A divisive mandate

After Bola Tinubu was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election, he thanked his supporters and appealed to his dissatisfied…

After Bola Tinubu was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election, he thanked his supporters and appealed to his dissatisfied rivals. Tinubu’s ruling All Progressives Congress party urged the opposition to accept defeat and not cause trouble after they had demanded a rerun, saying that delays in uploading election results had made room for irregularities. The parties now have three weeks to appeal the results, and both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi have said they are headed to court. An election can be invalidated only if it’s proven the electoral body largely didn’t follow the law and acted in ways that could have changed the result. The Supreme Court has never overturned a presidential election.

We have published commentary on how the presidential election shaped up, but we think it is important to emphasise some key learnings from the country’s most competitive elections. 2023 is well on its way to being filed in the same shelf of Nigerian political history as the most flawed elections — chiefly the elections of 2003 and 2007. This is not to say that recent voting exercises were great, but the operational disenfranchisement of many voters last week artificially depressed official turnout to the point where this is the lowest voter turnout ever, and some of the state calls are so befuddling that no serious political observer believes they reflect Election Day realities. How the democratic transition is managed by all stakeholders will tell us a lot about the true resilience of Nigerian democracy. Additionally, regional federal politics may be firmly back. While Peter Obi was a galvanising force for many young and middle-aged urban and semi-urban voters, the sweep of states in his column — easily the best third-party haul in Nigerian electoral history — means that his true legacy may end up turning the Labour Party into the main opposition party in the South. Not since the days of Nnamdi Azikiwe and the Nigerian People’s Party in 1979 has a southern-led party come even close to a decent performance in federal elections. Mr Obi virtually eviscerated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the South East and South-South and made large inroads into the Middle Belt. The sky may have been his horizon in a more competently managed exercise. If Labour deepens its roots and behaves like a proper party, it might be the spiritual successor to the various political iterations of Azikiwe’s movement. The first test of its durability comes up next week. The final major learning is that the PDP is well on its way to becoming a northern opposition party, although the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) will have something to say about it. Although we project that the PDP would hold the most governorships largely because of the nascent nature of the Labour and NNPP, it will suffer from its failure to deal with the fundamental problem that drove the G-5 governors to sabotage its efforts to win the key states of Oyo and Rivers. As a classic big-tent party, the PDP had always found a way to manage the conflicting interests of key stakeholders. Starting with Goodluck Jonathan’s botched management of the ‘New PDP’ faction who proved the missing piece the APC needed to ascend to Aso Rock in 2015, the umbrella party has lost its problem-solving skills. Post-2023, it will exist as a party of strange bedfellows held together solely by the party name. This de facto state of things will likely become de jure over the next one or two election cycles if Labour and the NNPP keep making electoral in-roads in traditional PDP-voting territories on both sides of the Benue River. In the final post-mortem, the 2023 contest will end up at the Supreme Court, which has never overturned a presidential contest in its 60-year history. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and much of the country riding on it, the odds do not favour a change in that institution’s behaviour. The final postscript of this maniac electoral adventure may have already been written.