For all the condemnations that followed the words of Islamic cleric Sani Jingir, who recently asked Muslims to support the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket in 2027, the man did not say what many are not already thinking. The justification he provided was no different from what we heard in 2023 when we were told that the only way a Muslim southerner could ever win the presidency is to choose a Muslim northerner as his vice because—and this is significant—the average Muslim northerner is too parochial to vote for a Christian northern minority, and they cannot bear to see a fellow Muslim deputise a Christian. The only ticket they can respond to, we were told, is the one that over-represents them. That was how they upstaged a political arrangement that had previously maintained religious balance in the calibration of political leadership.
A quick caveat is necessary at this point. Nigeria hardly holds free and fair elections. We also do not conduct election polls; we simply project how people will vote (or voted) based on blocs of religion and region. Those calculations have become self-fulfilling prophecies, obscuring our ability to break down demographics, voter behaviour, and voting patterns beyond amorphous coalitions. We therefore cannot know for a fact whether Muslim northerners are more open-minded than the analyses predict.
Even more interesting is the public forum where Jingir made his statement. He did not say it from the confines of his mosque, where his statement could be dismissed as the febrile rantings of a cleric desperately chasing clout. He said it—boldly and without any inhibition whatsoever—at a political event wrapped in the shroud of a religious gathering. It was in the presence of the state’s high-ranking politicians, fellow clerics, self-appointed custodians of religious morality, and the hundreds of men socialised into thinking that taking one wife after another at public expense is a religious duty. They were all seated there in their red caps branded with the èmilókàn insignia. So, yes, while the gathering was supposedly a religious one, it was also highly politicised. The politics was everything; the tinge of religion was just to give moral weight to what was essentially an All Progressive Congress rally. Those who invited him knew his penchant for saying politically incorrect things and still gave him the platform. He said what he said, and you know what? I am more comfortable with the likes of Jingir, who express the courage of their bigoted conviction, than those who rush out to condemn with pseudo-liberalistic jargon but do not vote for a non-Muslim either.
Nobody needs a Jingir to tell them that the 2027 election will be determined by the same identity politics that shaped 2023 (or the ones before it). In the past few weeks, I have been asking some Yoruba Muslim friends why they would vote for Tinubu. Of course, they come up with the usual justification: how he has stopped the country from tottering towards disaster (as if Nigeria has not been tottering at the brink for ages) and how nobody else can do what he does. Then I ask, “If Tinubu converts to Christianity today, will you still vote for him?” Their enthusiasm practically screeches to a halt, then is followed by a long, meaningful pause. What they say afterwards does not seem as certain anymore.
Truth is, we cannot wish away identity politics in a democratic process. All politics is inherently tribal, a fallout of the very nature of democracy that places political power in the hands of the majority. How do you mobilise the majority without whipping up primordial sentiments, without political popularity eventually descending into populism? In Nigeria, we have seen this play out in the entitlement of those who think political power is their birthright. In 1999, when a Christian was elected president, it so upset their world that they brought up Sharia. That restlessness they typically experience when out of political power kept them animated throughout the Goodluck Jonathan presidency until they eventually had Muhammadu Buhari, a small-minded bigot who embodied the provincialism of the likes of Jingir. After Buhari came Bola Tinubu with a Muslim deputy, and people like Jingir are already calculating that by the time power returns to the north, it will be 24 unbroken years of Muslim presidency.
The only thing that can upset their calculations is if a Christian wins, which is a possibility considering that many people have been disillusioned with Tinubu’s shortcomings. Jingir did not misspeak; he was there to mobilise forces at an event where Muslims with certain ideas had been gathered under the auspices of a religious ceremony. Jingir merely said aloud what others are reluctant to say so as not to dredge up a Christian resistance as we saw in 2023. Whether that sleeping dog is truly lying will become more apparent when the elections draw closer.
Here is the thing: as much as I am opposed to reducing our politics to an ethno-religious headcount, what bothers me more is Jingir’s trivialization of Islam. For him, and others like him, the whole point of a Muslim-Muslim ticket is merely to prove to non-Muslims that they outnumber them (as if voting patterns are that clean). It would have been a different conversation if he had pointed out that a Muslim win would testify to the beauty of Islamic ethics. His comments would have been far less objectionable if the matter had been that Muslims must win so that the virtues that define Islam could help Nigeria develop into a better country. But no, all he wants is to pass a headcount so they can use numbers to expand their claims to collective resources. Islam, for him, is a mere tool that enables him and his fellow travellers to continually gobble up but never to produce or regenerate.
So, what exactly does it matter if Muslims are 99.9 per cent of the population when our lives are not better for it? Northern states have run Shariah in various guises for years, but what good has it done? Their states are no less corrupt than the supposedly secular ones. Religious governance has not led to better social, educational, health, infrastructural, institutional, and ethical outcomes for northern Nigeria. They are just as poor and dysfunctional—and even far worse—than the states that do not blatantly posture religion. I have a Christian friend who lives in Saudi Arabia and is always full of awe for the organisation that defines the place. When we talk on the phone, she asks why the Islam in our own country is associated with poverty, violence, and an eternal cycle of despondency. One only needs to look in the direction of people like Jingir to understand why a society whose best use of its religion is to win elections never grows.
Jingir might be an individual, but his understanding of religion as a mere symbol that need not maintain ethical depths is not. Just three years ago, some folks questioned whether Tinubu was even a Muslim at all because he failed to recite the salat properly. Take some time to think about that. A candidate with an unprecedentedly shady life trajectory like Tinubu was running for president, and the test of his Muslim character is whether he can recite Sūrat al-Fātiḥah—the first chapter of the Qur’an—which even a computer can effortlessly regurgitate! They did not raise questions based on his character. They did not ask if this man can stand the test of Islamic virtues: piety, civic responsibility, integrity, justice, sincerity, and self-discipline. Their test of his religious quality was about the most superficial aspect of the faith. But which one interests God more: how competently sacred words are recited or whether we demonstrate the ethics of the faith in our daily life?
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun