I have patiently waited to hear someone from any part of this country saying he or she intended to trek to Abuja to congratulate the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (ABAT); no one signified intention to that effect up till today, the 7th day after the 2023 presidential election results were announced....CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING.>>
A day after 2015 presidential election, one Suleiman Hashimu, an Ibadan based young man, announced his intention to trek from Lagos to Abuja to congratulate the then president-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari, and started.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The journey took the young man 18 days, trekking daily from 6 am to 6 pm; Hashimu presented a folder filled with goodwill messages to the president-elect from community leaders and their subjects through whose domain he passed to Abuja. Many other trekkers set from different destinations across the country to Abuja to congratulate General Muhammadu Buhari on behalf of their communities – They happily did so for the president they elected, the president they were given in an election many believed was the freest and fairest in the history of this country.
But I had conspicuously noticed that there were no such trekkers after the 2019 presidential election. The reason was obvious: President Buhari who Nigerians, particularly the down trodden masses, trooped to the poll to elect despite all odds, turned to be a disappointment; his diehard supporters, who someone called ‘Buharideens’, that erroneously believed he was a messiah that would take them out of the woods, from the very harsh conditions imposed by Goodluck Jonathan’s PDP government, to a promised land of flowing milk and honey, had left them in the lurch – Buhari’s administration had thrown more than half of them into the abyss of poverty within his first term.
The Buharideens are withering away very fast in the last eight years of Buhari’s administration, they were likened to a group moving in a city bus, each and every one of them has a bus stop to drop, and the bus was therefore half full (or half empty) by this year’s February 25th presidential election: For example, look at the trend of voter turnout, which is calculated by dividing the total number of votes cast by the number of collected Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs); it was 43.6% in 2015, it dropped to 34.75% in 2019 and 28.6% in 2023, the lowest ever, with only 3 out of 10 registered voters turning out to vote, according to Bloomberg News – Nigerians are disillusioned with government’s performance, therefore didn’t bother to vote again.
This morning, I teased a young man near my house in Kano, that he should trek to Abuja to congratulate Tinubu, wetting his appetite with the bounties the 2015 trekkers reaped: They were fed and given various gifts on their ways to Abuja, while Hashimu, the first trekker, on reaching Abuja, was given a new car and 2 million Naira (now about 5 million Naira with the present Naira depreciation against all currencies). The young man replied thus: “Oga, they will lynch me before leaving Kano. People are not happy with this election.”. He indicated that the president-elect was not popular.
Certainly, Tinubu turned out to be the most unpopular president-elect since the return of civil rule in 1999, going by the record of the 7 presidential elections held from 1999 to 2023: Tinubu won with the least number of votes (8,794,726) ever and lowest percentage of total votes won (37%), as no president-elect had ever won with less than 15 million votes and less than 50% of the total votes cast in the period; Olusegun Obasanjo won with 18.7 million votes in 1999, being 62.8% of the total votes cast to beat Olu Falae who got 11.1 million votes; Obasanjo also won 61. 8% of the total votes cast in 2003, being 24.1 million votes, to beat Muhammadu Buhari who contested under ANPP and won 12.9 million votes.
In 2007, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua won with 24.6 million votes, being 69.8% of the total votes cast, to beat Buhari; GoodLuck Jonathan won 22.61 million votes being 56% of the total votes cast in 2011 to beat Buhari who got 12.2 million; Buhari beat Jonathan, a sitting president in 2015 with 15.4 million votes being 53.9% of the total votes cast, while Jonathan got 12.8 million votes; Buhari also won with 15.2 million votes, being 55.6% of the total votes cast in 2019 to beat Abubakar Atiku who got 11.3 million votes.
Tinubu also won with the least number states (12) ever won by a president- elect since 1999: Obasanjo won 27 states both in 1999 and in 2003; in 2011, Jonathan won in 23 states; Buhari won in 21 states in 2015; and won in 19 states in 2019.
Again, Tinubu won with the lowest 25% of the threshold. The constitution requires a candidate to win a presidential election by winning 25% of votes cast in 24 states and the FCT, Tinubu won 25% in 29 states in the 2023 to emerge victorious: President Buhari won 27 states in 2015 and 33 states in 2019 respectively; Jonathan won 34 states in 2011; Obasanjo won 33 states in 1999 and 2003 respectively.
With the foregoing, I reacted to the young man’s response: “Are you sure Nigerians are not happy with the 2023 presidential election?” I quipped, saying: “But I saw old men with grey hair on the tele jumping about happily congratulating ABAT, the very minute INEC declared him winner, while a video clip circulating in the social media shows a gubernatorial candidate of the ruling party with his friends prostrating in thanksgiving to the Almighty for the declaration.”
“But those are APC northern state governors, it is their election, it is their win – they did the job.” The young man replied quickly.
Of course, the APC northern governors had delivered the bulk of Tinubu’s vote from their domain, and were alleged to have negotiated his success at the presidential primaries for the post of Vice-President and ministerial slots in the federal government, in the event of his winning the election.
Tinubu was said to have paid heavy sums for their support both at the primaries and the general elections, even though he did not nominate any of them for the post of the Vice-President, but picked a former governor that has the support of some of them as the Vice-Presidential candidate.
Though there are very wide allegations and documented evidence of electoral malpractices across the nation, those perpetuated in the north, particularly in the north-western part of the country, were unprecedented.
Unlike in the southern part of the country where the malpractices were primitive in form of disenfranchisement of the voter and cases of ballot box snatching and stuffing, the nefarious act in the north was more systematic in form of vote buying and electoral official-collision.
This is despite the president and the CBN Governor using the Naira swap policy to deny the state governors the use of their stock-up loots and the use of government funds to buy the ballots; they resorted to mopping up food items, condiments and detergents and swapped them with votes, especially with the gullible women voters that formed the bulk of the whole.
A state governor in this region was said to have stocked up some petrol stations with fuel few days to the elections and sold the fuel at a discounted cash price of N280 per litre, no bank transfer, against N340 going price in other stations, just to raise cash for vote buying…
The 2023 general election was far away from the semblance of fairness. The U.S Ambassador to Nigeria, Mary Beth Leonard, has affirmed our young man’s allegation that the 2023 poll has failed to meet Nigerians expectations, that many are angry, but she pleaded with the stakeholders to resolve arising issues in the courts of law.
