Nearly four and a half decades between Nigeria’s critical presidential election of 1979 and the no less momentous presidential polls of this year, many analysts have rightly noted the striking similarities between both exercises. The 1979 presidential election was contested by five political parties namely the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP), Great Nigeria Peoples Party (GNPP) and the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). The presidential candidates of these parties were Alhaji Shehu Shagari of the NPN, Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the UPN, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe of the NPP, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim of the GNPP and Mallam Aminu Kano of the PRP although the election was widely perceived at the time and turned out to be a closely fought three-cornered contest among Shagari, Awolowo and Azikiwe as Aminu Kano and Waziri Ibrahim were essentially fringe players with their support bases in Kano and Kaduna as well as Borno and Gongola respectively.
Interestingly, the three main contenders also represented the tripod of the three major ethnic groups namely the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo. All presidential elections between 1979 and that of this year had essentially been two-party contests even when there were more than two candidates on the ballot making the share of votes scored by candidates far higher than that possible in a three-horse race. Thus, in the 1983 presidential election, which was really a showdown between Shagari and Awolowo even though Azikiwe was on the ballot, Shagari scored 12,081,471 (47.57%) of votes to Awolowo’s 7, 907, 209 (31.09%) of the votes. The June 12, 1993, presidential election was a two-cornered affair between Chief MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) from the South who polled 58.36% of the vote to win the election and Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC) from the North who recorded 41.64% of the vote.
In the same vein, the 1999 presidential election was a showdown between General Olusegun Obasanjo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who won 62.78% of the vote and Chief Olu Falae of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) who scored 37.22%. In 2003, another essentially two-cornered affair between Obasanjo and General Muhammadu Buhari of the ANPP, the former polled 61.94% of the votes to Buhari’s 32.19%. This was also the pattern in the 2007, 2011 and 2015 presidential elections which were basically contests among two major candidates respectively even when there were other fringe candidates in the race.
In essentially two-party contests, candidates have the chance of scoring a higher number of votes than in contests with three or more major candidates who split the total number of votes cast into more fractions. Thus, in 2015, Buhari’s margin of victory over Jonathan was 2,591,759 votes as he scored 53.96% of the total votes while in 2019, the Daura General’s margin of victory over Atiku Abubakar was 3,928,869 as he polled 55.60% of the votes. A number of analysts have sought to despise, discredit and delegitimize the 2023 presidential poll outcome partly because the winner, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, scored what they consider a paltry 8,794,726 representing 36.1% of the votes while his two main contenders, Atiku of the PDP and Peter Obi of the LP, jointly scored approximately 13 million votes.
But it is the single candidate with the highest number of votes and the requisite constitutionally required spread that can emerge winner. The constitution makes no room for a tag-team in presidential elections. In any case, as I had earlier stated, each candidate will necessarily score a lesser number of votes in a three or more- cornered contest in which the key contenders are from the major ethnic groups from which they enjoy considerable support as was the case in the 2023 presidential election.
Let’s return to the 1979 presidential poll to illustrate this point. In that election, President Shehu Shagari scored 5,688,857 (33.77%) of the vote, Awolowo recorded 4,916,531 (29.6%) of the vote and Azikiwe had 1,732,113 (16.75%) of the vote. Shagari’s 33.77% of the vote in no way detracted from the legitimacy of his victory in 1979 just as Tinubu’s 36.62% of the vote in this year’s election rests on solid ground and does not erode from either the legality or legitimacy of his triumph. Another point of similarity between the 1979 election and that of this year is that the Yoruba of the South-West voted as massively and one-sidedly for Awolowo’s UPN back then as the Igbo of the South-East did for their son, Peter Obi, in this year’s election.
Indeed, it is remarkable that with victories in only five states, Lagos (82.30%), Ogun (92.61%), Ondo (94.50%), Oyo (85.78%) and Bendel (53.20%), Awolowo recorded 4.916 million votes coming a close second to Shagari who only won by a margin of 772,306 votes even though his party, the NPN, won 12 states and performed impressively in a 13th, Kano State. Perhaps a major difference, however, is that the Yoruba near-unanimous vote for Awolowo was predicated largely on his superlative, unsurpassed, performance as Premier of the Western Region in the First Republic.
Prior to his emergence as Premier and Leader of Government Business in the West, which enabled Awolowo to showcase his administrative acumen as well as developmental passion and genius that endeared him to the masses of the region, Zik’s NCNC had been the darling of the West with the party winning elections in key urban Centres of the region including Lagos, Oyo, Ibadan, Ife, Ilesha among others. But beyond sheer primordial tribal identification, it is difficult to decipher the basis of Peter Obi’s new cult following in the Igbo land. His performance during his 8-year tenure as governor of Anambra State was anything but stellar. Obi is distinguished neither by a commitment to principled politics nor by a capacity for rigorous and profound thought.
But this is not new. In 1979, Dr. Azikiwe scored 82.88% of the vote in Anambra and 84.69% in Imo, possibly because of his status and role as perhaps the greatest Igbo man of the 20th century and his contribution simultaneously and rather paradoxically both to Nigeria’s nationalist struggle for independence and the evolution of Igbo collective consciousness and ethnic self-esteem. On the developmental front, however, the great Zik was not a spectacular success as Premier of the Eastern Region at least not in the mold of the mercurial and intrepid Dr Michael Okpara, who remains, perhaps, the South-East’s most impactful transformational leader till date.
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Just like most Igbo today, particularly members of the intelligentsia, believe fervently that Obi won the February 25 presidential election, a substantial percentage of the Yoruba were convinced that Awolowo won the 1979 presidential election. Their conviction unfortunately rests on shaky ground even though I was also of the same view at the time. The great educationist, social critic and newspaper columnist, Dr Tai Solarin, wrote a long-running series of articles on the 1979 election titled ‘The Stolen Presidency’ in the Nigerian Tribune. Indeed, no presidency was stolen in 1979 just as in 2023.
But many of the intellectuals in the West were more circumspect and realistic as regards the dynamics of Nigerian politics at the time. As an ardent Awo supporter, I watched aghast and dismayed as a group of five Yoruba academics from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ibadan, who participated on an NTA Ibadan discussion programme shortly before the 1979 presidential election all predicted victory for Alhaji Shehu Shagari of the NPN.
Of course, their reasons were obvious. With Azikiwe’s presence in the race, it was unlikely that Awolowo would do well in the South-East even though his running mate, Phillip Umeadi, was from the region and his low rating in the East was compounded by Awo’s role in contributing to the victory of the federal side in the civil war. Furthermore, with the loss of some of his staunch stalwarts in the Middle Belt such as Joseph Tarka, Awolowo’s influence in the region was diminished and he had dim prospects of doing well in the far northern states. There was simply no pathway to victory for him just as any thought or talk of a Peter Obi victory in the 2023 presidential election is utterly self-deluding.
An emphatic victory in his Igbo South-East, a slim victory in Lagos in the South-West, Victories in Edo, Delta and Cross River in the South-South as well as victories in Christian dominated Plateau and Nasarawa in the North-Central as well as the FCT, Abuja, was an impressive performance by Peter Obi but grossly insufficient to achieve victory for him in a presidential election in a vast, complex polity like Nigeria comprising 36 states.
Yet, Obi continues to proclaim from the rooftops that he won the election although his lawyers could not present credible evidentiary proof of this before the courts. Even if the courts were to annul President Tinubu’s election as prayed by Atiku and Obi, could they have overlooked the Waziri Adamawa who came second in the polls to declare Obi winner even when the LP candidate did not raise any legal objections to the votes recorded by Atiku? It is brazen illogic.
When Awolowo challenged Shagari’s victory right up to the Supreme Court in 1979, the UPN presidential candidate did not claim to have won or sought to be declared winner. Rather, his contention was that Shagari did not meet the constitutional requirement to be declared winner in the election. Awolowo argued that although Shagari scored the highest number of votes, he did not meet the requirement of scoring 25% of the votes in at least two-thirds of the 19 states which he claimed was 13 since it was impossible to fractionalize a state as demanded by Shagari’s counsel, Chief Richard Akinjide.
The wily SAN had contended that Shagari won 25% of the votes in 12 states and also 25% in two-thirds of a 13th state, Kano even though he did not secure 25% overall in the state. Unsurprisingly, both the appeal tribunal and the Supreme Court upheld the respondent’s submission that Shagari was duly elected having won not just the highest number of votes but also scored 25% in 12 two-thirds of 19 states.
Most of Awolowo’s supporters were livid and contemptuous of the judgement but the great sage himself, unlike Peter Obi, was restrained and refrained from commenting on the judicial verdict till nearly a year later when he addressed the National Conference of his party. There he mainly questioned the suspicious mode of appointment of the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Atanda Fatai Williams, by the Obasanjo regime allegedly in consultation with Shagari even when it was obvious that the legal challenge against the latter’s election would most likely get to the apex court.
But could the judiciary have realistically reached a different conclusion as regards the 1979 election petition? It is unlikely. They could not have annulled the election of a candidate that clearly won in 12 states and performed strongly in a 13th and ordered a run-off between Awolowo and Shagari that could at least theoretically have resulted in victory for the former who won only five states and secured a little over 21% in Gongola State. Such a judgement could have consumed the country. Neither Atiku nor Obi met the constitutional requirement of support spread and did not score the highest number of votes in the election and yet they each sought to be declared the victors.
Peter Obi in particular laments that the Supreme Court judgement did not reflect public opinion. This is naive, betrays ignorance and is intellectually lazy. Such a position assumes that public opinion is a monolithic, uniform and unitary phenomenon. Unfortunately, in liberal democratic politics, public opinion is always complex, complicated, plural and not easily measurable. To which voice of public opinion, for instance, should the jurists have listened to and abided? That of the Obidients, Articulated, Batified or those who belonged to none of these partisan groups? It is a nonsensical proposition. The judges at both levels of adjudication decided to stand by the law and the facts. That was the right and reasonable thing to do.