I stumbled on a joke that tried to turn an election into a blood test. The flag bearers of the APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Kashim Shettima, were labeled AS. Atiku and Amaechi were branded AA. The question tossed to voters was blunt: who is normal among you? It was campaign humor wearing a lab coat, petty on the surface but designed to bite, because in Nigeria stigma travels faster than policy. My first reaction was casual. Medically, AA and AS live almost the same life. To weaponize that difference is to play on fear, to manipulate a public that still remembers what it felt like to be called “sick” for something you did not choose.
Dr. Ibrahim Alhaji Usman corrected me, and he did it with the patience of someone who has sat with data. “Not completely true,” he wrote. “AS carriers can have subclinical problems, especially microscopic haematuria. Studies show their renal vascular resistance sits higher than AA, but lower than SC and SS.” He had quoted those papers in his dissertation on renal issues in SS versus AA children. The irony was immediate. The campaigners who wanted to indict Tinubu and Shettima had, without meaning to, admitted there was no dramatic difference between them and Atiku in either phenotype or genotype. And they forgot the third letter entirely. Where was OK in the metaphor? A new genotype with no A or S in its makeup, emerging from NDC, as if politics could invent a blood type to match its ambition. A “stickler” for facts, Dr. Ibrahim reminded me, can be one of many problems people carry, and politics loves to medicalize dissent.
That joke would have died if it were not sitting inside a larger pattern. Atiku’s camp no longer chants “Atikulated.” Obidients still own their name. Kwankwasiyya still march under theirs. But what unites the opposition to Tinubu is not a name. It is a mood. And the mood has a memory.
I remember 2011, after the post-election violence in the North. Southern friends told me, with certainty, that northerners were violent, intolerant, uncivilized. Then came EndSARS in 2020, a Southern protest that curdled into arson and looting without the North joining, and those same voices went quiet. The capacity for anarchy, it turned out, was not regional. It was human. Fast forward to 2023. Northern moralists who had condemned Obidients for bullying, for hate comments, for intolerance, turned around and deployed the same tools against Tinubu’s supporters: ridicule, stigmatization, threats, the quiet art of silencing through fear. As one cleric put it recently, the moment you defect from APC to ADC, PDP, or NDC, your sins are washed. You are born again. You become saint.
Political scientists have a name for this. Donald Horowitz, in Ethnic Groups in Conflict, described how political entrepreneurs activate latent identities to realign loyalties. What we are seeing is Horowitz in real time: not a change of conviction, but a change of jersey. The calculation is cold. Those who are less critical of defectors are not necessarily convinced. They are relieved. Every APC man who leaves reduces the threat of incumbency, weakens the structure, and gives the opposition a number. It is not morality. It is arithmetic.
We have done this before and called it “change.” Before 2015, PDP posters were torn down, billboards burned, voices shouted down. Free association was treated as treason. When APC won, the same people who now play priest and judge admitted they had not read the fine print of “Change.” Many unworthy aspirants rode the wave. Discontent did the rest. Sociologist Irving Janis would call it groupthink, the pressure to conform, to silence doubt, to protect the illusion of consensus. Today the method has evolved. Because incumbency is strong and coalition-building is hard, anti-government sentiment has turned to coercion. The tools are not new, only louder: blackmail, intimidation, lynching of reputation online, the slogan that if you support APC you must be a criminal or a bandit. It flattens 20 million people into one caricature.
And yet the contradiction is glaring. The same voices say Tinubu is the problem, his policies are the problem, and in the next breath say no one outside their ethnic or religious comfort zone can be trusted. About Ten presidential aspirants are on the ballot, but we still tell ourselves only the big parties with money and former office holders can win. That is not democracy talking. That is political economy. Joseph Schumpeter warned that democracy often becomes a competition of elites with resources, not ideas. Voters know it, and so they hedge.
The toxicity is compounded from the pulpit. Mallams and pastors have joined the fray, branding one candidate Satan and another godly, turning insecurity and poverty problems that predate this administration and were once explained as divine trial, into proof of moral failure. Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority helps here. When institutions fail, people look for saviors. Clerics fill that vacuum, and in doing so they sanctify intolerance. Hate becomes righteous. Self-help becomes calling.
So the diagnosis that “politicians divide us” is only half true. The division is co-produced. It is produced by campaigns that frame people as AA or AS to trigger medical stigma. It is produced by religious leaders who frame opponents as demonic. It is produced by a public that prefers the comfort of the echo chamber to the discomfort of scrutiny.
The reality is simpler and harder. There is no political genotype OK that can erase A and S and start us fresh. There are only citizens who must decide, again, whether they want politics to be a hospital where we diagnose each other, or a marketplace where we argue interests and live with the outcome. We have walked this road before. It did not take us to heaven. It took us in circles. Until we stop treating ballots like blood tests and opponents like diseases, we will keep rebranding the same men as messiahs, and calling it change.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
