Will the Winners Take It All?

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A Nation Divided. Buy the issue here.

Although the results and processes of the elections have been challenged at the electoral tribunal by both Atiku (as he’s more commonly known) and Obi, INEC issuing a certificate of return to Mr. Tinubu implies that he is most likely to be sworn in as the next president of Nigeria by 29 May 2023. But as I predicted in an earlier essay, voting patterns were partly influenced by identity and value considerations, raising serious gaps in the spread with concomitant legitimacy concerns. For instance, Mr. Tinubu’s victory was made possible largely from votes by the South West and Muslim-North, while Obi’s were pulled from Christian-majority Southern and North Central Nigeria. The Igbo-majority states in the South East, specifically, voted overwhelmingly for one candidate—Obi—a pattern of opposition voting that critics have argued hitherto condemned the region to systematic marginalization by the Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressive Congress (APC) administration.

On the pretext of Buhari’s 97-5 per cent metaphor and the context of the voting pattern of Nigerians in the South East in the 2023 presidential election, this essay will attempt to discuss the security challenges in the South East and what the Tinubu administration could do differently to restore peace in the region. The staunch rejection of APC by the region, the rejection of the Muslim-Muslim ticket, and the growing perception of a ‘massively rigged’ election are creating ambivalence that could amplify the fragilities that are associated with the federal government’s policies towards critical issues such as the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB), its leader Nnamdi Kanu, and contested economic policies, such as the impracticability of an eastern railway corridor, that may be interpreted as ‘punishing the South East,’ despite its altruism. The success or acceptance of the Tinubu administration in South East Nigeria depends on how ‘peacefully’ he circumvents these ‘issues’.

Mr. Tinubu campaigned vigorously and traveled across the five states in the South East to market his candidacy and share his plans for the region. In Abia State, he touched on his plans for university education and his strategy to resolve the intra-party conflicts, and he intimated the people of the state on the rewards of not staying in opposition. In Imo State, Tinubu shared his vision of love, peace, unity, stability, and progress. He further promised to break the shackles of poverty and ignorance, and tackle corruption and problems in the power sector. He also pledged to make the state an attractive centre for tourism by adding value to real estate while also supporting critical infrastructure, as well as education, security, and revenue generation, among others.

In Enugu, however, Mr. Tinubu warned that it is only when the people of the state vote for him and the APC gubernatorial candidate, Mr. Uche Nnaji, that they will enjoy the national cake. According to him: ‘Nobody will give you any credit, you are working hard, you’re sweating now. We want you to sweat well now for this party until you deliver victory. Until Bola Tinubu becomes the president of Nigeria, we will not give you but a soaked sliced bread.’ The threats of marginalization notwithstanding, Tinubu promised to make the state a manufacturing hub, an agro-processing centre, tap from its coal deposits, build deep seaports, and construct rail lines if he got elected. In Anambra, Mr. Tinubu promised development, industrialization, erosion control, and jobs, while committing in Ebonyi to make the South East an equivalent of what Taiwan is in Asia, invest in education and security, connect the region through interconnected rail lines, and dialogue with all agitators.

The above notwithstanding, an unhealthy rivalry between the Igbos and Yoruba had quietly crept in, as it seemed both ethnic groups fortuitously presented their best as options for Nigerians to choose from through the ballots. Consequently, ethnic whistling became a part of the campaign strategy and was, in the case of South Easterners, counted against Mr. Tinubu. Previous incidents of ‘igbophobia’ and anti-Igbo comments made by Tinubu’s camp were instrumental. For instance, a video where Senator Remi Tinubu, Mr. Tinubu’s wife, blamed the Igbos in Lagos for ‘spoiling everything’ and threatened to ‘entreat all the deities of Lagos to chase Igbo people out’ in 2019 was recirculated.

Similarly, a viral xenophobic and anti-Igbo phone conversation between Ibikunle Amosun and Kashim Shettima, fact-checked by PR Nigeria, and found to be fabricated, inundated the social media space and created a distorted view of Mr. Tinubu’s running mate. Importantly, Mr. Obi overtly condemned the identity-based campaign and faulted Tinubu’s acquiescence to his camp’s ethnic whistling in a viral WhatsApp broadcast that read,

Yoruba, shine your eyes; if you vote for Peter Obi, you are automatically voting for seaports in the South-South and South East. The Igbos will stop coming to Lagos to invest; rather, they will go to Delta and Rivers States. They may even stop building houses in Lagos. It will affect a lot of Yorubas. Yoruba ‘ronu o’ (think).

These, coupled with Tinubu’s preference for a Muslim-Muslim ticket and according to Business Day, his past involvement in narcotics, as well as Obi’s popularity in the South East, the ignoble legacies of APC rule, and, as Ebenezer Obadare, a professor of sociology, has argued, the prospects of producing an Igbo president since the end of the Civil War, made the Tinubu candidacy quite unpopular and trivial among the Igbos in the South East.

Although Mr. Tinubu won the election, he managed to garner only 127,605 votes—about one per cent of his almost nine million total votes—from the South East. This demonstrates his unpopularity and low acceptance in the region. The above is similar to the 2015 presidential election scenario where the then-APC flagbearer, Buhari, pulled just 198,248 votes—about one per cent of his 15,424,921 total—from the South East. Nevertheless, the Buhari ‘winner takes all’ politics or governance based on votes awarded by regions and states established a precedence—that attention granted by the federal government to states or regions could be directly proportional to the distribution of votes the chief executive received from those regions.

On 22 July 2015, at the United States Institute of Peace, Buhari proposed and held on to this theory when he declared that ‘the constituents, for example, (that) gave me 97 per cent (of the vote) cannot, in all honesty, be treated on some issues with constituencies that gave me five per cent.’ The implication, therefore, was that the South East, which gave him only about one per cent of votes, was to be systematically relegated and this was partly responsible for the resurgence of separatist activities in that region. As Buhari’s prospective successor and as an APC member, the chances of Tinubu maintaining Buhari’s ‘winner takes it all’ ideology are potent and may be partially responsible for the tension and trepidation in the South East region. These fears are made more germane by the WhatsApp broadcast amplified by Mr. Obi as well as Tinubu’s campaign speech at Enugu, which threatened to perpetually marginalize the Igbos if they failed to work for his victory at the poll. Although Tinubu has promised to run an all-inclusive government, the Buhari antecedent still hovers like a specter far beyond rhetoric. The stability of the South East may hinge on Tinubu’s absolute commitment to ‘belonging to everybody and belonging to nobody’—a promise his predecessor never honoured.