Weep Not For Nigerians

Weep Not For Nigerians

Abdullah Musa

There was a presidential election in Nigeria on the 16^th of April, 2011. The results declared by the Electoral Commission showed that Jonathan Goodluck, the incumbent President swept the polls, nearly doubling the votes and spread recorded for his closest rival, Muhammad Buhari. Are Nigerians celebrating this victory? Yes, in the South; No, in the predominantly Muslim North.

These responses are automatically translated for Nigerians by Western Press as that Muslims dislike Jonathan because he is Christian, and love Buhari because he is a Muslim. This is totally wrong! But who will listen to me as I am also a Muslim? More so who has time to listen as already the killing fields are open once again, and those who call themselves Nigerians are snuffing out each others’ lives with impunity?

Whether there was rigging in this election or not might be known when the aggrieved go to the court. In our country, even if elections are massively rigged as they were universally acknowledged to be in 2007, the perpetrators retained their stolen mandate; and it is on such stolen mandate that Jonathan became President. And because it is such juicy mandate, there is no harm in repeating it as long as semblance of fairness is given to the process.

What is the focus of our attention is principally two-fold: whether Nigerians are capable of holding a national election in which all contestants are happy with; and whether the Western world is indifferent as to who becomes Nigeria’s President, as long as the process is adjudged to be free and fair. The reader may recall that the smoldering crisis in Plateau State originated in election for Jos North local government which pitted a candidate from the predominant Hausa population of the local government against another candidate who is what is commonly called an indigene. In this kind of scenario, nobody could lose; but more importantly, the Hausa man could not win because the area in contention did not originally belong to his ancestors.

In the recent presidential election, Jonathan, a Christian from the predominantly Christian South-South, was pitted against Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, from the predominantly Muslim North –West. For any candidate to win, he must have presence in all the six geo-political zone of the country. And this is the problem: south-easterners, south-southerners, and south-westerners all teemed up to say that the northern candidate would not have a foothold (25% of the votes cast in their area) in their area. Not only that, the south-east zone, and the south-south zone said that it is possible to have turn out of more than 98% in their zone, when national average hovers between 50 to 60%! More worrying for national cohesion though, the south-west fielded a northerner as its presidential candidate, yet refused to vote for him! The south-westerner says: I will not vote for my party’s presidential candidate since he is a northerner; I will not vote for my kinsman even though a Christian, because he is Vice to a northerner; and Tinubu will say I will not vote for my party’s presidential candidate even though he is a Muslim like me, even though the Christian voter of Kaduna state will vote a Niger-Deltan all on the strength of religious solidarity; Tinubu will vote for regional solidarity!

So far we have avoided the question of issues that should pre-occupy voters on any election: the reason being that there are no issues under consideration; that is, issues over which you will task a candidate for failing to achieve. PDP has been in power for the past twelve years; it had a seven-point agenda; but no one is interested in measuring its performance along such scale. It is to the eternal shame of Bola Tinubu, that he will reap from the exemplary performance of Babatunde Fashola to sell ACN to literate and focused Yoruba, but only to turn and support PDP’s mediocrity in the face of sterling qualities of a Muhammadu Buhari. But to be fair to him, his understanding of politics is no different from that of his colleagues in PDP: grab power; divert resources in order to consolidate personal power; that is not the way Buhari sees politics. He sees it as service and as a trust.

One never really wanted to discuss zoning. Lame as it was for solution to solving Nigeria’s political problem, it proved to be the wisest choice: two opposing tribes or religion should not face each other in an election, there cannot be loser. General Buhari does not believe in zoning. He believes, (erroneously though to my understanding) that one should strive to build his character which should sell itself to the electorate. This could be true in a homogeneous society. In this mad contraption called Nigeria, someone can pass a death sentence on himself rather than be saved by someone from another tribe or religion. Such is the level of depravity!

In the name of whatever deity the reader believes in, should this madness be allowed to continue? Of what use is free and fair election when positive values do not bind people together? The North presented to the nation a credible candidate. Bola Tinubu and company turned a national election into a religious, tribal, and regional farce. Since we do not have any history worthy of mention, we leave Bola Tinubu’s judgment in the Hands of his Creator.