By Mahmud Jega
By the time you are reading this, over a breakfast of hot pap and akara pieces if you are lucky, the long, arduous, costly, time-consuming, energy sapping, now drab, now exciting, tension-soaked, logistics-challenged, zoning debate-muddled 2011 election cycle in this country has climaxed with the election of Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan of the PDP to another four years in the President's office with effect from May 29.
Dr Jonathan must be adjusting his trademark Niger Delta hat and grinning broadly like a fisherman who just landed a 100-kg Nile perch. Many things will be going on in his mind right now, beginning from the realisation that he has just made history as the first man ever from the Niger Delta to win a national election in Nigeria. Twenty million plus votes and a quarter of the votes in at least 32 states is a phenomenal electoral and political achievement for which Jonathan must be justly proud. To boot, this is an election already widely hailed by local and international election observers; never again will he live in the shadow of the 2007 polls, adjudged at the time to be the worst in the world.
The overall picture of Jonathan's win is very glossy, but a closer examination of the results and their meaning in Nigerian politics should elicit both a grin in some cases and a frown in some other cases. Among the grin-eliciting events, Jonathan united the South-South. Once thought to be a collection of feuding minority tribes incapable of coming together for a common cause, Dr Jonathan managed to win every single Niger Delta state by a wide margin, including one [Edo] that is controlled by his party's bitter rival, ACN.
Jonathan's landslide win in Igboland merits another grin. Until recently, no pundit would have given a Niger Delta politician any chance of winning a national election in Igboland, arising from the events of the Civil War which ended 41 years ago and the subsequent feud over abandoned Igbo property in Niger Delta cities, but here was Jonathan pulling a rabbit out of the political hat.
Then there is the Jonathan win in Yorubaland, narrower than the other two wins to be sure, but meriting a grin all the same. This is territory that in the past year was overran by ACN and Jonathan's assumed bulwark in the zone, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, collapsed into electoral insignificance. But Jonathan miraculously won in Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti and Ondo, all of them held by ACN and LP.
One more Jonathan grin for the win in the North Central. Plateau, Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Nasarawa all went his way by interesting margins, but Niger State, whose placement in the North Central zone is a misnomer, went another way.
Now come the frowns. The North West and North East geopolitical zones, despite many carrots, despite the Vice President, despite 9 PDP governors and despite many powerful ministers and other top Federal officials, despite infusions of money, despite the secret pledges of support by some emirs and in spite of promises to quit the stage in 2015, still voted comprehensively against Jonathan, in two cases denying him even a quarter of the vote. The far Northerners' vote against Jonathan transcended party lines; millions of PDP supporters apparently voted against their party's presidential ticket; how else did PDP lose in places where only a week earlier it won Senate and Federal House races?
Anyway, those areas that voted heavily for Dr Jonathan and ensured his comprehensive win, why did they vote for him? It would have been very nice to say that Jonathan won because of his record of performance in office in the past year, or because of the quality of promises that he made during the campaign. Well, neither.
From all evidence he won due to his identity, not his personal quality. His identity as a Southerner helped him to win every Southern state, except the one [Osun] accidentally won by ACN due to insufficient redirection of voters by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu [who has denied, implausibly, that he had a secret pact with PDP].
He did not campaign with it, but Dr Jonathan's identity as a Christian was the major factor in his victory in the North Central states. Now, in all probability, these voters rallied around a Christian because they believed that in General MuhammaduBuhari, the far Northern Muslims were playing for a winner-takes-all. That was the perception, whoever created it.
And then of course, Dr. Jonathan benefitted immensely from the power, reach and resources of the PDP, which is well established in every state and which, since 1999, has at one time or another governed every state in Nigeria except Borno, Yobe and Lagos. Quite a party you have there.
Which brings us to the matter of Dr Jonathan's main rival in the election, General MuhammaduBuhari, candidate of the CPC. If Jonathan was carried along by the reach and power of a well-established and well organised political party, CPC was a poorly organised, hotchpotch party carried along by the immense prestige of its founder and leader, Buhari. Without Buhari, simply, there is no CPC.
To win 10 million votes in a free election, as Buhari did at the weekend, is a wonderful achievement, but a lot of shine is taken out of it when the observer realises that almost all the votes came from one section of the country, from the General's ethnic and religious kinsmen. What few votes Buhari got from other parts of the country, most certainly came from Northerners living in those places. It is not the stuff of winning a national election. In fact, it threatens to anoint General Buhari as the Awolowo of this age, electorally speaking; totally trusted by his kinsmen, totally not accepted by others.
Why did things come to this, when Buhari's essential message in his three consecutive runs for the Nigerian presidency in 2003, 2007 and 2011 is not ethnic or religious irredentism but ramrod stiff integrity, total intolerance for corruption and giving no quarter to criminality and rascality? The question is, why did this worthy message get so much acceptance in the North but none at all in the rest of the country?
It is not that Southerners and Middle Belters do not want integrity, or that they won't accept such a message coming from a far Northerner. In fact, in recent years alone, at least three Northerners-Nuhu Ribadu at the EFCC, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi at the Central Bank and more recently Professor Attahiru Jega at INEC-have received ample commendations from Southerners for appearing to do a good job. Why then couldn't Buhari's integrity message cross the Niger?
Most probably, it was because of the 2001 episode, when he was alleged by a newspaper to have said that Muslims should only vote for a Muslim. Since then, Buhari has denied saying this 100 times [though at first he was slow to refute it, not bothering with newspaper allegations, as was his character] but it is already deeply etched in the psyche of non-Muslim Nigerians.
Now, those Northerners who voted for Buhari in their millions, did they do so because of his message or, like Southerners and Jonathan, because of his identity? It is politically impressive that the Northern masses that supported Buhari did so against the wishes of the Northern political elite, who are congregated in PDP. They almost certainly did so because of his identity as a Northerner and a Muslim.
The more Northerners distrusted Jonathan, the more Southerners and Middle Belters liked him. And the more Southerners distrusted Buhari, the more the Northern masses loved him. Luckily for Goodluck Jonathan this time, his coalition was the larger one.
No comments:
Post a Comment