By Hamza Waziri.
As INEC blows the whistle for the 2023 general elections campaigns to commence for the first time in twenty years, the name of Muhammadu Buhari will not be on the presidential election ballot paper and it will never appear again. Indeed, if we ever see such a name on the presidential ballot it will certainly not belong to this former military leader, three times runner-up and two times winner of the presidential election.
The incumbent President has always been a factor in the past five general elections and even today he remains so as his achievements or non-thereof will be on the front burner of campaigns alongside other sentiments that will play major roles in determining who succeeds Buhari on the 29th of May 2023.
Since Buhari is not on the ballot, the emergence of presidential candidates and their deputies has changed the complexion of campaigns and even made it difficult for any serious political analyst to predict the likely winner of the next election without skepticism as Religion, Ethnicity, and Regionalism become the major primordial sentiments that will shape the minds of the electorates.
Certainly and interestingly, the battle is between APC and PDP with the Labour Party breathing down their necks and may yet spring surprises while NNPP, SDP, ADP, AAC, and a few others are there to pick pieces of the crumbs if they play their cards well and feature strong candidates for other elective positions on their platforms or even form alliances with the bigger parties.
For APC and Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu, they must work harder to show Nigerians that Buhari and by extension, APC has delivered enough to deserve another chance to govern Nigeria again. All his achievements must be ticked off to valiantly convince Nigerians that even though they did not get 100 percent, they tried their best to change the situation for the better.
And to be fair to the APC, attempts were made to revamp our economy, remedy the infrastructural deficits, and confine corruption to the back seat, at least, as it couldn’t be exterminated completely from our national life and vigorous efforts were made to fight the emerging wars; insurgency, kidnapping, and banditry.
Analysts posited that no matter the economic and infrastructural achievements recorded by any government as long as citizens do not feel safe doing their normal businesses, it will be hard to score the government high, therefore, APC and Tinubu in particular will have to convince Nigerians that they will do something different to arrest the security challenges bedeviling every geopolitical zone of the country.
Nonetheless the situation has not made it easy for the PDP to walk into Aso Villa as many Nigerians have not forgotten so soon why they were voted out of power over seven years ago.
. They will have to convince Nigerians that they have truly repented and are ready to chart a new and sincere path to rescuing the country from economic stagnation and security challenges, while entrenching good governance where fairness, justice, and equity will be her mantra. But PDP has not given Nigerians that confidence as she has not been able to put her house in order.
The recent media parley with the Rivers State Governor, Ezenwo Nwesom Wike where he made allegations against the party and her presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar has dampened the trust they were trying to rebuild as Wike has shown that they can not be trusted, that the party leadership lacks integrity and honor to uphold an agreement or even redistribute leadership positions according to its own zoning system, to be able to carry everyone along.
Even though some Atiku apologists believe that Wike’s influence starts and ends in Rivers State, that might turn out to be their greatest undoing because you cannot underrate a sitting governor of one of the three influential states, that is, Lagos, Kano, and Rivers, which are critical to any presidential election. A lot of people share his sentiment, especially, Southerners who feel undone by the process that brought in another northern presidential candidate.
Just as Wike rightly pointed out, you need at least two of these three states to win the general election but in this case, Lagos is a no-go area because Tinubu is grounded there and Labour Party is also there to give APC a run for it’s money, due to the large presence of Ibos there, while Kano is Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso’s, the presidential candidate of NNPP strongest base, even as it is an APC controlled state, therefore, the main battle will be between APC and NNPP, but this is not ignoring the significant presence of PDP there too.
Kwankwaso, according to some political pundits, is smart enough to play regional politics. And in this case, it is an attempt to arrogate some power to himself and negotiate with any candidate to form an alliance or coalition of parties and hopefully share the spoils, in case they are victorious.
However, as we noted, the major sentiments on the front burner are religion, ethnicity, and the regionalism, and to the extent that one affects a certain candidate negatively, to that extent is it to the other’s benefit, but hopefully the biggest winner will be Nigeria.
Today, we have three leading candidates, two from the Southwest and Southeast and one from the Northeast. Two are Muslims and the other is Christian, and the three of them represent the three dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria.
It is believed that a same-faith ticket may affect APC‘s chances, and Atiku’s candidacy will affect the PDP because some groups believe it would not be fair for a Northerner to succeed another. However, Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s flag bearer has systematically increased the chances of APC to emerge victorious because the South-east and South-south that Atiku and Obi combined and delivered to PDP in the 2019 general elections is now to be shared between them even though the combination couldn’t oust APC at the time.
It is anyone’s guess if the duo stand any real chance of winning the election this time around when the votes of the SE and SS are expected to be split for PDP and Labour Party while APC picks pieces, some large share of that from Imo State, and the dominant northern votes.
Peter Obi is expected to make a good outing in the forthcoming presidential election, especially in the South but it is not yet time for him to clinch the seat because even though he has been able to rouse the consciousness of the youth particularly those of the South East he has been unable to replicate same in the other geopolitical zones due to the fact that his movement is conceived as Igbo agenda coupled with the fact that most of his supporters are thought to be sympathetic to the Independent People of Biafra ( IPOB) a violent group proscribed by the Federal Government as a terrorist group.
. . Therefore, unless and until Peter Obi distances himself from IPOB and condemns their nefarious activities in the strongest terms, he cannot be seen to be genuinely contesting to be President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for all Nigerians.
. . For Atiku Abubakar who is a serial contestant like Buhari, he has a lot to do to win the race. First, he is contesting against two Southerners who both can use the issue of power shift to whip up regional and ethnic sentiments; secondly, unlike Buhari, he is not well liked by the northern masses, to the extent that they would give him blind massive support the way they used to give Buhari and thirdly, if he brings religion, Tinubu shares the same faith with him.
. And that is where some of the things that count against the two other candidates are in favour of Tinubu.
Tinubu is from the south where power is expected to shift to(even though power rotation is not in Nigeria’s constitution) as Buhari exhausts the two terms of the North.
Tinubu can easily get the Southwest behind him if the ethnic card is placed on the table and can also get the North on his side if religious politics is thrown into the ring, as the northern Muslims and indeed southern Muslims and at least most of the members of the Redeem Christian Church of God (RCCG) will vote for Tinubu because of his wife, Sen. Oluremi Tinubu who is one of the pastors
of the Church, the scale tilts in his favour.
. Finally, If campaigns were to be issue-based, as far as his antecedents in infrastructural, and human developments are concerned, Tinubu stands a better chance of winning from his records in Lagos State, but in politics, like in the game of football, it is not over until it is over.