Another new beginning…
Nigerians voted and the world did not end. We swung it! In spite of warts, we managed to stage a democratic show in the full glare of the world. Congratulations Nigeria!
President Buhari has bagged a second term of four years. His main opponent, Atiku Abubakar, is heading for the courts because he believes he did not lose fairly. However, Olisa Agbakoba, a senior advocate and former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), counsels otherwise. He says Atiku should let go. He warns, though, that going forward, Nigerian must strive to ditch primordial sentiments in electing leaders.
An analysis of the scores announced by INEC shows that APC scored 2,036,450 against PDP’s 1,776,670 in the South West; in the South East, APC garnered 403,968 while PDP had 1,693,485;
PDP also had a great showing in the South-South where it had 2,233,232 against APC’s 1,051,396. In the Northwest, APC scored 5,995,651 while PDP had 2,280,465; in the North-East, it was APC: 3,238,783 while PDP had 1,255,357 while the North-Central also went to the APC which scored 2,465,599 against PDP’s 2,023,769.
APC won in 19 states (scoring the required 25% in 33 states) while PDP was victorious in 18 with 25% score in 28 states. APC had 56% of the popular votes while PDP had 41%, leaving the other 89 parties with 3%. Those who had hoped that the massive use of the social media to market the new generation candidates was going to lead to a paradigm shift in voting patterns were disappointed. Nigerians have used their votes to say that a Facebook president or WhatsApp political gladiator is miles different from the real thing in the physical world.
A total of 29,364,209 voters were accredited for the 2019 exercise while 28,614,190 votes were cast with only 27,324,583 accepted as valid. On the whole, APC, with 15,191,847 beat PDP which scored11,262,978. The gap between the winner and his main challenger was 3,928,869.
Yes, there may have been underaged voting in some areas and violence in pockets of voting areas. But by and large, the elections were peaceful. The poll observers were right to have adjudged the process largely free, fair and credible. I wouldn’t go as far as telling anyone not to approach the tribunal although if I was the aggrieved presidential candidate, I would have borrowed a fairly used lesson from history and consider the elections done and dusted.
If there was wholesale rigging as the opposition alleged, how come some of the leading lights of APC, such as Governor Ajimobi and Senator Akpabio, lost their election? Why couldn’t President Buhari rig in one of the polling units in the presidential villa where his party lost? Many people had predicted that PDP’s Senator Dino Melaye’s goose was cooked but he won handsomely; so did Speaker Yakubu Dogara. PDP had supreme control of the Southeast where its Vice-Presidential candidate, Peter Obi hails from and shared more than 40% of the spoils with the APC in the Southwest, the home region of Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo. Atiku won in Ondo and Oyo states while Lagos, which many had hoped would give Buhari at least 3 million votes recorded only 18% voter turnout.
Olisa Agbakoba was sad that ethnicity showed up at the party: “The voting pattern for the 2019 Presidential Election shows ethnicity played a significant role in the Election. President Muhammadu Buhari kept his base in the North while former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar largely held his base in the South. Both All Progressive Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) benefited from primordial voting. The excepted zone is the South-west where voting occurred on the basis of issues.”
And talking about issues, I had openly counselled PDP on these pages to focus on issues if it hoped to defeat Buhari. In my piece of December 18, 2017, “New Improved PDP?”, I had said, “Although many Nigerians have openly said they are not happy with the state of the economy and have tasked the current government to fast-track measures that could ease their pain, they have not forgotten for one moment that it was under the PDP’s watch that our economic forest was denuded. Yes, the PDP created many billionaires, but it impoverished the country … I would have thought that the right place to start was to apologise to Nigerians for blowing the earlier chance given to the party to govern the country. The convention offered that opportunity but it wasn’t taken. That leaves the party open to allegations of taking Nigerians for granted as if saying, “We have raped you before and shall rape you again because we know that you enjoy it”.”
Sadly, rather than rebrand, PDP paraded the same people, the same style, the same slogans. All the time spent inventing a Buhari clone called Jubril of Sudan, propagating insulting tribal stereotypes, jamming the social media with creative diatribes and wolf cries, deriding every move of the government, even the ones that seemed to favour the downtrodden, making Buhari the subject of campaigns instead of PDP’s alternative vision and programme - all that time could have been spent selling a new dream to the people and showing them that the new vessel was not the same as the one that brought them to grief in the earlier voyage.
The Good Book says, God uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. We are at the portals of another new beginning. Buhari’s promise that he will “strive to strengthen our unity and inclusiveness SO THAT NO SECTION OR GROUP WILL FEEL LEFT BEHIND OR LEFT OUT”, gives the feeling that we are about to see, as detergent advertisers would say, a “New Improved Buhari”.