Bola Ahmed Tinubu eked out a victory to be declared Nigeria’ president-elect on Wednesday but the opposition parties committed a strategic blunder by splitting their forces and allowing the ruling All Progressives Congress to reclaim the Presidency in ...
An election marred by allegations of irregularities still had one clear message: the country was hungry for change. Eight years of stagnation under president Muhammadu Buhari had brought economic misery and insecurity to many communities and individuals.
A charismatic campaigner whose devoted followers call themselves Obidients, Obi won much praise and acclaim from the international media. But he also cost the opposition the election by slicing off the PDP’s support base in the South. As an Igbo Christian from the Southeast, Obi was never going to gain traction in the Muslim north — and indeed he fared dismally everywhere in the north.
Abibatu Mogaji, the leader of the Lagos Market Women’s Association, and went on to study accountancy at Chicago State University, well understood the mysteries of demographic arithmetic that determine Nigeria’s elections. There is no doubt that there were flaws in the election and these were pointed out by the international observer missions.
The most serious claim was that there were problems with the high-tech Bimodal voting system designed to automatically upload results to a viewing portal. This malfunctioned at some places where results were uploaded by hand, leading to charges of rigging. But this was just as likely due to the general ineptitude that has marked much of Buhari’s administration as a conspiracy to rig the election.
The reality is that aside from the politicised youth and empowered middle class in metropolitan areas like Abuja and Lagos, who turned sharply against the APC,Thabo Mbeki, who chaired the Commonwealth Observer Group, summed up the situation tersely:There will be court battles and political noise for some time to come. But the one inescapable fact is that there were more than enough votes for the opposition to prevail if they had not gone their separate ways.
The case that Tinubu made was based on his competent leadership of Lagos, where he was Governor between 1999 and 2007.
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