In less than eight months, Nigeria will hold another presidential election, likely to be as fiercely contested as the 2023 version, if not more. The final cast of contestants will emerge after the primaries and possible last-minute alliances and some say by the courts. But it is not only the presidential candidates and their permutations and their ideas that will be on trial at the polls. The 2027 election, probably more than earlier polls, will also provide a major opportunity to test or re-test some of the long-held assumptions and questions about Nigeria’s electoral politics.
I will explore three of such key electoral assumptions today, starting with the place of incumbency, which can now be regarded as a settled issue based on the outcome of the 2015 presidential election. The world over, elections are seen as referenda on incumbent candidates or parties. It is the same in Nigeria where incumbency usually comes with both expected baggage and undue advantage.
For different reasons, the four sitting presidents who stood for re-election after Nigeria embraced the presidential system in 1979 went into their second elections with perceived popular weaknesses. Alhaji Shehu Shagari was vulnerable in 1983, and to different degrees so were Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 and President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019. But being in office and having control of state apparatus and resources usually blunt the vulnerability to the extent that it was deemed totally impossible, no matter what, to defeat an incumbent president in Nigeria.
However, 2015 happened. And it is now a settled matter that even in Nigeria an incumbent can be defeated. But defeating a sitting and vulnerable president is still not a given, as not all vulnerabilities are fatal. 2027 will thus provide an opportunity to test if we are due for a repeat of 2015 or not. Based on the still painful effects of petrol subsidy removal and Naira devaluation, his lopsided appointments and the generally middling performance of his administration, President Bola Tinubu cannot be said to be going into this election as a clear favourite of most voters.
But he is adjudged to have greater political nous than previous presidents and he is suspected to have less scruples than his predecessors in pressing state resources and apparatus for electoral purposes. These by themselves may not count as much as the quality of the opposition. All things being equal, Tinubu is likely to be confronted by a fractured opposition that additionally has not, beyond the usual vibes, made a compelling case of what it would do differently and how that would translate to a different outcome for most Nigerians. Even after controlling for state power, Tinubu may still get over the line because a significant number of voters may trust him to do a better job than his opponents or he may be favoured, yet again, by the arithmetic of a crowded contest. But it is also possible that most of the voters may choose to vote anyone but Tinubu. For now, it is difficult to say how things will pan out in January, as many things can still change between now and then. But for sure, the assumptions about the baggage and the advantage of incumbency will be tested.
The second assumption that will be appraised is the weight of political structure and the agency of individual voters in determining the outcome of presidential elections in Nigeria. The structuralist view of Nigeria’s election sees most of the voters as anonymised individuals deciding largely as part of political groupings, and the country as a mass of decentralised electoral groupings that are sustained and controlled by certain patrons or party grandees. To this school, whoever controls or is supported by a coalition of most electoral-rich political structures has the edge.
The contrary view, which we can call the individualist school, sees the voters as distinct individuals with minds of their own and who are not tied to any patronage system or political structure, and who will always vote for whom they think is the right or most qualified candidate. For those who subscribe to this view, appealing directly to a plurality of individual voters, rather than cutting deals with an array of political lords, provides a surer path to victory especially for non-traditional politicians.
Individual and group voters exist in Nigeria, as in other climes. A review of voting patterns over many electoral cycles suggests a division largely along urban-rural and class lines, which further suggests that the group voters might be more in number. This realisation has increased the utility of political structure to presidential candidates desirous of getting not just the highest number of votes but also of meeting the spread requirement. In a vast country where extraction and patronage are the norm, it is not surprising that cobbling together the largest coalition of political structures or being the candidate of a party that boasts of such a structure has been the more preferred and the surer path to victory in presidential elections. To be sure, there is an alternative path, of an individual with a near-religious, popular following, but the nature of Nigeria’s politics is that the utility of this alternative path is limited by how Nigeria’s diversity makes it difficult to have candidates that appeal on merit to individual voters across the different divides. Also, whatever makes a politician wildly popular in one section of the country necessarily arouses suspicion and even hostility in another section.
It is important to state here that the distinction between individual and group voters or of appealing to political lords and directly to voters is not always neat or normative (even when some go to great length to cast political decision in sanitised moral hues). The groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The fact that someone is voting as part of a structure does not undermine the soundness or independence of their decision. Also, the fact that someone is exercising their individual agency does not mean they are operating independently, and not just following a crowd.
Also, controlling most of the state and local council structures does not automatically guarantee victory, as anti-party and tactical voting are not infrequent in our politics. While our experience has shown that enjoying mass, near-cultic following might fall short, it is also not impossible for a presidential candidate to have some mass appeal and be supported by a cross-over vote machine that a strong political structure can offer. This combination created the path for Buhari in 2015, after failing to make the cut in three electoral cycles despite his faithful 12 million voters.
Based on purely structuralist readings, the election should be a cakewalk for Tinubu. His party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is in power in 31 of the 36 states of the federation. The governors are the real lords of the manor and they control the structure in their states. But this by itself doesn’t mean much. The APC will be deluded to think it would win the majority of votes in all the 31 states. It may not even poll up to a quarter of the valid votes in the presidential election in some of these states.
Some of the opposition figures have been pointing out that 2027 would be a contest between governors and the people. There is something to this, though it may be overblown. The fact that a governor has moved to a new party does not mean everyone within the structure has moved with him or will vote for the new party’s presidential candidate, especially if the candidate has been narrativized as being against the interests of their zone or region or when there is a home boy on the ticket. The point is that while governors are all-powerful at the state level, their control is not absolute. Even with their best efforts, they might not be able to guarantee their preferred outcome always. That said, the influence of governors cannot be dismissed, especially as they have an incentive in securing victory for themselves or their party, as a loss at the presidential level may create a negative bandwagon effect. Also, the assumed face-off between the governors and the people may not hold water, and there is no guarantee that the people are with the opposition.
It is possible that structure by itself is over-rated but it is also possible that it is not. It is also possible that mass appeal by itself has been underappreciated but it is also possible it has not. Some of those who favour the individualist lens say, with utmost conviction, that there is no way Nigerians who have gone, and are still going, through the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades will re-elect Tinubu and that the only way he can win again is through rigging. Pain-points are a major determinant of how people vote, but these are not the only considerations. With and without rigging, Tinubu may still win or lose. We will never know until the 2027 polls if structure still trumps individual agency or if we have now moved to the age of the individual voters making independent decisions.
The third assumption that I think will be tested is whether there is indeed a settled national consensus that the presidency should rotate every eight years between the north and the south. My sense is that this bargain was fashioned in response to the crisis that followed the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election and the agitation against regional dominance during military rule. Even when it is not codified in the constitution and no politician can be stopped from exercising their constitutional rights to stand for elections, the political elite has largely kept to this gentlemanly agreement. This bargain has been tested a few times, especially following the sickness and the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua and in practically all presidential elections since 2003. It will be tested again in 2027.
By the rotation logic, the presidency should stay in the south till 2031 before returning to the north for eight unbroken years. All the aspirants from the south pledging to do only one term in office are responding to the need not to upset this delicate bargain. Without really saying it, they are simultaneously trying to reassure the north and appeal to northern votes. This is also the appeal of Jonathan to some northern politicians, as only Jonathan and Tinubu can really be confined to one term because, if either of them wins in 2027, he would be constitutionally term-barred from running in 2031.
There is a possibility that the rotation bargain is a shared consensus between the political elite and the generality of Nigerians. But what if it is just as elite construct and it is not really a hill most Nigerians are ready to die on and that all those tying themselves into knots making promises that no one believes do not really need to bother? We will not know until this assumption is tested. If it however matters to both the political elite and the majority of the electorate, what happens if someone forces the issue and this delicate balance is upset? Will it be tolerated as one of those things or will it set off a series, or sow the seeds, of a political crisis in the country? This, too, we will not know until we get to that bridge.
Credit: Waziri Adio