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As was widely speculated, the presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Muslim from the Yoruba-speaking southwestern part of Nigeria, has picked his running mate from the Muslim North of Nigeria ahead of the 2023 presidential election. On Sunday, July 10, while on Sallah homage to President Muhammadu Buhari in his Daura, Katsina State, country home, Tinubu, former governor of Lagos State and the national leader of the APC, announced his staunch supporter and ally, Senator Kashim Shettima, former governor of Borno State, northeast Nigeria, as his running mate in the race for Nigeria’s next President in 2023. In what appears to be a replay of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, Tinubu, a Yoruba Muslim from southern Nigeria, is set to run with Shettima, a Kanuri Muslim from northern Nigeria, in the same way MKO Abiola, a Yoruba Muslim, ran with Babagana Kingibe, a Kanuri Muslim, 30 years ago, by 2023.
If Shettima’s nomination was expected given his pivotal role in the emergence of Tinubu as the candidate of the APC, the reaction from the Christian community rejecting the prospect of dual Muslim presidency in post-Buhari Nigeria was equally expected and somewhat justified. Nigeria of 2023 is not exactly the same as that of 1993, given the deep polarisation along ethno-geographic and religious fault lines in a way never experienced before in Nigeria’s post-Independence history. And this level of unprecedented division is largely blamed by many on President Buhari’s leadership that is perceived high on provincialism but low on pan-Nigerian nationalism. His mismanagement of Nigeria’s diversity as seen by his elevation of his Muslim-dominated northern sectional interest over national interest in the policies, programmes and appointments of his administration has left the country deeply divided and its people living in mutual suspicion of one another. In such a divided polity, a Muslim-Muslim ticket of the ruling party in Buhari’s Nigeria, with all the incumbency advantage of deploying state security apparatus and resources at its disposal going into the 2023 presidential election, is a tinderbox waiting to ignite.
Even though Tinubu gave “competence” as a reason for his choice of Shettima as running mate, many are quick to adduce the more important reason of his effort to harvest votes from bigotry of numbers in Nigeria’s largest voting bloc in a polity that is primarily driven by the politics of ethnic and religious identity. The northern Christian wing of the APC is particularly irked by a choice of running mate that they consider has effectively reduced them to second-class citizens in their own country that can neither be President nor Vice-President not because they are not competent but because of the faith they profess and the biological happenstance of birth in a region where there is bigotry of electoral numbers of the religious majority.
However, in the national conversations about the grievous ‘sin’ of disregard for religious balancing and consideration for equity, inclusion and fairness in the choice of its vice-presidential candidate that has been committed by the ruling party, many Nigerians may not have realised the fact that Nigeria’sz main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), like a drunken harlot, actually lured the APC into an amorous orgy of incestuous liaison that has now produced a Muslim-Muslim ticket. On the emergence of a Muslim-Muslim ticket on the platform of the APC, the PDP drew the first blood when it jettisoned the principles of zoning and, instead, picked its presidential from Muslim North at a time when it should have picked from the South, citing “winability.” By committing the original sin of refusing to zone to the South on the expediency of “winability,” the PDP tempted the APC into committing the follow-up ‘sin’ of the Muslim-Muslim ticket.
After eight years of the Muslim northern presidency of Buhari in 2023, it was expected that the next President of Nigeria would come from the southern half of the country, in line with the principles of zoning and rotation of presidential power as a means of ensuring inclusion, equity, fairness and justice among the plurality of the Nigerian people, in order to achieve peace and unity. Unfortunately, once the APC indicated its willingness to effect a power shift to the South in 2023, the PDP started nursing the idea of jettisoning zoning in order to opportunistically benefit from the votes of the Muslim North by presenting one of their own as its candidate.
Enter Atiku Abubakar, a northern Muslim, former Vice-President and former and current presidential candidate of the PDP.
The emergence of Atiku from the Muslim North of Nigeria as the presidential candidate of the PDP altered permutations within the APC to the extent that some elements considered the option of also fielding a northern Muslim candidate as a counterweight to Atiku in the struggle for the votes from Nigeria’s most fertile electoral soil. And if the APC had taken the option of a Muslim northern presidential candidate, Nigeria would have been ruled for 16 years by a Hausa-speaking northern Muslim President, no thanks to PDP’s naked and simplistic winning gimmick, which saw it throwing the principles of equity, fairness and justice out of the window of its Wadata House headquarters. Another eight-year rule of a Hausa-speaking northern Muslim President of Nigeria would have firmly instituted ‘Arewa privilege’ in the presidential politics of Nigeria, where a southerner, whether Muslim or Christian, would no longer be eligible for the highest office of the land because of his geography of origin and the language he/she speaks originally.
Fortunately for Nigeria, the northern wing of APC demonstrated the rare courage of honour and commitment to peace and national unity when its leading lights, Shettima, Nasir el-Rufai, Aminu Masari, Abubakar Badaru, Simon Lalong, Ali Ndume, Kabiru Gaya, Tukur Yusuf Buratai, Atiku Bagudu and many others like them, threw their weight behind their preferred candidates in the South in the build-up to the party’s presidential primary. To these men, Arewa privilege in Nigeria’s presidential politics should never be allowed to happen, even when the PDP and its northern wing worked towards it. In the end, the northern wing of APC, despite having the yam (votes) and knife (incumbency), decided to shift presidential power to the South after eight years in the North and after a keenly contested election that was transparent, free and fair. Southern aspirants came top-three, number one being Tinubu, a man whom many in the North regard as the reason for power shift to the North in 2015 and for whom it is payback time. To the northern wing of APC, one good turn deserves another, as against the PDP where it doesn’t.
Although a Muslim, Tinubu is first and most importantly a Yoruba man and, in the South West where he hails from, religion plays little or no role in political transactions mainly because of the high level of religious harmony, intra-ethnic integration and accommodation in Yorubaland. Like many of his Yoruba kinsmen, Tinubu is as much a Christian and traditionalist as he is a Muslim. And if religion were the criterion for the North’s support for his aspiration, Tinubu would hardly qualify. Tinubu emerged as a candidate of the APC ahead of other southern aspirants because of his enormous investments in a party he co-founded in 2013 and worked it to victory in 2015 against a party that had ruled Nigeria for 16 years. But having emerged as a candidate and with PDP’s Atiku menacingly looking to grab the huge vote bank in the Muslim North, the expediency to fortify Tinubu’s candidacy with a powerful politician from the same Muslim North was inevitable to successfully shift power to the South. Going into the 2023 presidential election, the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket with a southerner leading it with the prospect of power shift to the South comes closest to the requirement of equity, fairness and justice than the PDP’s Muslim-Christian ticket with a northerner leading with the possibility of perpetuating Arewa privilege after eight years of northern presidency.
