There can no gainsaying that the candidacy of Peter Obi has significantly impacted the trend and context of elections in Nigeria.
By Tiko Okoye
Let me commence by unequivocally stating that I am truly for everyone and for no one. I love engaging in robust, passionate debates that are based on facts, and revoltingly detest arguments driven by emotions and sentiments. Gaslighters and purveyors of hocus-pocus, aka nattering nabobs, always make me want to puke with their propensity to play to the gallery and flow with the tide of majority public opinion as they mealy-mouth hubris and inanities specifically designed to awe and intimidate gullible audiences.
Just this morning, a friend I regard very highly – and is a very committed patron of the Obidient movement – sent me a relatively long message. He wondered why I have “failed to acknowledge that the 2023 presidential election was the worst ever conducted in Nigeria” and why my voice has been missing from the throng of those canvassing that the winner of a presidential election must garner not less than 25% of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory as “spelt out in the Constitution and the Electoral Act.”
He made several other ruinous allegations that really made me pensive. I felt that I should just put an end to my writing if people like my friend have become so hardened by partisan politics. It wasn’t till about two hours to my self-imposed deadline that I decided to pen this piece that represents a slightly amended version of my response to my friend.
There can no gainsaying that the candidacy of Peter Obi has significantly impacted the trend and context of elections in Nigeria. Prior to Obi’s coming on board, the Labour Party was no more than a fringe or portmanteau political party, despite its much-touted sponsorship by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). Most political pundits, this columnist inclusive, willy-nilly dismissed any chances of Obi making any notable impact on the national political terrain of a country like Nigeria that’s still enmeshed in the web of primordial proclivities, especially when he had no concrete structures on the ground and was depending entirely on an amorphous mob known as the ‘Obidient movement.’
But Obi shocked the nation to its very roots. For the very first time in a long while, Nigerians witnessed a truly competitive presidential election in which all three frontrunners won the same number of jurisdictions. APC’s Bola Tinubu won 12 states, PDP’s Atiku Abubakar also won 12 states, while LP’s Obi won 11 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). The difference is the provision requiring that the winner would be the candidate who scored the highest popular votes and garnered not less than 25% of the votes cast in not less than two-thirds of the states AND the FCT. ‘And’ is capitalised by me for reasons that would subsequently be explained.
While believers are free to gloat and thumb their noses at doubters, the way and manner they have been going about Obi’s stellar performance has become quite irksome. It’s as if they are at war with large swathes of the nation. Yes, it is acceptable for them to parrot that “Some divine intervention is in the whole issue,” but to proceed from there to dub the election as the worst ever held in Nigeria defies all logic. For crying out loud, how can the same mortals attributing the performance of Obi to divine intervention simultaneously thumb their noses at God by disparaging His act?
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Obidients cannot even be honest with themselves to concede that the record of the nation’s worst election indisputably belongs to the 2007 version superintended by then-President Olusegun Obasanjo and INEC Chairman Prof Maurice Iwu. It was an election in which INEC was officially releasing results on air and their website in areas where voting was still in progress; one which even the major beneficiary – PDP’s Umaru Yar’Adua – publicly lambasted as the most shambolic election he had witnessed in his lifetime!
The numerous ‘independents’ in Nigeria are hardly impressed when Obidients make such claims as “Obi won the heart and soul of Nigerians who massively voted for him,” trivialising the fact that Obi scored about 6 million votes to come third, Atiku scored about 7 million votes to come second, while Tinubu polled about 9 million votes. But should I really be surprised? Not at all!
The man who most Obidients equally extol as their global idol – aside Russia’s Vladimir Putin – former-President Donald Trump, has been similarly bitching about the “stolen mandate” 74 million American voters gave him, not minding that Joe Biden trounced him with a record margin of 4 million votes. In Trump’s MAGA mind, 74 million is greater than 78 million, and represents ALL America! I’ve a very strong sense of deja vu whenever I read trending posts in the social media. Like French satirist Voltaire once proclaimed: “Wherever it is the practice to worship the sun, it automatically becomes a crime to interrogate the laws of heat.”
But the brazen disregard for facts and propensity for gaslighting notwithstanding, I still stand by two comments I made in my previous essays. First, nobody would deny Obi his right to challenge his loss at the courts/tribunals. Still, he should’ve acted like a statesman in the manner of Goodluck Jonathan because while only a Pyrrhic victory is tenable in the short-term (by going to court), a more expansive and emphatic victory in the relatively longer-term horizon would be made possible by crushing mischievous character profiling his opponents has particularly succeeded in crystallizing in the North where he desperately needs to make inroads to actualise his ambition. Second, all the court cases would go the same way as Donald Trump’s in 2020 and 2021.
Obidients relentlessly pillory INEC Chairman Prof Mahmoud Yakubu for “trying to tear out the 25% mandatory status of the FCT from the Constitution, just to “illegally” impose Tinubu on Nigerians as President-Elect.” They argue that he cannot be elected for failing to garner less than 25% of the votes cast in the FCT – a condition that even very senior lawyers among them claim every winner must satisfy. I’m not a lawyer but I’m very ably guided by common sense and have my own conviction on the use and role of ‘and’ as a conjunction (recall that I capitalised it earlier?). The FCT is not a State so it only makes proper to couch the provision as “States and the FCT.” It does not confer on the FCT a form of exclusivity and superiority over a State, when the reverse is actually the case.
A State is governed by an elected governor; FCT by an appointed minister. A State produces three Senators; FCT produces only one. A House of Assembly makes laws for a State; FCT has no such structure and is over-sighted by the National Assembly.
But suffice to say that even if the Supreme Court concurs with the position held by Obi and the Obidients and Tinubu is adjudged as not elected for failing to score 25% in the FCT, there would still be no clear-cut winner since Tinubu would still have the highest number of popular votes. It then becomes a hung or, to use the Nigerian lingo, inconclusive election that would be resolved through a run-off between Tinubu and Atiku, not a re-run as Obidients are supposing. And so far, I’m yet to see any lawsuit Obi has filed seeking to deduct invalid votes from Atiku’s total in a way that would’ve caused him to supplant the Waziri Adamawa.
An entirely different scenario would present itself if Atiku didn’t garner up to 25% of the votes cast in the FCT, creating a constitutional crisis that must be resolved either by the ruling of the Supreme Court or a “Doctrine of Necessity” amendment of the extant provisions of the Electoral Act by the National Assembly, and assented to by the President.
Let me conclude by reiterating the poignant comments of Works Minister Babatunde Fashola that don’t require rocket science for those that have ears to hear and apprehend. “Politics is a game of numbers and numbers have arithmetic equations. After 2019, APC was adding and expanding, with defections of three PDP governors, while PDP was subtracting and dividing, with Obi breaking away to Labour Party, Rabiu Kwankwaso to New Nigeria Peoples Party and the Wike-led mutinous G-5 acting as spoilers from within.”
Should reasonable men and women expect that a house that APC badly mauled in 2019 when the tenants were very united would offer a serious challenge to the same ruling party when the opposition has become so splintered and disunited? Divided, it is said, they fall, and united we stand – wobbling and fumbling aside – and win. As for Peter Obi and his Obidients, the beat very obidiently goes on!