Elections 2023: Nigeria Annoints a New President
The victory of Bola Tinubu of the nation's ruling party over 17 challengers suggests Africa's most populous nation has opted for four more years of the same.
It looks like more of the same in Nigeria. A tiny fraction of the nation's vast population has chosen as their president Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu, 70 years old, and candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress party's (APC). He is the hand-picked successor to the outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, also of the APC, who was term-limited out of standing for re-election.
Tinubu, who is believed to be ailing, will be faced with a host of problems his predecessor appeared utterly incapable of resolving, or even unwilling to undertake. The most reliable national polling organization, Stears, has suggested that the new president will be grappling with Islamist insurgencies in the northeast, an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom, conflict between herders and farmers, shortages of cash, fuel and power, as well as endemic corruption and poverty. But it is security that rises to the top.
The winner is required to post more votes than any of his 17 rivals plus at least 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the 36 states plus the capital district of Abuja. That's a pretty low hurdle. If that bar is not reached, a runoff with the top two candidates is staged within a month. This time, that meant Tinubu was elected with barely 8.8 million votes out of a nation of nearly 220 million people, with some 93.4 million eligible to vote. Tinubu's vote total was 36.61% of the votes cast. More than 12 million new, largely younger voters registered this time.
The results posted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) showed Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a former vice president of Nigeria, came in second with 6.9 million or 29% of the vote, and the Labour Party's Peter Obi, a candidate, who appealed especially to the nation’s youth, garnered 6.1 million votes or 25.4% of the total cast. Obi did carry the nation's largest city, Lagos, but in the end that counted for little.
Two-round systems used in other western nations provide that if no candidate reaches 50% of the total vote, a runoff is held between the top two. This is what happened a year ago in France when moderate incumbent Emmanuel Macron faced off against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in a second round, with Macron coming out victorious.
Instead, the Nigerian system, where no candidate managed a majority, left the entire process open to immediate charges of fraud, which the losing candidates lost no time in claiming. This was the first time electronic voting was held in this vast nation that within the next decade is expected to leapfrog into the position as the world's third most populous country. Seizing on indications of some electoral chaos in scattered polling locations, all the losing parties expressed displeasure with the results and how they were arrived at. "I demand that this sham of an election be cancelled, and we call on INEC to conduct fresh elections within the window period provided by the electoral act," said Julius Abure, chairman of the Labour Party, whose candidate, Obi, was third in line.
Election observers from the European Union said the INEC's poor planning and communication had undermined trust in the process, but their preliminary report did not suggest any outright manipulation of the results. In some more remote regions, snafus cause the polls to remain open late into the night on Saturday and even into Sunday. The electoral commission has suggested that the opposition take their objections to court—a tactic that has been tried in other African nations in the past but produced few results.
What is especially important, however, is to examine the election through a slightly different prism. This map, compiled by Stears, demonstrates just how fragmented and regionalized voting is.
No single candidate really dominates the country. But it is striking that the APC and its successful candidate have captured much of the west of the country and one state in the far northeast. This is what the Council on Foreign Relations says about Borno in its Global Conflict Tracker: "The conflict [with the Boko Haram terrorists] has been primarily contained in the Muslim north, particularly in Borno state, but has displaced millions of people in the region. In June 2018, the Nigerian Army announced that two thousand internally displaced people were to return home." After all, it was in Borno that Boko Haram kidnapped 276 school girls in April 2014 and where the bulk of the pressure from government anti-terrorism forces have been focused. Clearly, voters are hoping the new APC government will continue to pursue the policies of its predecessor.
The new president, and the parliament also elected Saturday, will be functioning under the constitution of Nigeria's Fourth Republic that was established in 1999 when civilian rule was restored following a succession of revolving door military-civilian governments in the years that followed Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960. As it happens, I was present for the end of the Second Republic in 1983 when a military coup brought an end to just such a chaotic period.
The military leader during the rule of this junta was General Muhammadu Buhari. Ultimately there were two more cycles of military rule followed by civilian governance that encompassed a Third Republic lasting just 20 months from 1992 to 1993. Eventually, the current Fourth Republic was inaugurated with a new constitution in May 1999. In 2010, Goodluck Jonathan was elected president, only to be defeated by Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, ending 16 years of rule by the PDP whose candidate Abubakar was defeated Saturday.
The big question, of course, is what this means for Nigeria, for Africa, but especially for the big power rivalry that is tearing Africa apart.
For Nigeria, the prospects frankly are not encouraging. As Harvard Kennedy School professor Robert I. Rotberg observed Wednesday morning in his Conflict Mitigation Newsletter, Tinubu " promises to wield a limp duster rather than a stiff broom." Rotberg then went on to explain, "Buhari campaigned vigorously in 2015 to bring an inglorious end to Nigeria’s infamously rampant scourge of grand and petty corruption. But Nigeria is more dangerously and criminally corrupt now than in 2015. It is not clear that incoming President Tinubu will have the desire or ability to squelch the takings of the politicians and gangs who profit so readily from peculation, influence peddling, extortion, and large-scale criminalized procurement fraud—all common in Nigeria."
Indeed, Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index pretty much tells it all. Nigeria has been bouncing around near the bottom for decades, and most recently ranks 150th most corrupt of 180 nations in the world
And that's just one corner of the problem in a nation rife with rampant inflation that hit a year-over-rate of 21.8% in January—the highest since September 2005—but with a growing and increasingly impoverished population. Within the next 20 years, Nigeria is expected to leap from the world's sixth largest nation to third—behind only India and China, but larger than the United States, though its actual territory is no larger than Texas and Arizona.
What Nigeria has managed to avoid—so far—is being sucked totally into the orbit of either Russia or China, unlike some of its immediate neighbors who have fallen prey to the alluring promises of Russia's Wagner mercenary army to control Islamic terrorists or China to build vast and barely necessary public works projects. In 2021, Vladimir Putin and President Buhari signed a "military cooperation agreement," but as John Campbell of the Council on Foreign Relations observed at the time, "the agreement is a legal framework only; Nigeria has not entered into a new agreement actually to make new [arms] purchases. With respect to Nigeria, Russia is likely to be “transactional”—can its companies make money?" Still, it's been clear that the United States' reluctance to sell military equipment due to human rights concerns is an ongoing friction point.
Nevertheless, Nigeria joined with 140 other countries in voting for a recent UN General Assembly resolution condemning Putin's invasion of Ukraine. It did not even join 14 other African countries that, along with China, abstained.
With respect to China, my fear is that Nigeria may be en route to being sucked into more large projects it can't afford. Moreover, trade between Nigeria and China versus the United States is becoming increasingly unbalanced. In 2020, bilateral trade between with China was more than triple the amount of trade with the U.S.—$19.94 billion versus $6.18 billion, while at the same time, Chinese direct investment in Nigeria ballooned to $123.3 million from $24.4 million, making Nigeria one of China's top five investment destinations in Africa.
All of these are challenges that Tinubu will need to manage, though it is unclear if he continues to follow the blueprint of his predecessor, Buhari, that he will have much more success.
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In two weeks, voters in Kazakhstan will be going to the polls to elect a new parliament—a snap election in a nation that has shown itself as a critical component in Russia's efforts to subvert western sanctions and pursue its war in Ukraine. Andelman Unleashed continues to follow all the world's national elections. Stay tuned!
Ajay @ Mastercard ?!
yes, elections in Nigeria, Niger, Senegal and less civilized countries, where only self- proclaimed "kings" rules , are a joke nothing has changed for decades. No matter who they meet, they meet everyone who has a business and wants something from them making biz... and who pays better