When they gathered in Jos, Plateau State capital to launch the Tinubu 2023 Presidential campaign, it was a laughing issue for the display of crass ignorance of the person they gathered to market, Tinubu. I watched from far how party goons and their appendages shuttled from post to pillar to impress Tinubu for patronage should he emerge victorious at the elections.
I watched amusingly how organizers of the event over stressed themselves without a second thought of reasoning just to impress Tinubu.
Many thought Bola was the fool to be fooled because from the onset through series of investigative reports at his disposal, he knew Plateau State was not his to win.
Plateau APC stalwarts that over-labored themselves, although at a fee (allowance), were ignorant of the declaration Tinubu made in his comfort zone (Lagos) that the election was the turn for Yoruba presidency (Emi lokan), so, why were they over-laboring themselves on a Yoruba affair in Jos if they had known?
The first casualty from Tinubu was the chairman of the Jos event, Ahmed Idris Wase then deputy speaker House of Representatives who was vehemently blocked from being the Speaker the 10th House of Representatives through a well coordinated betrayal orchestrated by Tinubu and his inner caucus and appendages.
Wase refused to renounce his aspiration and opted to redouble his effort to prove a point against his betrayers and those hypocrites that served as moles to block his victory. He remained in the race until the final whistle.
Since 2015, I went on sabbatical from politics to mainstream journalism but privately providing strategies to politicians that need my service for free.
I can still recall those old good days of active politicking at Keffi, street Obalende, Lagos where the national secretariat of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) of the second republic was situated.
NPN was truly a national party piloted by the likes of Meredith Adisa Akinloye, Shehu Shagari, Alex Ekwueme, Suleiman Takuma, Uba Ahmed, Dr. Sule Kumo, Dr. Abubakar Olusola Saraki, Dr. Ibrahim Tahir, Shehu Kangiwa, Dr. Joseph Wayas, Clement Isong, Abubakar Tatari Ali, Ali Baba, AD Rufa’i Misau, Ahmadu Ribadu Yola, Ibrahim Sangari Usman, Ali Habu Fari, Umaru Dikko, Thomas Yepwi, Sale Hassan, Abdullahi Adamu (Maye), John Jatau Kadiya, Joseph Tarka, Aper Aku, Tilley Gyado and several others.
The politicking of today is scientific, corrupted, ruthless lacking in ideology than the politics of those proud days.
February 25, 2023 presidential and national assembly elections were the most keenly and bitterly contested since 1999. The intense competitiveness of the elections was reflected in the number of states and legislative seats won by the leading political parties with Atiku Abubakar (PDP), Bola Ahmed Tinubu (APC) and Peter Gregory Obi (LP), winning in 12 states each including the Federal Capital Territory FCT captured by Labor Party.
Rabi’u Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) cleanly swept the votes of only Kano state being his strongest hold.
The degree of competitiveness was clearly a function of the substantial credibility and integrity of the electoral process notwithstanding some of the technical hitches as well as logistical failures experienced at the initial phases of the exercise.
Sporadic acts of violence in some areas were contained. Hijacked Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) machines were replaced in some areas, while some areas had none, yet the exercise was conducted and results announced, as in few areas as alleged, the elections were not even held but results declared surprisingly and shamelessly.
The shortcomings witnessed were sufficient enough to fundamentally change or alter the ultimate outcome of the exercise. The elections largely did not reflect the will of the electorates in most cases while in few other cases, it was compromised.
Despite the glitches, which are understandable since there are no perfect elections anywhere in the world, those who contend that this was one of the best-organized elections but not credible may not be wrong since it was orderly.
Indeed, the voting pattern for the leading presidential and national assembly candidates confirmed the projections and prognostications of many analysts and pundits before the elections. Perhaps the greatest revelation of the election was the performance of Peter Gregory Obi of Labor Party.
Several analysts and members of the dominant parties had dismissed Obi as lacking elaborate structures to near a win. His party, Labor, had neither a serving governor nor any seat in the 9th national or even state assembly to rely on. It could not boast of any of the 774 local government councils for take. Yet, Peter Obi won emphatically in the five South-eastern states and also recorded electoral victories in the FCT, Lagos, Nasarawa, Plateau, Edo and Delta states outside his home base. Honestly, Obi had skillfully projected himself as a ‘born again’ politician with a mission to overhaul and radically reform the prevailing system.
To those who rallied his trumpet call, it did not matter that as an eight-year governor of Anambra State and running mate to Atiku Abubakar in the 2019 presidential election, Obi was part and parcel of the system he now disavowed in often trenchant language. Had Atiku won the 2019 election, Obi would have been in office as vice-president and likely would have been on the ticket of PDP in that capacity in the 2023 election.
Obi was an entrenched member of the subsisting system and only quit the PDP to pick the LP ticket when it dawned on him that he could not clinch the PDP’s presidential ticket and failed to control his tall presidential ambition. There is no significant difference between the values Obi stands for and the philosophical orientation of the PDP or any of the other dominant parties.
Yet, Obi is one of those who have vehemently denounced and rejected the outcome of the presidential election and challenged the verdict of INEC and the judgment of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal at the Supreme Court which he lost.
But if the election had been rigged against him as Obi insists, how on earth could he have won over 90% of votes in the South-east while other leading contenders performed abysmally in that region? Indeed, the South-east was easily the most monolithic and one-sided in the voting pattern while other regions were more diverse and liberal in their voting behavior. While the LP recorded 1,960,589 votes in South-east, APC and PDP scored 127,605 and 91,195 votes respectively in same South-east. If the election was indeed rigged against him as Obi alleges, how come he defeated Tinubu’s APC in Lagos State, a party that had won every election in the state since 2015? Could it be that elections were free and fair only in those states won by Obi?
Running a most divisive campaign, Obi, apart from understandably enjoying the massive support of his Igbo kith and kin, also deliberately and consciously courted and sought Christian votes without a thought of the dangers of politicizing religion in a complex, multi-religious polity like ours.
The desperation of Obi and Tinubu introduced a brand new hate into the polity and planted further mistrust between Muslims and Christians nationwide. One is in doubt if there are remnants of Muslims up north to vote any Christian presidential candidate and so is the case in the few Christian dominated states in the north against a Muslim.
Obi was particularly engaged in what many described as “Church Tourism”, and he made a point by attending the annual mass gathering of the mega Pentecostal Churches, where he was rapturously received by some of the leading pastors openly endorsing his candidacy while the Muslim Izala sect faction of Sheikh Yahaya Jingir trumpeted the Muslim/Muslim ticket in their strongholds for Tinubu.
This is one of the reasons APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket, chosen for strategic and pragmatic electoral purposes, became a contentious issue, particularly in Christian circles. The Christian factor was thus a key consideration that swung substantial Christian votes to Obi in states like Plateau, Delta, Nasarawa, Kano, Edo and even Lagos to some extent. However, the observed side of the coin was the dismal performance of Obi in the North-west and northeast. Those pastors, who openly and threateningly projected Obi as a Christian candidate in Churches and other places where they exist in the north, unwittingly de-marketed him in those core Muslim areas that have substantial voting numbers the like of a self-ordained prophet that preaches the opposite of what the Holy Bible says, Isa El-Buba based in Jos, Plateau State lacking any political strength other than trumpeting hate on his pulpit and market square to ignorant believers for recognition by those in the Christian faith.
Atiku Abubakar and his party, PDP which came second in votes score according to the doubted declared results with 6,984,520 votes, also rejected the outcome of the polls and hurriedly challenged both results and the applied process.
However, Atiku failed to know that there was a strong gang-up against his perceived victory right from the onset when he emerged victorious at party primary. Despite the lingered internal squabbles with the Nyeson Wike group of clownish, hypocritical amateur politicians and betrayers, there was a well calculated plan to rig the elections against an Atiku victory from the highest level with the active connivance of the election umpire that his group failed to unearth.
One of those point men, who facilitated the crime, is said to be an indigene of Bauchi State now reappointed, to his former position as an aide to President Tinubu.
Let’s reason this way, before the presidential election, why was Chidi Nwafor who developed the BVAS machine suddenly transferred out of INEC headquarters to a rural station in the South-east outside the federal capital where he was needed most? What was his offence for the sudden transfer? Nwafor was an IT expert at INEC headquarters credited as the developer of the BVAS and responsible for uploading election results to INEC web portal.
His alleged refusal to compromise cost him a sudden transfer and replaced by one Femi Odubiyi, a onetime commissioner for Science and Technology in Lagos State, who was hurriedly recruited for Nwafor’s job. It was alleged that Femi was responsible for the ‘criminal’ act of jamming the network that halted transmission of election results to INEC web portal for ease of rigging the election. This is an allegation for further investigation.
However, APC governors and other younger and liberal elements from the North were determined on the zoning policy of rotating power between the North and South in the best interest of equity, justice and national cohesion which had a negative effect on an Atiku victory. Thus, even though Atiku had floored Tinubu in key northern states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Kaduna, Sokoto, Gombe, Katsina, Yobe and Taraba, the magnitude of his victory was marginal as Tinubu was awarded a close second in many of those Northern States won by Atiku.
APC had a total number of 1.7million votes to PDP’s 1.4million in the minorities dominated North-central. In the North-east, APC was said to have scored a total of 1,185,458 to PDP’s 1,741,845 votes in Atiku’s strongest hold thus coming second. And in the North-west, APC scored 2,652,233 votes to the PDP’s 2,329,540 courtesy of Senator Abdul-Azeez Yari’s effort.
That notwithstanding, the PDP inexplicably went into the election as a fractured house with the grievances of the so called G5 governors—Benue, Oyo, Rivers, Abia and Enugu—not solved. The indifference of the governors to the Atiku campaign no doubt partly contributed to his loss in all the South-eastern states as well as Rivers, Benue and Oyo states.
Although he attributed his loss to a sophisticated rigging, Atiku himself acknowledged that lack of cohesion within the ranks of the party contributed to his disappointing performance but not expecting a defeat from the records.
As he told the press, “Obi took our votes in the South-east and the South-south while Kwankwaso blocked our victory in Kano, but that alone cannot make any of them a president. We are ready to dialogue with Obi and Kwankwaso with a view to forming an alliance”. But such an alliance or mutual understanding could have been undertaken far before the elections, and not after. Lack of cooperation and a working relationship among the leading opposition parties rather than the rigging allegation and compromise were responsible for the outcome of the elections as a subject for study against future. It was unlikely that the APC, NNPP or LP could singly defeat the PDP at the polls even with the advantage of the incumbency factor because former President Buhari had already mortgaged the soul of APC and LP was seen as a cult while NNPP was more or a less a leper in the game.
Although Atiku was the most vilified, denigrated and relentlessly attacked by his internal and external adversaries and opponents, obviously because of his front-runner status in the race, he resisted all odds and neutralized the planted landmines to triumph at the polls but that victory was denied by the powers that fired the shots as opined by majority of PDP supporters and other sympathizers across party divide. The truncated victory further demonstrates that the democracy is still in the mould of Nigeria’s undertakers.
But adding his voice to the debate, Special Advisor (Media/Public Relations) to Bauchi State Governor Muktar Gidado said: “God created Nigeria in such a way to make it impossible for any part of the country or religion to exist without the other. The authors of our Constitution also worked hard to bind the country together with provisions that will make it impossible for a section of the country and any religion for the presidency of Nigeria that must have a strong Pan-Nigeria appeal and strong support and must be embraced by a significant number of adherents of other religions.
“That forms the basis why Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State has been busy building more bridges, friendships and alliances across ethnic, regional and religious lines over the years that encouraged him to contest his party’s presidential primary in 2023 as a trial with that effort now improved and will be reflected in the 2027 presidential primary and hopefully and prayerfully to the subsequent general elections.
“Amazingly, it appears that Tinubu contested not only against candidates of other parties who were unenthusiastic about his candidature.
“Thus, how do we explain the inexplicable protracted fuel subsidy removal as well as the APC’s abrupt cash swap policy that threw hundreds of thousands of Nigerians into indescribable pain and anguish right into the 2023 election with the strong possibility that many would be angry enough to vote against APC and its candidate? But Tinubu was still declared winner by INEC.”
“A Bala 2027 presidential contest if the Almighty God so wishes, shall, and I repeat shall stand firm against any rigging formula no matter how crude or scientific. Rigging shall be exposed and fought with vigor. We shall stand within the orbit of law to defeat riggers with our brains and brawns. We shall change the narrative for the good of the democracy.”
Despite the hullabaloo that ensured after the 2023 results were announced and declaration made accompanied with Certificate of Return, and from the quoted analysis of Gidado, the 2023 election was the first in history since 1999, that Tinubu’s party was defeated in his supposedly strongest hold, Lagos by a less strong party, Labor while the APC won the three senate seats as well as 20 of the 24 House of Representatives seats in same Lagos state.
Another point worth a mention is the dismal performance of APC in Plateau State that produced the Director-General of the Tinubu/Shetima Presidential Campaign Council (APC-PCC), Simon Bako Lalong, the then sitting governor of the state.
Apart from receiving a humiliating defeat by Labor Party in the presidential election, Lalong had to contend another humiliating defeat of his tall ambition to the senate. He was defeated by the PDP in his Plateau Southern zone. PDP won two of the three senate seats in Plateau State (Plateau North & South) but snatched by the Court of Appeal and awarded same to APC without laboring for it that made Lalong a senator today.
Therefore, to those who are still complaining of rigging the presidential election but silent on the outcome of the national assembly results, need to put-in some explanation on how the APC lost the presidential election in Lagos, Plateau, Kaduna, Katsina, Gombe, Yobe and few of its controlled states and PDP won in Yobe.
The March 11th gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections were tougher than the presidential election as some governors that asked for second term or planted their stooges in contest, were sent packing on that day as disgraced and defeated inconsequential politicians who mistakenly accessed leadership but later thrown to the dustbin of history.
Expectedly, Governor Bala Muhammed in Bauchi State emerged victorious for his second term despite the gang-up of inconsequential politicians whose eyes were on the public treasury for looting (warwaso) than service, and the absence of any serious contender to disturb a sleep and his first term performance scorecard adjudged as second to none.
As PDP and LP reached the Supreme Court in 2023, Nigerians hopefully expected an objective judgment with undeniable facts of law but that became a fiction. A suspected compromised judgment was delivered.
The judgment till date remains an albatross to good governance as a clueless and inept leadership was imposed.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
