Category: Segun Ayobolu

Despite his status, academic renown and reputation as one of the foremost political scientists with specialization on the politics of Africa particularly Nigeria, Professor Richard Joseph appears to have been substantially swayed by the largely propagandistic opinion polls that predicted a Peter Obi/Labour Party (LP) victory in the 25th February presidential election and the attempt to rely on this failure in electoral futurology to discredit the polls. In a brief critique of the election in the Chicago Tribune, the author of the classic, ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’ which was a rigorous and insightful analysis of the politics of the Second Republic, opined that “A highly touted system of electronic transmission of votes failed, leading to the manual collation of ballots. Accusations swirled that the failure was contrived so the results could be manipulated. Disregarding the protests on February 28 the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a former governor of the most populous State, Lagos, to be the elected President”.

Not surprisingly one of those quoted in Professor Joseph’s piece presumably with some subtle approbation was the globally acknowledged novelist and thinker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who in an open letter to President Joe Biden of the United States, had excoriated the election in which her fellow Igbo kinsman, Peter Obi, came third despite his much hyped pre-election probability of emerging triumphant in the polls.

Thus, echoing Chimamanda’s letter characterized by flawless prose reminiscent of her fiction but of negligible analytic value, Professor Joseph writes that “Peter Obi, a former governor from the South-East, galvanized a large following, particularly among youths, and was officially credited with 25% of the presidential vote. His ethnic group, the Igbos, feel excluded from Nigeria’s highest offices, and a fair share of power since the Biafran war of 1967-70. Obi’s “third force” poses a major challenge to the two-party dominant system”. Being substantially a fiction writer, Chimamanda can be forgiven for her imaginative flights of fancy in the realm of political analysis but not so a political scientist of Professor Joseph’s towering standing.

For one, within a decade after the Nigerian civil war, an Igbo man, the cerebral Dr Alex Ekwueme, had risen to become Nigeria’s Vice President in the Second Republic between 1979 and 1983. But for the military intervention of December, 1983, and the consequent prolonged absolutist rule, there is nothing to suggest that the dynamics and interplay of political forces would not have since produced an Igbo President. Again, during the respective presidencies of General Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr Goodluck Jonathan in this dispensation since 1999, qualified Igbo men and women occupied critical, influential and powerful national offices such that the hysteria of Igbo marginalization is mere emotive fantasy.

And while the dearth of Igbo representation particularly in the top hierarchy of the security architecture in the President Buhari Muhammadu administration was undesirable, the South-East has gained more in terms of infrastructural development in the region during the last eight years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) since 2015 than the preceding 16 years of the PDP despite the prominent positions of Igbos in government between 1999 and 2015. Professor Joseph thus ought to be more nuanced and restrained in his unquestioning regurgitation of the mantra of Igbo marginalization.

In any case, does the perceived marginalization of an ethnic group in high political offices in a complex, plural society like Nigeria mean that the apex political authority of the presidency will be conceded to them on a golden platter within the context of competitive elections even when they ignore the imperatives of negotiation, bargaining and bridge-building needed to actualize their objectives? If indeed Peter Obi’s “third force”, presumably the LP, has come to pose a major challenge to the two-party dominant system as posited by Professor Joseph, how come that the force of the veritable political “hurricane” had petered out by the governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections of March 18 with the LP winning only one governorship seat in Abia and even unable to win majority of legislative seats in Anambra, Peter Obi’s home state which he had previously governed for eight years?

Like Chimamanda, Professor Joseph makes much of the ‘large following’ supposedly enjoyed by Peter Obi among youths as a key factor in his undoubtedly impressive performance in the presidential election. But then, how come that his victories were in his ethnic South-East where he secured over 90% of the votes, Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with considerable Igbo enclaves and Christian populations as well as the largely Christian-dominant areas of the South-South, Southern Kaduna, Plateau and Nasarawa states? Do we not have substantial youth populations among the electorate in the South-West, North-West, North-East and half of the North-Central where tremors of the supposed Obi electoral earthquake were hardly felt? All the claims of a national groundswell of youth support for Obi and the LP surely deserves more rigorous and serious analytic scrutiny.

Even then, Professor Richard Joseph is too honest an intellectual not to acknowledge the improvement in the electoral structures and processes in the 2023 elections relative to most previous elections. Thus, he states, “Were there machinations to secure his (Tinubu’s) commanding 37% of the popular vote? Perhaps, but that is not a novelty in Nigerian elections. However, the bar is set higher because of the work of many civil society groups, a new Electoral Act, huge government sums in improving INEC’s capacity and extensive social media”. Incidentally, Professor Joseph devotes a whole chapter in his magnum opus to ‘Electoral fraud and violence’ in the Second Republic.

As we noted last week, the 1979 elections, despite the undisguised partisan preferences of the military umpires of the election as represented by the General Olusegun Obasanjo regime, was competitive and credible just like this year’s elections were to objective and intellectually honest observers.

In the distinguished professor’s words in that book, “At 1.30am on the morning of 11 August 1983, a long five days after the first elections were held, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was declared re-elected President of Nigeria by a vote of 12,037,648 to 7,885,434 (for his nearest rival Obafemi Awolowo). Shagari’s vote had doubled from his 1979 total, that of Awolowo had increased by approximately 40 per cent. Of equal importance is the fact that Shagari obtained a minimum of 25 per cent in 16 states of the Federation, compared with 12 states in 1979…”.

Pinpointing the import of the NPN’s purported victory in 1983, Professor Joseph notes that “One major cause of the electoral disorder of 1983, as earlier advanced, was the effort by the NPN to move from being a ruling party whose strength exceeded that of other parties, to one which enjoyed a monopoly of power within the political system. To achieve this objective, it was necessary for the party to increase the size of its vote in the states it already controlled, through its control of the voter registration and voting process, and to pry away from the opposition the heart of their political bases”.

The keenness of the contest and the outcome of the elections, shows that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) did not even attempt the kind of electoral heist perpetrated by the NPN in 1983 in the February and March, 2023, elections. Even if the party had wanted to, the reforms referred to earlier by Professor Joseph had enhanced the institutional autonomy of the electoral umpire as well as the technology-driven transparency of the voting procedures particularly the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, that made this impossible. Consequently, unlike the NPN which doubled its vote size between 1979 and 1983, the APC vote in the presidential election decreased from 15,191,847 in 2019 to 8,794,726 in 2023 while that of the PDP fell from 11,262,978 in 2019 to 6,984,520 in 2023. both Peter Obi who contested on the platform of the LP and Musa Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) were break away key stakeholders from the PDP and they had a combined total of 7,598,204 votes. Had they not depleted the votes of the PDP in its erstwhile strongholds in the South-East, South-South and Kano states, the latter could very well have emerged victorious if it had contested the election as a cohesive whole. This speaks to the credibility of the election. Beyond this, while the APC won 19 states in the 2019 presidential elections and the PDP 17 states and the FCT, both parties won 12 states each in the 2023 polls with the LP winning in 11 states and the FCT and the NNPP sweeping Kano. Had Professor Joseph taken all these factors into consideration, and there is no reason why he shouldn’t have, he would have been unlikely to lend his not inconsiderable intellectual weight to dishonest attempts to dent the integrity of the elections.

In any case, the main reason cited in the public domain by the PDP and LP for questioning the credibility and integrity of the Presidential election was the non real time uploading of the results from polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) as admittedly promised by the electoral body. INEC has since explained that its system suffered unanticipated glitches which made it impossible for it to do so immediately but this commitment in its guidelines has since been complied with – and all the results now fully uploaded. Since all political parties have copies of results on designated forms signed by their polling agents, electoral and security officials, they should now be in a position to compare these hard copy of results in their possession with the uploaded figures on the IREV so as to demonstrate the discrepancies between both and the consequent alleged massive rigging in favor of Tinubu and the APC. To the best of my knowledge, only one Online medium has reported yet unverified differences in the results posted on the IREV portal and the actual results declared in one state.

The responsibility to credibly discredit the results on the IREV portal is particularly that of Peter Obi who vociferously claims to have won the election despite coming third. Just like Chimamanda, Professor Richard Joseph apparently places much store by the failures associated with the promised uploading of polling units results on IREV and the alleged implications on the outcome of the elections. But this appears to be treated only as a tangential issue in Peter Obi’s petition as the focus of his claims and prayers are on Tinubu’s alleged forfeiture of funds in the US almost three decades ago, the alleged illegibility of Tinubu’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Kashim Shettima to contest the election and Tinubu’s failure to score one-quarter of the votes cast in the FCT. None of these appear designed to demonstrate convincingly and conclusively that Obi won and should have been declared Victor in the election.

As a one time governor of Enugu State, Senator Chimaroke Nnamani, aptly put it in a statement this week, “Obi’s petition is dead on arrival. He does not have the spread or national appeal. His appeal to non-electoral matters is to de-market the President-elect and besmirch his reputation. His petition is ego-driven, a joke carried too far. His attempt to highlight non-electoral issues is trying to embarrass the President-elect. Obi now needs to come down from his high horse to allow sedate minds to negotiate on behalf of the Igbo and the South-East for a safe landing to include our stake in the national palaver and share of the accruals of the commonwealth”. Nnamani is a medical doctor and not a lawyer but he makes eminent sense in my view.

As this column has had cause to mention in the past few weeks, the 2023 presidential election of February 25 in Nigeria, was a reincarnation in key respects of the 1979 presidential election that was held on August 11 of that year, witnessed the retreat of the military to the barracks and ushered in the Second Republic which lasted from 1979 to December 1983. Some analysts, bitter at their projected candidates losing in this year’s elections, have likened the 2023 presidential elections to the 1983 polls in which the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) had won a purported ‘landslide victory’ that directly brought the military back onto the political terrain with the emergence of the Muhammadu Buhari-Tunde Idiagbon military regime of December 31, 1983. This is a misplaced and misleading analogy. Compared to the fatally flawed 1983 elections massively rigged by the NPN, the 1979 elections, just like those of this year on February 25 and March 18, were characterized by a reasonable degree of competitiveness, transparency and credibility even though large numbers of Nigerians particularly from the South-West geopolitical zone of the country including this writer vehemently denied this fact at the time.

While there were five registered political parties that contested the 1979 elections, only four of the 18 parties that participated in the 2023 polls were key contestants in the polls. The five parties that ran in the 1979 poll were the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), the Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP), the Great Nigeria Peoples Party (GNPP) and the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). And for 2023, the main contenders in the presidential contest were the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP) and the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP). The 1979 election was a five-horse race while that of 2023 was a four-way contest. Given the dynamics of the comparative party systems of both periods, the ethno-regional origins of the key presidential candidates and the consequent perception of the sectional orientations of their parties were decisive determining factors in the outcome of the polls in 1979 and 2023 respectively.

In 1979, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba presidential candidate of the UPN, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo flew the flag of the NPP while Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim and Mallam Aminu Kano from the North were presidential candidates of the NPN, GNPP and PRP respectively. It was thus natural and understandable that the ethnic affiliations of the candidates reflected in their performance in the election. Mallam Aminu Kano of the PRP won a massive victory in his home state of Kano while his party performed impressively in Kaduna even winning the governorship of the state albeit narrowly. Similarly, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim’s GNPP won in the candidate’s home state of Borno and neighbouring Gongola states while Alhaji Shehu Shagari of the NPN won in the Northern states of Bauchi, Benue, Gongola, Kaduna, Kwara, Niger and Sokoto.

It must of course be borne in mind that at the time of the 1979 election, Nigeria comprised of19 states. In the presidential election, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe won in the South-East states of Anambra and Imo while also winning the predominantly Christian state of Plateau. On his part, Chief Obafemi Awolowo won massively in the South-West states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ondo as well as Bendel in the Mid-West while also recording an impressive 21.67% of the votes in Gongola State and 39.48% of the votes cast in Kwara. Thus, the overall pattern of voting was such that of the total voter turnout of 48,633,782 voters, Shagari scored 5,688, 857 (33.77%) to emerge winner, Awolowo recorded 4,916,551 (29.18%) to come second, Azikiwe scored 2,822, 523 (16.75%) to emerge third, Aminu came fourth with 1,732,113 votes (10.28%) and Waziri Ibrahim fifth with a score of 1,686,489 (10.01%). Yet, each of the opposition parties claimed that the elections had been massively rigged in favour of the NPN. But if the opposition had worked together before the election and presented a common front as they had been severally advised to do without success, their combined score of 11,157, 676 votes would have dwarfed the NPN’s winning figure and there is no way Shagari would have won the election.

What then gave Shagari and the NPN a decisive edge in the 1979 presidential election was that in addition to his outright victory in core northern states of Sokoto, Gongola, Bauchi, Kwara, Kaduna and Niger, he won in the minority states of Benue, Cross River and Rivers while coming a close second in Gongola, Kano, Plateau, Bendel and Borno. This was reminiscent of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s victory in the February 25 election, a phenomenon made possible by his winning majority of the votes cast in his South-West zone, a majority of votes cast in the North-West and North-Central while garnering substantial votes in the South-South. Just like Shagari’s winning formula in 1979, in most states where Tinubu did not come first on February 25, he came a close second to either Atiku or Obi. He won in three out of the six geopolitical zones in the country and did well in the South-South leaving the South-East as the only zone where he could hardly muster 5% of the votes in the area. Atiku won only in the North-East and Obi in the South-West and South-South with a good showing in the North-central. We repeat that there is no way either man could have met the stringent conditions to win the presidency- score the highest number of votes cast overall and win 25% of the votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of the states in the country including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

Just as Awolowo swept the polls massively in the South-West as well as the Mid-West in 1979, Peter Obi won a decisive and definitive victory in the South-East and most parts of the South-South on February 25 this year. But bounteous regional votes combined with Christian votes in Plateau and Nasarawa are grossly insufficient to propel anyone to victory in a presidential election in Nigeria. That is a lesson the Yorubas learnt the hard way in 1979. Ironically, most Yoruba including myself believed that Awolowo’s UPN was massively rigged out in 1979 just as the majority of Igbos believe Obi suffered the same fate this year. Nothing can be more fallacious. Obi concentrated his energies and campaign strategies on winning Igbo votes in the South-East, Igbo enclaves in urban agglomerations outside the South-East and Christian votes across the country particularly Southern Kaduna, Plateau and Nasarawa states. He reaped the votes he desired in those areas but these were insufficient to win him the presidency. That is the blunt truth. It has nothing to do with rigging. Similarly, Atiku unapologetically projected himself as the Northern Hausa-Fulani candidate and reaped a harvest of votes in the North that were mmm substantial but incapable of winning him the presidential diadem.

I remember listening to a current affairs discussion programme on NTA Ibadan a few days before the August 11, 1979, presidential elections which featured at least five lecturers from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ibadan. Towards the end of the programme, each discussant was asked to predict who would win the presidential election. To my utter disappointment and disenchantment, each of them who were all Yoruba by the way, predicted an outright victory for Shagari of the NPN. It turned out that they were right. The announcement of the result led to widespread dejection and despondency in the South-West. Awolowo had emphatically won the Yoruba votes based largely on his superlative performance as Premier of the Western Region in the First Republic. Unfortunately, his candidacy did not evoke that strong emotional attachment outside the South-West.

To worsen matters, Awolowo picked his running mate, a Christian like him, Chief Phillip Umeadi, from the South-East thus alienating the rich harvest of Muslim northern votes while at the same time not gaining electoral traction in the South-East. I recall that when he came to campaign in Ilorin, Kwara State, Awolowo took time off to worship at a church presided over by Primate Theophilus Olabayo of the Christ Evangelical Church of Yahweh Ministries. Incidentally, Olobayo had prophesied that the name of the next President was in the Bible.

Many thought this referred to Awolowo whose middle name was Jeremiah, a major biblical prophet. I can still remember a front page picture of Awolowo kneeling in prayer in the church published in the Nigerian Herald, the Kwara State government newspaper. The optics were not the best for Awo in a state with a substantial Muslim population like Kwara. Of course, when Shagari won the election, Primate Olobayo rationalized his failed prophecy by pointing out that there was also the name of a character called Shamgar in the Bible!

Just like Peter Obi in 2023, there is no way Awolowo could have won the 1979 presidential elections contrary to the strong desire of most Yorubas. Peter Obi’s choice of a Northern Muslim political lightweight, Baba Datti-Ahmed, as his running mate could not make up for the grievous harm done to his candidacy by vociferous and extremist pastors and Pentecostal’Daddies’ who projected his campaign as a religious war by other means.

Following his loss in 1979, Awolowo challenged the outcome of the election at the Election Petition Tribunal up to the Supreme Court but lost. Although we berated the judiciary at the time for its decision on the election petition, it occurred to me years later that there was no way the judiciary could grant victory to a UPN that won in five out of 19 states and had 25% in six states over the NPN that won in nine states and had 25% in 12 states with a substantial number of votes in a 13th state. It was a matter of common sense.

In the approach to the 1983 elections, Awolowo’s UPN went into a working agreement with a faction of the Northern political elite headed by the late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua who nominated his running mate, Alhaji Muhammadu Kura. In that flagrantly rigged 1983 election, Shagari won re-election scoring 12,081,471 votes (47.51%) to Awolowo’s 7,907,209 votes (31.09%) with Azikiwe coming third with 3,557,113 votes (13.99%). Within weeks the military had struck and the Second Republic was history. Members of the opposition were overjoyed but the celebration soon turned to ashes in their mouths. For, the new military regime made no distinction between members of various political parties as they routinely harassed, intimidated and persecuted politicians across party boundaries while launching the country on a downward trajectory that could not have been contemplated even under the worst civilian administration.

It would appear from all indications that one of the key participants in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential elections, the Labour Party (LP), and its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, had a clear-cut and straightforward agenda to dictate the dominant narrative on the polls before and after the exercise. Before the elections, a number of sponsored and obviously flawed opinion polls had predicted an outright victory for Obi on February 25. In a worst-case scenario, they projected that the election would head for a run-off with Obi being one of the candidates that would qualify to participate in the supplementary poll. Although many influential foreign media houses apparently accorded utmost seriousness to these polls, their empirical basis was largely entirely unreliable as succinctly explained by renowned senior lawyer and Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption (PACAC), Professor Itse Sagay, in a recent interview on Channels Television.

For one, the legal luminary submitted, the sample sizes of most of these polls were too limited to be of significant scientific value. Again, questionnaires and inquiries were directed mostly at urban-based educated youths who were accessible on the phone while the no less substantial number of illiterate rural dwellers particularly in the North-West and North-East were neglected in the conduct of the opinion polls.

It was thus not surprising that the ultimate outcome of the presidential election, in which Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) emerged as the outright winner proved the utter distance of the predictions of the opinion polls from Nigeria’s political realities. While Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) came second in the election, Peter Obi’s LP emerged third although posting an impressive result given the fragility of the LP’s political structures across the country before the elections. Rather than seeing Obi and the LP’s haul of 6,101,533 votes and his outright victory in 11 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) as being indicative of the credibility of the election, local and international supporters of the LP have doubled down on the claim that their candidate won a decisive victory at the polls without demonstrating credibly how this could have been a probable outcome of the election.

While the winner of the contest, Bola Tinubu, recorded 8,794, 726 votes, the runner-up, Atiku Abubakar, scored 6,984,520 votes. Interestingly, even though both Atiku and Obi have filed their petitions against the results of the polls before the Presidential Elections Petitions Tribunal (PEPT), it is Obi who came third and his supporters that have been most vociferous in decrying the elections, which they insist the LP won. Atiku led some members and key officers of the PDP on a one-day protest at the premises of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja and has, presumably, since abandoned that ultimately futile route to enable his lawyers diligently pursue his case before the Election Petition Tribunal.

Apologists of the Obidients and the LP have continued to stridently delegitimize the February 25 presidential election and denude it of all credibility and integrity by shouting themselves shrill that the exercise was massively rigged. Challenged to demonstrate through empirical facts and impeccable logic how Obi could possibly have won the election especially given the kind of narrow ethnic, regional, and religious campaign that he ran, the LP candidate’s supporters respond with even more vehement assertions that Obi was the victim of a stolen mandate.

One narrative cavalierly peddled by the Obi/LP’s vociferous social media mob is that the February 25 presidential election was the worst ever in Nigeria’s history. Of course, this kind of ignorant statement can be readily forgiven and its purveyors advised to get better acquainted with their country’s political and electoral history. Could these people who make these reckless and patently implausible claims have in mind, for instance, the 1964/1965 federal and Western Regional elections respectively? Any standard political science text on Nigerian politics contains accounts of those fraudulently manipulated elections in which the majority of candidates to various parliamentary seats were announced as returned unopposed when their opponents had been denied the opportunity to obtain nomination forms by the electoral commission.

It was that stupefyingly rigged election, in which the immensely unpopular Samuel Ladoke Akintola government was riding back to power on the wings of superlative electoral fraud; an election in which leading members of the Akintola government in the Western Region had publicly boasted that the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) would win whether or not the people voted for them that Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, reacted to in the famous gun incident at the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation in Ibadan. Yet, the Obidients lynch mob has tried in futility to demonize and discredit Soyinka for his courageous action as a 31-year-old at the time without any regard for the canons of historical and analogical equivalence.

If it is agreed that incidents of violence and related deaths have a proportional relationship to the scale of rigging in elections, it is noteworthy that documented records indicate no less than 200 deaths in the aftermath of the 1964/65 federal and regional elections compared to between 13 and 21 deaths in sporadic incidents across the country in the 2023 presidential and governorship elections. The estimated number of deaths during various elections includes 100 in the 1993 elections, 80 in 1999, 180 in 2003, 300 in 2007, 800 in 2011, 100 in 2015, and 150 in 2019. Despite the exaggerated reports of violence in a minuscule number of the over 176,000 polling units throughout the country, the scale of violence in the 2023 elections was the least in the country’s history.

Or could those who claim that this year’s elections are the worst ever have in mind the 1983 election; an exercise during which the all-powerful Minister of Transportation and strongman in the President Shehu Shagari administration, Alhaji Umaru Dikko, had boasted that the then ruling National Party of Nigeria ( NPN) would win not just a ‘landslide’ but a ‘moon slide’ victory. Even as the collation of results in that election was underway at the Headquarters of the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), Umaru Dikko stormed the building for mysterious and unaccountable reasons thus badly compromising FEDECO’s declaration later of the incumbent, President Shehu Shagari, as the winner of the election.

No such incident occurred to vitiate the credibility and integrity of the 2023 elections. Or are bad election losers comparing the 2023 elections with the 2003 and 2007 elections widely acknowledged as easily the worst and integrity-deficient in this dispensation since 1999? In this regard, with respect to the February 25 presidential elections, the results were least competitive and thus least credible in the South-East zone where Obi scored over 95% of votes cast by his Igbo kith and kin.

In contrast to the monolithic block voting of the Igbo in the South-East, Peter Obi won in Lagos while Atiku Abubakar won in Osun both in Tinubu’s South-West ethnic-regional political base. Similarly, Obi won in Nasarawa and Plateau states while posting an impressive performance in Benue while Tinubu won in Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Borno, Zamfara Jigawa states in Atiku’s Northern base. It was only in Obi’s Igbo base that no other of the three leading candidates could score up to 25% of the votes cast. Ironically, when he appeared on the Channels Television ‘Politics Today’ programme, Obi’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmad, claimed that the over 6.1 million votes received by his party at the presidential polls were valid, accurate, and not rigged.

The implication is that where the LP won, the election was free, fair, and credible while rigging and manipulation occurred only where Peter Obi and the LP lost. Till date, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar have not been able to credibly and coherently explain how Tinubu lost Osun and Lagos in the South-West or how even President Muhammadu Buhari and other key leaders of the APC presidential campaign council lost in states like Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi, Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi or Taraba in an election widely touted as massively rigged. The APC went into the election with at least 21 governors but won the presidential election in only 12 states. This shows that the power of incumbency, an ordinarily critical factor in Nigeria’s elections, was of negligible significance in this election cycle.

Not less critical is the fact that Atiku also won in 12 states while Obi triumphed in 11 states and the FCT, which made the 2023 polls one of the most competitive and thus credible in the country’s history. The introduction of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS), in accordance with the Electoral Act, also significantly enhanced the credibility of the 2023 polls relative to those before it, particularly in this dispensation. According to reports by credible observers, the BVAS recorded an 88% success rate in the over 176,000 polling units across the country although 240 of these polling units had been demobilized by INEC before the elections because they had no voters.

In 9% of the polling units in which the BVAS malfunctioned, they were fixed and put into use while in 2% of polling units malfunctioning BVAS machines were replaced. The efficiency of the BVAS machines was clearly one reason why of the 93.5 million registered voters only 24.9 million actually turned out to vote in this year’s elections. In the 2015 elections, 29.4 million were recorded as turning out to vote while this figure was reduced to 28.6 million in the 2019 elections.

A comparison of the performance of the APC relative to the opposition parties in 2015, 2019, and 2023 presidential elections also speaks to the credibility and integrity of this year’s election. In 2015, the APC scored 15,424,921 votes and in 2019, the ruling party recorded 15,191,847 votes in the presidential election. On its part, the PDP won 12,853,162 votes in 2015 and 11,262,978 votes in the 2019 presidential election. While the APC’s margin of victory over the PDP in the 2015 presidential elections was 2,571,759 votes, the margin in 2019 was 3,928,869 votes and the margin this year was 1,810,206.

As was pointed out last week, had the PDP contested the February 25 presidential elections as one cohesive entity instead of breaking up into Peter Obi’s LP, Rabiu Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) and the G5 governors led by Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State constituting a powerful opposition to Atiku’s aspiration within the party, Atiku would have been exceedingly difficult to defeat in the election. As for Peter Obi, with a massive victory in the South-East, a modest triumph in the South-South and fair performances in Plateau and Nasarawa states in the North-Central, he ought really to be celebrating the unexpectedly strong showing of his party, a performance that underlines the substantial credibility of the elections, and going back to the drawing board to conduct a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis in preparation for future elections.

Obi campaigned massively and relied on massive Igbo votes in his South-East enclave while also depending on the South-South’s geo-ethnic and Christian religious affinity with the South-East to win considerable votes in the South-South. He also concentrated on winning large constellations of Igbo and Christian votes in Lagos, Plateau and Nasarawa states as well as the FCT to perform well in these areas. This could not however pave a path for him to the presidency in a situation in which he won only in two regions – South-East and South-South – and posted an abysmal performance in the vast North-East and North-West, regions in which he did not score 25% of the votes cast in any state.

In a similar vein, Atiku won in only Osun in the South-West as well as Akwa-Ibom and Bayelsa in the South-South losing the two regions to Tinubu and Obi respectively. Atiku campaigned as an unrepentant northern candidate and did quite well in the region even though he won an outright victory only in the North-East and lost overall votes in the North-west and North-Central to Tinubu. He did not record an outright victory in any of the three zones in the South. Obi too did not win an overall totality of votes in any of the three regions in the North. It is impossible for a sectional candidate to win a presidential election in Nigeria. That is the reality of the outcome of the presidential elections no matter how the supporters of losing candidates choose to delude themselves.

One myth spun about the politics of Lagos State in this dispensation, a fallacy reinforced by many analyses of the Saturday, February 25, presidential election in which Mr Peter Obi’s Labour Party (LP) defeated the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress ( APC) by a little less than 10000 votes in the state, is that the country’s commercial nerve-Centre and economic powerhouse has been under the dictatorial grip of one man since 1999. It is as if elections never held in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019 as constitutionally required and that successive governors of the state have simply been picked and foisted on the state without the participation of the people in general elections.

True, one party in its various mutations from the Alliance for Democracy (AD) to Action Congress (AC) to Action Congress of Nigeria ( ACN) and now the All Progressives Congress (APC) has enjoyed political dominance in Lagos over the last two and a half decades. However, this does not mean that elections in the state during this period have been a stroll in the park for Tinubu’s dominant progressive tendency. For the most part, elections have been highly competitive in Lagos State indicating that a vibrant democratic culture exists in the state while it is also noteworthy that the state had remained in opposition until 2015 and all elections between 2003 and 2015 were conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) under the control of the PDP-controlled federal government in that period.

INEC under the imperious President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration did not enjoy the kind of institutional autonomy it does today and PDP chieftains, notably Chief Olabode George, routinely boasted of the ease with which they would ‘capture’ Lagos. Yet, despite Obasanjo deploying troops to Lagos for that purpose, Lagos was the only state that refused to capitulate to the PDP Tsunami that swept the AD out of power in Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, Ondo and Oyo states in 2003. Tinubu remained the ‘last man standing’ winning a hotly contested election in which the PDP had the late Engineer Funsho Williams, a technocrat who had risen to the peak of his career as a Permanent Secretary in the Lagos State civil service and served as Commissioner for Works during the tenure of Olagunsoye Oyinlola as military administrator of the state, as its governorship candidate.

In the 2007 governorship election in Lagos State, Obasanjo vowed to ‘capture’ the prized state for the PDP deploying troops once again for that purpose and personally coming to campaign in the three Senatorial Districts of the state for the PDP governorship candidate, Senator Musliu Obanikoro, despite which the AC triumphed. The AC candidate, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) polled 599, 300 votes (51.48%) to beat PDP’s Obanikoro who scored 383,956 votes (32.98%) while Mr. Jimi Agbaje of the Democratic Peoples Alliance (DPA) scored 114, 557 votes (9.84%). Combined, the opposition had a healthy 42.64% of the vote.

Fashola’s 1,509,113 votes in 2011 (81.03%) has been the highest so far by any winning candidate in a governorship election in the state in this dispensation. His main opponent, Dr Shamsudeen Dosumu, of the PDP recorded 300,450 votes (16.13%). In 2015, Mr. Akinwumi Ambode of the APC scored 811,994 votes (54.94%) while Mr. Jimi Agbaje of the PDP got 659, 788 votes (44.64%). And in 2019, the incumbent governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, scored 739,445 votes (75.65%) while Mr. Jimmy Agbaje of the PDP recorded 206,141 votes (21.09%). The sharp decline in the PDP’s share of the votes in 2019 has been attributed to protracted factional infighting within the party and Chief Olabode George’s alleged high handed leadership that has resulted in the incessant depletion of quality party membership over the years.

Over all, however, the opposition has always been active and posted impressive results in virtually all governorship elections in Lagos State.

However, the APC has no excuse for not taking due notice of the decline in voter participation in elections from 2011 to 2019 and taking proactive steps to halt a trend in which its share of the votes steadily dropped from Fashola’s 1,509,800 votes in 2011 to Sanwo-Olu’s 739,445 votes in 2019. According to a research report, Lagos State led the states with the lowest voters turnout in 2019 with 1,089,567 voters (17.25%) even though out of the 6,570,291 registered voters, 5,531,389 had collected their PVCs. The APC machinery did nothing to interrogate and take measures to counteract this trend.

Ethnicity was clearly a key determining variable of voter behavior in the February 25 elections and not just in Lagos. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the PDP won most of the key states in the Northwest and Northeast such as Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Yobe, Zamfara, Kebbi and Taraba although Tinubu from the Southwest won in Jigawa, Kogi, Niger, Kwara, Benue and Borno states while Peter Obi’s Labour Party (LP) won in Plateau and Nassarawa states in the North-Central. In a similar vein, Tinubu won in Oyo, Ogun, Ondo and Ekiti states but lost Osun to Atiku and Lagos to Obi in his Southwest region.

The most ethnically monolithic voting behavior, however , occurred in the Southeast where Obi won over 95% of the votes of his Igbo kinsmen in the five states of the region. In Lagos, the Igbo bloc voting in areas where they have large populations propelled a hitherto marginal LP to a narrow victory in the presidential election although the APC won all three Senatorial seats and 20 of the 24 House of Representatives seats in the state.

The fact that the LP in Lagos, which has utilized the ethnic factor to become the major opposition party in the state, is fielding a Gbadebo Chinedu Rhodes Vivour as its governorship candidate in today’s election has strengthened the belief in many quarters that the Igbo have an expansionist agenda in Lagos and have ambitions to take over political control of the country’s most economically viable state. That the LP candidate’s mother as well as his wife are Igbo and that he speaks only a smattering of Yoruba have become key issues in today’s election largely because of the Igbo bloc voting in the February 25 election as well as the insensitive claim by many Igbo residents of the state over the years that Lagos is a ‘no man’s land’, a claim that riles most Yorubas.

Furthermore, Gbadebo Chinedu Rhodes Vivour admitted on live television that he does ‘not think in Yoruba’, a fact that demonstrates his cultural distance and alienation from the majority of the people in this core Yoruba state of the Southwest that he seeks to govern. Furthermore, several of his tweets in the past, many of which have been reportedly pulled down following his emergence as governorship candidate of the LP, indicate that he is a strong supporter of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) and its separatist aspirations. He has admitted being an active organizer and participant in the 2020 #EndSars protests that turned into an orgy of violence in which public and private property estimated at over N2 trillion were destroyed in Lagos. Videos that have already gone viral showing the now incarcerated leader of IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, ordering that select properties of targeted individuals, all Yoruba, be attacked and destroyed by the #EndSars protesters suggest that what started as a noble nationwide action against police brutality nationwide was hijacked and used to pursue an ethnic agenda in Lagos.

Another video that has gone viral is that of a LP meeting in a community in Abia State where it was repeatedly stated that the party’s target was not just to win in Abia but even more importantly to take over Lagos “at all cost”. All of these suggest that today’s election will be underlined by serious ethnic undertones as the Yorubas are likely going to mobilize to participate actively in the exercise unlike the apathy they demonstrated in the previous election. And the antipathy to the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket among Pentecostal Christians in particular which played a key factor in the outcome of the presidential election in Lagos will certainly not be a determining variable in today’s elections in the state.

But regular online public affairs analyst, Michael Ogueke, believes that the anti-Igbo narrative is only an excuse by a lazy and complacent APC machinery to rationalize its loss in Lagos. According to him, “Yorubas in Lagos that make up 70% of the registered voters refused to come out to vote. About half of those who came out to vote voted Labour. And party officials were busy pocketing mobilization funds without adequately taking care of their field officers and polling agents and as a result many could not be at their polling unit duty posts thus allowing the LP’s field agents to rig everything in favour of Labour in their backyard”.

In the midst of all this, Sanwo-Olu has adopted a characteristically statesmanlike posture and risen above the fray. In a broadcast to the state ahead of today’s elections, the governor said “Dear Lagosians, as we go out to vote on Saturday, let me make this very clear: No electoral victory is worth the blood of any Lagosian, regardless of faith, ethnic origins or political affiliation. My desire is not just to win this election; my desire is as well to win Peace and Unity for our dear state”. Continuing he said, “To those who have been hurt by ethnic profiling by fellow citizens in the course of this campaign, I plead that you forgive…This is perhaps the greatest take away from this whole election- our need to heal and move past the divisive rhetoric that has shaped the course of this election cycle. What unites us as Lagosians is far more important and substantial than whatever differences exist among us”.

Some have framed this election as a referendum on the last 24 years of the political hegemony of the Tinubu progressive tendency in Lagos State. If so, the state has made definite, identifiable and undeniable developmental strides across diverse sectors. From a largely financially insolvent state that generated an internal revenue of a miserly N600 million per month in 1999, Lagos today has an IGR that has crossed the N40 billion mark monthly and has been nurtured to become Africa’s fifth largest economy. The Lekki Deep Sea Port, the Blue Line Light Rail mass transit project and its ongoing Red Line complement, the phenomenal Eko Atlantic City project that has emerged from the belly of the sea on which is being built the United State’s largest embassy in the world; the Lekki Free Trade Zone where the Dangote oil refinery, one of the largest in the world is located; the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) mass transportation initiative that has delivered Lagos from the ancient Molue buses that once dominated road transport in the state are just a few indicators of the largeness of vision and lofty ambition that has defined governance in the state in the last two and a half decades.

There is a reasonable consensus that Sanwo-Olu has impressively carried on from where his predecessors stopped and even improved on their performance despite having to respond to such unanticipated emergencies as the Coronavirus pandemic as well as the disruptive and destructive #EndSars violence in the state. True, after prolonged periods of rule by one party or tendency, it is only natural for human beings to desire change even for the sake of change. But then, even in the quest for change, does it make sense to trust the management of Nigeria’s most strategic and complex state which is also Africa’s largest economy to candidates with zero managerial experience in either the private or public sectors? Most rational voters will most likely answer the question in the negative.

But the APC must also realize that the longer it stays in power in Lagos, the greater the imperative for it to continually renew and reinvent itself as a party, maintain its organizational dynamism and vibrancy and, most importantly, remain in close organic linkage with its grassroots support base which must never be given the impression that they are being taken for granted.

WHO exactly is Jesus Christ, the rock solid foundation on which Christianity rests? Some say he was a great man, a moral exemplar, an inimitable teacher or a gifted story teller among other perceptions. When Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say I am?”, they replied that some said he was John the Baptist, others that he was Elijah or one of the prophets. However, when Jesus asked who the disciples themselves thought he was, Peter responded by saying that Jesus was the son of God and the expected Messiah of mankind. Impressed, Jesus said this truth could only have been revealed to Peter by the Holy Spirit.

For those who perceive the Lord Jesus in mere human terms as morally good or as one of the great out of the many great personages of history, Professor Clive Staples Lewis, one of the brightest minds of the 20th century, a former atheist turned Christian, affirmed in his book, ‘Mere Christianity’, that “I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God’. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God or else a madman or something else…But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that door open to us. He did not intend to”.

It is astonishing that with a substantial number of Nigerians still unreached with the message of the gospel of Christ, and many more ranking among the billions in the world who remain completely at sea as regards who the man of galilee is, many Nigerian Christian leaders are so obviously preoccupied with and distracted by partisan politics especially in the run-up to next year’s elections. But the prime and most critical mission of the church is to preach good news of salvation through Christ and win souls into God’s kingdom. It is in this sense that the Lord Jesus described the church as the salt of the earth. But of what use is salt when it has lost its saltiness, Jesus asked?

Is the church losing its saltiness by descending into the arena of partisan politics? This appears to be the case sadly. But the church is not a political organization. It is first and foremost a spiritual body. A situation in which churches take partisan political positions and even some trying to corral their members to follow their choices by declaring on their altars that those who vote against a Christian candidate would go to hell, could have long run deleterious consequences especially because membership of churches comprise people of different partisan preferences.

Perhaps the first distraction for the Christian church in Nigeria was the astounding prosperity with which God has blessed her. This has led to an obsessive materialism on the part of many church leaders that has made it difficult to distinguish the church from the world. Prosperity is not a sin and poverty is not synonymous with virtue. But the prosperity gospel can easily become a snare to the church if the emphasis is on the acquisition of wealth, the competition among church leaders to ride the best posh vehicles, fly in their personal private jets or live in the most majestic houses as well as build the most magnificent, sprawling houses of worship. I can recall the man of God who famously declared that he wished the COVID-19 pandemic could continue to rage because it was during the lock-down that he bought another private jet. Statements like this, breed distrust and discontent against Christianity and the gospel by many who believe that the Christian Ministry has become nothing but a money-spinning enterprise by men of God who have become desensitized to the poverty of many of even their members many of who, ironically, pay their tithes and offerings faithfully. But I digress.

It is the pervasive and blatant political partisanship of many church leaders, particularly those of the Pentecostal persuasion that is the potential greatest danger to the credibility of Christ’s gospel and the integrity of the church today. The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Peter Obi, has strived more than any other candidate in the run-up to the 2023 election, to play on the Christian religious card just as former President Goodluck Jonathan did during the 2015 elections, which he nevertheless lost. Earlier this month, Obi was at the annual Convention of the Winners Chapel, Ota, popularly tagged ‘Shiloh’, where, just like in the many other churches whose events and gatherings he has attended in what can only be described as politically opportunistic church tourism, he was introduced by colluding clergy in a way as to elicit excitable applause for him.

Speaking on the occasion, the founder and spiritual leader of the church, Bishop David Oyedepo, claimed that what Nigeria needs now is not a leader but a deliverer. Unfortunately, he did not expatiate sufficiently on exactly what he meant by that distinction. Was he referring to Obi as his envisaged deliverer of Nigeria? If so, he did not state what the characteristics of a deliverer are and how Obi fits the bill. Was Obi’s performance as two-term governor of Anambra State so stellar that we can credibly rely on his record to conclude that he is Nigeria’s long-desired deliverer? It is not enough for a man of God, no matter how revered, to magisterially declare one candidate as the deliverer Nigeria needs without offering compelling logical and empirical reasons for his arriving at that conclusion.

Or, could it have been a revelation from God? If so, will church leaders who take blatantly partisan positions and speak ex-cathedra from their altars in the name of God not risk bringing God to disrepute if such political projections turn out to be wrong and misguided as has happened a number of times in the past? Bishop Oyedepo told his congregation that he warned the nation in 2015 that the nation was headed for a disastrous crisis if his voice was not heeded on the election. At that time he was one of those Christian leaders rooting for Jonathan and the PDP. He gave the impression in his sermon that the challenges the country faces today started with the APC assuming power in 2015. The truth is that the problems of today have their roots in the venality, incompetence and lack of vision of the PDP’s 16 years in power although the APC ought to have done much better in confronting these challenges including insecurity and the management of the economy. Unfortunately, the Christian leadership was implicated in the massive corruption of the Jonathan years.

It is difficult to understand how some Pentecostal pastors in particular are doing everything to influence their congregations to vote for a supposedly Christian candidate in the person of Peter Obi. This divisive campaign and its undisguised Christian religious undertone may swing a good number of votes in certain quarters to Obi but it may at the same not sway an also not inconsiderable number of Christians from voting for other candidates. On the other hand, Obi’s openly divisive campaign will definitely hurt the (LP) candidate grievously in huge Muslim voting blocs across the country.

In any case, what has been Obi’s track record in terms of his relationship with Christian leaders and the Christian church before now that he is seeking to ride on the back of Christians to occupy the country’s apex position of authority as President? Did he attend these church gatherings before now that he religiously does now? Is it true that he marginalized Anglicans and favoured Catholics as governor of Anambra State? Obi’s supporters claim that he returned Christian schools taken over by government to their owners as governor. But there is nothing spectacular about that.  Asiwaju Bola Tinubu returned mission schools to their original owners as governor of Lagos State. In fact, though a Muslim, Tinubu returned more schools to their original Christian mission owners than to the Muslim missions. Again, Tinubu built a chapel at the Lagos State House at Marina to enable Christian members of staff have a convenient place to observe their religious obligations.

Before Tinubu, there was only a Mosque at the State House. His wife is not just a Christian; she is a senior pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Throughout his eight-year tenure as governor of Lagos State, the annual New Year thanksgiving service always held with the revered General Overseer of the RCCG, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, ministering. There is no evidence of Tinubu compelling members of his family to convert to his religion, which makes nonsense of the argument that a Muslim-Muslim ticket will lead to the Islamization of the country. In any case, how is that even constitutionally possible?

True, the church cannot be indifferent to the social, political and economic milieu within which it operates. But on no account must she descend into the partisan arena as a participant. Nigerian Pentecostals in particular must learn the appropriate lessons from the experience of the Evangelicals in America who had passionately backed former President Donald Trump without restraint only for the latter to lose the election to Joe Biden this year. Some Christian leaders cite the Biblical aphorism in the book of Proverbs that when the righteous rule, a nation prospers to justify their political partisanship. But who constitute the righteous? Does bearing a Christian name, attending church or even having lofty Christian titles necessarily indicative of righteousness?  It is dangerous for man to seek to usurp God’s sovereignty in determining who the leader of a country or entity will be at any time even though Christians have a responsibility of using their votes and prayerfully.

It is necessary to repeat that the primary and most critical mission of the church is to help save the souls of men through the preaching of the good news. In doing so, the church does not need to have men in high positions of authority such as President or Vice President etc. to achieve its goals. In his scintillating book, ‘Jesus: The Man Who lives’, the British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge (1903- 1990), writes, “When he was approached by someone important like Nicodemus, it never seems to have occurred to him, as it surely would to any ordinary evangelist or promoter of good causes, that, such a man, with valuable contacts and influence, would be of service to his ministry. What he had to say to Nicodemus was precisely the same as what he had to say to the meanest beggar or the most disreputable tax collector – the equivalent, then, of today’s property-developer – that he must be reborn, and become a new man”.

The Lord Jesus avoided the palaces and mansions of the rich and powerful while on earth. Anytime he accepted an invitation to the habitations of the rich and influential such as Mathew the tax collector, it was to speak words of truth to them thus leading to their salvation. He was completely aloof to the politics of the Roman Empire and the desire of the Jews for liberation from the bondage of Rome. Stressing that his kingdom was not of this world, He rejected any attempt to be crowned King of the Jews by those desirous of a secular Messiah. Yet, a small band of his disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit, turned the Roman Empire upside down and caused the behemoth to succumb to the message of a gospel spread by the most humble and lowliest of men.

In his tome, ‘The Penguin History of the World’, Professor J.M. Roberts states that “Emphatically, Jesus rejected the role of political leader and a political quietism was one of the meanings later discerned in a dictum which was to prove to be of terrible ambiguity: ‘My kingdom is not of this world”. And Malcolm Muggeridge reiterates this point in his submission that “In his teachings, too, Jesus continually stressed the fallacy of looking to this world and its rulers for help and guidance in fulfilling God’s purposes…the profound distrust of power which Jesus inculcated has lived on in the hearts of those who have lost him most and served him best”.

•This article was first published December 24, 2022

Today marks yet another critical milestone in the democratic evolution of Nigeria. The fundamental idea of politics and democracy rests on the premise that those who have the legitimate right to allocate scarce resources and values in society as well as determine who gets what, when and how are determined through the will of the majority as expressed in free, fair and credible elections. The legitimacy of a democratic government derives from the will of the people exercised in ways stipulated in governing constitutions. A number of the crises that we have confronted since the commencement of this dispensation in 1999 have been so serious that, had they occurred in the late 1960s to early 1990s, the consequence could have been enthusiastically welcomed military overthrow of democratic systems. But one of the abiding lessons of our history has been that self-proclaimed military Messiahs tend to be nothing but fake political saviours after all who leave society far worse than they met it.

Thus, we have had nearly two and a half decades of unbroken civil rule.

Bitter experience has taught us that the worst civilian administration is far better than the best military regime. It is remarkable that a far higher number of Nigerians have registered to vote in this year’s elections than ever before. Over 87.2 million Permanent Voters Cards have been collected. This is an indication of enhanced confidence in the efficacy of the ballot box as an instrument of effecting leadership and governmental changes. While a not insignificant number especially of our youths have sought solace abroad, the ‘Japa’ phenomenon, an also not insubstantial number have chosen to stay behind and utilize their votes to empower a government capable of bringing about positive changes in the country’s fortunes and actualizing her potentials.

Elections have gradually over the last two decades acquired greater integrity, credibility and transparency. The electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has attained greater institutional autonomy. Increased use of technology has largely rendered nugatory and ineffectual previous methods of manipulating elections and perverting the will of the people.

2015 marked a watershed in the evolution of the electoral process when a government in power at the centre was displaced by the opposition through the ballot box for the first time in the country’s political history.  Nigerians are becoming more and more aware that the best panacea to the problems of democracy and the existential challenges of the country lie in more, not less, democracy.

As Nigerians go to the polls to cast their votes today for which of the leading three candidates –  Mr. Peter Obi, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar or Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu – deserves to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari in May, what should be some of the key determining factors on their minds?

Implicit in our discourse so far is the indispensability of democracy to fostering good governance, transcending the depredations of underdevelopment and fostering the accelerated development of Nigeria. The question then is who among the candidates contributed the most in fighting for and helping to actualize the democracy we have experienced since 1999? The track record of all the candidates is in the public domain in this regard. It is only logical that he who staked more of life, resources and livelihood to fight for, promote and defend the democracy we have today can be trusted more to strengthen the country’s democratic structures and processes under his leadership.

With the retreat of the military from the politi cal terrain and the restoration of civil rule in 1999, which of these candidates contributed most to deepening the country’s federal practice? It is axiomatic that democratic governance can have only negligible efficacy in a plural society like ours without a robust federalism that galvanizes development from the grassroots. The records of the candidates are here again in the public domain. Atiku Abubakar was Vice-President for eight years under the General Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. That administration had an essentially unitary mind set and orientation. It took no steps whatsoever to decentralize our excessively centralized constitution. For instance, it opposed the creation of new local government councils in Lagos State and even seized the federal allocations due to local governments in the state insisting on the abolition of the new councils.

Of course, Atiku can rightly claim that he was only a deputy and not in charge in the administration. Indeed, he has since leaving office professed a commitment to a fundamental restructuring of the Nigerian federation. How much of this sincere and how much vote-attracting rhetoric? Did he do as much as he could have to influence the Obasanjo administration in which he was number two man in the direction of a greater commitment to true federalism? It is for the voter to decide.

Tinubu was governor of Lagos State for eight years and Obi governor of Anambra State also for two terms of eight years. Which of them showed a greater commitment to the federal ideal? Obi’s critics maintain that he did not hold local government elections even once during his tenure in office. What is the veracity of this allegation? Do we have any concrete evidence of the measures he took to help deepen federal practice in Nigeria as governor? Answers to these questions will help voters determine his record on this score in today’s election. Tinubu as governor of Lagos State increased the number of local government councils in the state from 20 to 57. He maintained, funded and nurtured them despite punitive financial strangulation from the Obasanjo administration. Some experts contend that the increase in the number of local governments has helped accelerate the pace of development at the grassroots while creating opportunities for the emergence of new cadre of youthful leaders at the grassroots in the state.

It is also on record that as governor of Lagos State, Tinubu gave full backing to his Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, to challenge at the Supreme Court those sections of the constitution as well as practices of the federal government that negated the letter and the spirit of true federalism. Lagos State won at least 13 of such cases at the apex court thus affirming among others the rights of states over urban planning within their jurisdiction, the illegality of federal government seizure of state funds, the illegality of federal government intrusion into local government administration and that the funding of Joint Venture Contracts as well as the National Petroleum Company PLC among others should be from the federal government’s account rather than the Federation Account.  It is for voters to decide if these facts are true and whether or not this should have a bearing on how they cast their votes.

Again, which of the leading candidates has the best demonstrated track record of utilizing democracy as a handmaiden of concrete developmental accomplishments? As Vice –President of Nigeria under Obasanjo, Atiku was put in full charge of the economy for the first term of that administration. The privatization of key public enterprises was one of his major undertakings in that capacity. While his supporters commend his efforts in that regard, others scathingly accuse him of selling off prized public assets at rock bottom prices to his cronies and friends. This was one reason why his former principal, Obasanjo, accused him of alleged corrupt practices in unsparing language in his book, ‘My Watch’.

On his performance as governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi claims to have raised the standard of education as demonstrated by the state’s secondary schools performance in the West African School Certificate (WASC) examinations as well as meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). His supporters consider his record as superlative. His critics contend that his claims are largely nebulous, non-measurable and lacking in concreteness. Obi’s refrain during the campaigns has been that he wants to move Nigeria from consumption to production. Did he do anything as governor of Anambra State for eight years to indicate that he can do the same on a larger scale for Nigeria? The answer to that question will certainly sway some votes either towards or away from Obi in today’s election depending on the perception of the individual voter.

Tinubu’s supporters refer to his record in Lagos as one of his most validating claims to have the capacity to transform Nigeria and propel her to higher pedestals of development. They refer to his accomplishments in infrastructure development, qualitative social service delivery, human capital development, financial engineering ingenuity and institution building which they insist is second to none in this dispensation. His adversaries contend, however, that Lagos has always been developed and that leaders like Brigadier Mobolaji Johnson, Alhaji Lateef Jakande and General Mohammed Buba Marwa also contributed their quota to what Lagos is today. No credible supporter of Tinubu has claimed as far as I know that others before him had not played their roles in the progress of the state. Indeed, Tinubu stood on the shoulders of giants before him as governor of Lagos State. Yet, the truth is that in the 16 years between the collapse of the second republic and the democratic restoration of 1999, Lagos had degenerated to an urban jungle as Obasanjo uncharitably described her in Y2000. It was Tinubu’s challenge to turn the fortunes of the state around and set her on the path of sustained and irreversible progress. His supporters believe that he succeeded phenomenally in this regard. His adversaries argue to the contrary. It is the perception of what the facts are that will determine voter behavior to some extent today.

Tinubu’s supporters will ask if the Eko Atlantic City growing magnificently from the bowels of the Atlantic Ocean in Lagos and on which the United State’s largest embassy in the world is currently being built is fiction or reality. They will query if the Lekki Free Trade Zone which houses the Lekki Deep Sea Port and where the Dangote Refinery, one of the largest in the world, is currently under construction in Lagos is not an index of quantum developmental leaps? They will wonder if the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network that has transformed the transportation landscape of Lagos or the revolutionary Blue and Red Line light rail mass transit schemes are real or just figments of the imagination. They will ask if it is not a demonstrable fact that the Internally Generated Revenue of Lagos State was phenomenally increased from N600 million monthly in 1999 to over N7 billion by 2007 and has risen to at least N50 billion monthly today? Did this happen by chance or as a result of rigorous thinking, diligent planning and effective implementation?

Obi’s supporters applaud him for reportedly saving huge amount of funds for the state in both foreign and local currencies. His critics contend that was completely wrong headed in the face of acute infrastructure deficit. Atiku’s traducers say he did not do enough between 1999 and 2003 to address increased revenue generation by the federal government given his critical role in running the economy. These are some issues that will be at play in voters’ minds in today’s elections. However, beyond such rational calculations, primordial factors such as religion, ethnicity and regionalism will also be critical factors at play.    A transparent and credible electoral process today will be another decisive step in Nigeria’s ongoing march towards her desired democratic Eldorado.