Why endorsements matter
Know ye that there is a method to the madness of our politicians. If that does not make you perk up your ears, then know ye that you are missing the fun, the shenanigans and the intrigues of our national politics.
Take the mathematical precision that under girds power configuration and re-configuration. While the rest of us sleep fitfully over their bad behaviours, the politicians hunker down each night working on the intricate maths of power shift among themselves. We wake up in the morning to find that the man marginalised as we went to bed has become the man in firm control and now happily marginalises those who marginalised him. Funny, this political game.
There are several ways to look at this. We take only one: the mathematics of endorsements. Some of us think little of the mathematical calculations that go into the decision by one tribe to endorse a particular presidential or governorship candidate. I assure you it is more taxing of brain and intellect than you thought. No tribe endorses anyone as a solid block without getting its political calculations right. In simple terms, it is all about investments and the calculated potentials for good returns.
In my column, The endorsement game, published on November 25, I noted that as soon as INEC announced the start of the 2019 electioneering campaigns early in the month, we were “…swamped in a flurry of endorsements by ethnic groups and groups formed expressly to perform this function in respect of particular” presidential candidates. I also pointed out that “an endorsement in our own political culture is about two things: money and the careful calculation for power grab, otherwise known as power shift.”
The second is the more important of the two reasons. Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo appeared to have endorsed my assertion last week. According to the Punch newspaper of December 23, he was in his home region to campaign door-todoor in Alaafin-Oyo. The paper quoted him as having told his people: “The Yoruba have a lot to contribute to Nigeria for the 2019 elections. It is for us Yoruba; if you understand, it is for us. We are not looking at 2019, but 2023. If we don’t get it now, it may take some time again.”
My initial reaction on reading that was to say, ahem, with a resigned shrug of my shoulders. I came back to it and took a more careful look at what he was driving at. The vice-president was brutally frank about the nature of our politics. It is about me and us versus the rest. His political maths clearly told him where the political bread of the Yoruba would best be buttered in 2023 if they play the game right next year. It told him that Buhari holds the key. And it is his to give in reciprocity. Osinbajo is asking his people to aim at securing that key because their vote for Buhari would be turned into an investment with a huge potential for huge dividends for them in 2023.
As the leading Yoruba politician in the country, Osinbajo has a duty to do what he has to do to position the SouthWest for the 2023 vacancy in Aso Rock. My reading of his statement is that their block vote for Buhari would ensure his re-election and in 2023, they would have the right to demand for the return on their investment. In essence, this is not really about marketing Buhari as a competent leader but using him as a means to defined ethnopolitical interests.
This is not really about the country either. It means that the next year’s general elections is not about shopping for the best man for the most important job in the land but about the maths of ethno-political gains. It is the way the game has always been played in our land. But what is, is not necessarily right.
The vice-president might have let down his guard but I believe that the other tribes and geo-political zones are working out the political maths along the same lines of self-interest. Each presidential candidate is a means by which the tribes and the geopolitical zones can make a grab for the gates of Aso Rock villa. No candidate is good enough unless he passes the carefully worked out maths of giving the baton as a thank-you gift to the tribe that plays the game right.
It is heart-achingly disturbing. After all these years filled with the buttered sermons on patriotism, nationalism and unity, our politics is still hostage to tribes and tribal interests. Our leadership recruitment process is still not about the best man or woman for the country and parts thereof but about which tribe gets or holds the baton of political power. To underline that: we are not really searching for a great Nigerian leader. Each tribe wants its own member there decked out with the halo as a Nigerian president. Look back and see what we have been through to make Nigerians think as Nigerians and it makes you sad that tribes and tribal interests still dictate the leader or the leaders we should have at whatever level of government in the country.
The big three tribes still think of power shift or rotation as a shift or rotation among themselves. So, we expect the Yoruba and the Igbo to position themselves to receive the baton from Buhari, a Hausa/Fulani. You do not need to hear from me that this political maths of exclusion has no room for the minorities - unless they make genuine efforts to improve their numbers fortunes in the labour wards. It is the numbers game, of course. Former President Goodluck Jonathan points out in his book, My Transition Hours, that he became “president (in 2011) against the pattern of choosing Nigerian leaders from amongst the majority ethnicities”
His victory hit the glass ceiling but failed to shatter it. Actually, we never left square one; thus making his victory more of a political accident than the shattering of the glass ceiling. As it is in the centre, so it is in the constituent units of the federation. Weep not, brother. It is good enough for the minorities to line up the route for the presidential race and cheer on the big three.