PMB is not the real winner, but...

It is a natural law that in any contest involving two or more contestants, there must be a winner. There must be a loser as well. The winner emerges victorious, and as a result finds every reason to celebrate his victory just like we are currently witnessing all over the country in the wake of the just concluded Presidential and National Assembly elections.

According to INEC, PMB emerged winner of the election with a wide margin (roughly with 3.3 million votes) against the former embattled Vice President, and PMB’s main challenger; Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. But in the actual sense of it all, the real winner is not PMB but the “I don’t care” class of people. You may ask the question: Who are these people? An attempt is made below to describe who these people are especially in the context of the role they played in last week’s elections.

The “I don’t care” class of people, who registered to vote, collected their PVCs and actually didn’t vote for any of contestants. Most likely, to these people PVC is only a means of identification. This class of people is predominant, and is the real winner; simply because it is the majority. Remember in a typical setting like ours, the majority has the green signal.

To justify my claim of saying PMB is not the real winner, let’s have a look at these figures and do some basic elementary arithmetic. Prior to the commencement of the elections, INEC released the number of PVCs collected nationwide (which approximately stood at 72.7 millions) by eligible registered voters in the wake of the postponed election that was earlier scheduled for 16th February, 2019. Out of these numbers, Buhari polled slightly above 15 million votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar who polled slightly above 12 million votes. But the real winners polled slightly above 45 million votes. Are you surprised?

The over 45 million votes the “class” polled are of course a large number; large enough to have determined the faith of a country as vast as Nigeria. This should naturally be a cause for serious concern in this country (especially by politicians whose ultimate aim is to garner votes by any means possible) because a large segment of the country’s population are of the view that voting doesn’t actually matter, and so it is of no any measure of significance. This, obviously, could be attributed to the feeling/believe by some people that it will not make any difference; that the norm will simply continue, and no visible foreseen dividends will come. It will be business as usual, nothing more nothing less.

So, the real winner is this class of people who have their PVCs but chose not to vote in the last Presidential and National Assembly elections. As a result, the INEC should quickly reverse its declaration in favour of the real winners. PMB is not the real winner, but the “I don’t care” class of people.

Mustapha Makarfi, Kaduna.