffective and uninspiring Alhaji Atiku, cuddled the impressionable and dreamy Mr Obi, but reserved their worst arrows for Asiwaju Tinubu. He had become the main issue. How to ensure he survived the fusillade became the main preoccupation of his aides, nearly all of whom were bright and engaging professionals sadly finding it hard to match the relentlessness and malevolence of the Obi group. 

Lagos governorship poll

IS it not political insanity for Labour Party campaigners to invest Africa’s fifth largest economy on the untested and superficial Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour? The goal in the Lagos governorship poll is this time not religious, as the presidential election exhibited three weeks ago, nor any desire to elect a better, more gifted administrator than the incumbent Babajide Sanwo-Olu. The goal is simply and foolishly ethnic. The LP hounds whose campaigns are vivified by Peter Obi’s performance in the presidential poll in Lagos see in the half-Igbo Mr Rhodes-Vivour an ethnic champion and anchor for their anti-establishment revolt, and they are willing to gamble away the most prolific and modernising economy in Nigeria on a neophyte. This is not just insanity, it is a suicidal push certain to complicate and poison ethnic relations in Lagos State far beyond the elections as well as retard the state.