The 2023 Nigerian Presidential Elections: And the Winner is...
This is part 2 in a three-part series on Nigeria’s 2023 election. Part 1 covers the build-up to the presidential primaries. This part would cover the campaign period and the subsequent election, while part 3 would cover the post-election issues.
Choosing Vice Presidential Candidates
After the conclusion of party primaries in June 2022, the campaign season went into full swing. The first task for the parties was to choose their vice presidential candidates.
The vice presidential ticket is important for a lot of reasons. Chief among them is to use the vice presidential position to represent a chief constituency that the party wants votes from. So for example, if the main flag bearer is from the South, then the vice presidential candidate should be from the North, to garner Southern votes. If the presidential candidate is a Christian, then the vice president should be a Muslim, and vice versa.
The PDP tears itself apart, again.
The PDP in this election, keeps on stumbling from one crisis to another. In the aftermath of the primaries, Atiku Abubakar, a Fulani from the North East of the country, emerged as the party flag bearer. This means that to balance things out, his vice president should be from the South.
He narrowly edged out Nyesom Wike to clinch the party ticket. Wike had initially mentioned, prior to the primaries, that he would support whosoever emerged as the party’s candidate. As fate would have it, the person who emerged as candidate turned out to not be him. Contrary to his words, he didn’t issue any congratulatory message to Atiku as the party’s flag bearer.
Before the PDP primaries, Wike had been the major financier of the PDP in the aftermath of the 2019 elections. As the governor of the oil-rich Rivers state, he was able to garner immense influence within the party, even instigating the removal of Uche Secondus as the chairman of the party before the primaries to serve his own ends. He felt that this influence should be enough to carry him towards presidential candidacy. It wasn’t.
On Wike losing out on the presidential ticket, he started permutating to become the party’s vice presidential candidate.
Post-2015, the traditional stronghold for the PDP in the South was the South East. As a result, a South Easterner (Peter Obi), was picked as the running mate in the 2019 elections.
This same Peter Obi decamped to the Labor Party, and his campaign appeared to picking up steam, especially in the South East where he was from. As a result, picking a candidate from the South East as the running mate would have been a waste of the vice presidential slot.
This left the South-South as the only viable alternative, as the South West was a traditional APC region. Wike was from the South-South, and as such reasoned that he should be consolated with the vice presidential ticket of the party.
The PDP set up a committee to suggest the vice presidential nominee for Atiku. Three candidates from the South-South were proposed - Wike, Ifeanyi Okowa(Governor of Delta State), and Udom Emmanuel(Governor of Akwa Ibom). At the end of deliberations, 14 out of the 17 members of the panel suggested that Wike should be the vice presidential candidate.
Atiku ignored this suggestion and instead chose Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate. While this may have come as a surprise to Wike and his loyalists, it wasn’t unexpected. Considering Wike’s antecedents, Atiku must have been wary of having someone so “restless” as his vice president.
The vice presidential position in Nigeria, and even in most presidential democracies, is a place for someone who wouldn’t make a lot of noise. Someone who would not outshine his master.
Atiku must have seen a bit of himself in Nyesom Wike. Atiku was vice president to Obasanjo and he was a “restless” vice president - causing Obasanjo no small amount of headache. So much so that Atiku threatened to ensure that Obasanjo was not selected as the PDP candidate in the 2003 primaries, since Atiku also wanted to be president. Obasanjo was alleged to have knelt down before Atiku to beg him not to go through with that.
Of course, after Obasanjo won the election, he showed Atiku premium pepper. In the end, Obasanjo hounded Atiku out of the PDP in the prelude to the 2007 election. Atiku did contest as the presidential candidate under Tinubu’s nascent ACN, but it was to no avail, as he came a distant third in the election.
Atiku didn’t want to have someone like that as his running mate. So, he settled for the soft-spoken Okowa. At least, he was sure that Okowa wouldn’t be “restless” like Wike. In addition to this, Okowa supported Atiku during the PDP presidential primaries. Word on the streets is that Okowa promised Atiku that he would get him the votes of delegates from the South-South, in return for the vice presidential slot. Okowa most likely delivered(who knows, the ballots were secret), and Atiku kept his end of the bargain.
But Some are More Equal than Others
The choice of running mate for Tinubu was one that needed wide consultation. However, the deadline for nominating a vice presidential candidate was June 17, 2023. The APC primaries was on June 8, and there clearly wasn’t enough time to select a running mate before the deadline. So, Tinubu selected a placeholder candidate, Ibrahim Masari, a politician from Katsina.
INEC rules allowed parties to replace their running mate after the deadline. So, Tinubu planned to do a wider consultation before selecting his running mate, at his own pace.
Since Tinubu was from the South of the country, the political calculation was that his running mate should be from the North. However, Tinubu is a Muslim from the South. To balance things out, the expectation was that he should choose a Northern Christian as his running mate. Doing otherwise would lead to a Muslim-Muslim ticket.
Tinubu went ahead to pick Kashim Shettima, a serving Senator and former governor of Borno State. Shettima earlier came to limelight in the election cycle during the run-up to the APC primaries. Commenting on his opinion of Yemi Osinbajo contesting the primaries, he said that Yemi Osinbajo is a nice man. But that he’s too nice to be president. As a nice man, Yemi Osinbajo was better off selling ice cream than running for president. Of course, he felt that Tinubu had the necessary chops and grit to be the APC presidential candidate as opposed to the ice cream vendor.
Kashim Shettima is a Kanuri Muslim from the North East. As opposed to the North West which is predominated by the Hausa-Fulani, the Kanuri are predominant in the North East. Seeing as Buhari, the outgoing president, was from the North West, choosing another person from the North West as running mate would not have sat well with the other half of the “Holy North”.
However, Tinubu’s choice spurned Christian Northerners. They expected that since he was a Muslim from the South, a Christian from the North would be the ideal candidate for equal representation. The Christian Association of Nigeria, other personalities and groups in the Middle Belt/North Central widely condemned the move as discriminatory and inflammatory.
Unfortunately, a Northern Christian would be the wrong move based on Nigeria’s ethno-religious political calculus. The North is chiefly divided into three regions, the North East, North West, and North Central/Middle Belt. The North East and North West are predominantly Muslim.
The Middle Belt, on the other hand, is split in half between Christians and Muslims. The Western portion of the Middle Belt (Kwara, Kogi, Niger) is predominantly Muslim, while the Eastern portion(Plateau, Benue, Nasarrawa), are predominantly Christian. This means, that taking the North as a whole, Northern Christians are a minority. Picking a Northern Christian running mate would possibly alienate the majority Muslim population of the North, who have two of their own (Atiku and Kwankwaso), on the ballot.
Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket is also reminiscent of MKO Abiola’s ticket in the aborted 1993 elections. Abiola, a Yoruba Muslim like Tinubu, also had a Kanuri from the North East, Babagana Kinigbe, as his running mate. Tinubu was also an Abiola acolyte in the 1993 election, where he would go on to win a senatorial seat in Lagos. The influence of Abiola on Tinbu’s campaign would be quite visible in its slogan - Renewed Hope, which harked back to Abiola’s slogan of Hope 93 in the 1993 election.
Last-minute Shake-up
While all this was going on, there was an interesting development in Peter Obi’s camp. There were ongoing discussions between the Labor Party and the NNPP for a merger. If the talks ended up being successful, the ramifications would be massive for the two nascent political parties.
Peter Obi appeared to have a lot of popularity in the South and Christian-dominated portions of the North. Kwankwaso, on the other hand, was struggling for relevance outside of Kano state, the most populous state in the North. An alliance between the two of them would be formidable as it meant that both candidates would complement each other.
In the meantime, the Labor Party picked veteran politician, Doyin Okupe, as its placeholder vice presidential candidate.
The talks of a merger between the Labor Party and the NNPP ultimately broke down. The reason for its breaking down was the disagreement on who would be the frontline candidate and who would be the running mate.
Peter Obi’s camp felt that considering that the incumbent president, Buhari, was from the North, it was only appropriate for Peter Obi, a Southerner to be the face of the ticket. On the other hand, Kwankwaso felt that he was a bigger politician than Peter Obi. As a result, he felt he should be the frontline candidate while Peter Obi would be the running mate.
After the failed talks, Peter Obi chose Datti Baba Ahmed as his running mate on July 10. Datti Ahmed was a former member of the senate and the owner of Baze University, a private university in Abuja. Kwankwaso, on the other hand, picked Pastor Isaac Idahosa as his running mate.
Peter Obi on the Upswing
This election cycle would witness a number of polls taking their shot at predicting the winner of the election.
The first presidential poll was conducted by NOI polls for the ANAP foundation on 15 September 2022, and it predicted a win for Peter Obi. The result of the poll stated that 21% of voters said they would vote for Peter Obi, 13% for Atiku, and 13% for Tinubu.
The result of the poll was shocking because Peter Obi wasn’t running on a major party platform. One would expect that being a third-force candidate, polling should place him third. Instead, the poll stated that he would win the election.
On 18 November, Nextier released their own presidential poll. Unlike the NOI poll, this poll focused on rural voters. The result of the poll was also a predicted shocking win for Peter Obi. Apparently, 40% of rural voters said they would vote for Peter Obi, 27% for Atiku Abubakar, 20% for Tinubu and 5% for Kwankwaso.
Peter Obi generally had a massive following on social media. But most political pundits felt that this was where his influence ended. Polls showing that even rural voters would vote for him invigorated his supporters. His presidential aspiration went from being a long shot to near certainty.
On 7 February 2023, weeks to the election slated for the 25th of February, Stears released its own poll. The poll also predicted a win for Peter Obi. However, this came with a caveat, Peter Obi would win if the turnout for the election was high. If the turnout was low, Tinubu was going to win the election.
From Balablu
During the campaign, the APC candidate was notorious for a number of gaffes which his opponents point to as evidence of his senility and incapability to be president of Nigeria.
For instance, at a townhall meeting in Owerri, he said “A townhall, different, from balablu, blu blu, bulabai.”
On its face, this statement is utter gibberish. But there’s a catch. The video originated from TVC’s coverage of the event. In TVC’s coverage, after he made the gaffe, the video skips to a different segment.
Meanwhile, on the coverage by Channels, what he says instead is “A townhall, different from balablu, blu blu, bulabai of the other parties.” It seems like omitting “of the other parties” on TVC’s coverage was the decisive factor in turning his statement confusing gibberish to pure gibberish.
Curiously enough, the video coverage on channels is not clear, while the audio is clear enough. It’s also interesting to note that the word on the streets is that Tinubu owns TVC. So, it’s weird that his own TV station is the originator of his famous gaffe.
Another Tinubu gaffe was his “tasting the mic” incident. Apparently, the mic wasn’t really working and instead of testing the mic, Tinubu “tasted” it. I remember seeing the video during the campaign period and was shocked. But on a rewatch, the tasting of the mic isn’t so clear-cut. I’ll leave you to be the judge.
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While there are a lot of other gaffes, there was one that wasn’t really a gaffe, but was funny nonetheless. He said, “I want to be president. For what? Is it for eba? Is it for garri? Is it for beans and dodo? I want to be president for you.”
Clips from the statement ended up being a staple meme during the campaign period. It was even a TikTok trend for a while.
Were these gaffes genuine or intentional by Tinubu? Probably as a means to ensure that he was on the front burner of the Nigerian consciousness during the elections? Only time would tell.
Bobo Chicago
A spectre that hung over Tinubu during the campaign was his time in the United States of America. Tinubu emigrated to the US in the 70s and got an accounting degree from the Chicago State University in 1979. He worked in the US for a while, before returning to Nigeria in 1983 where he ultimately became a Mobil executive.
There have been rumours that while Tinubu was in the US, he was involved in drug dealing. Investigative journalist, David Hundeyin, shed more light on it. According to Hundeyin, Tinubu was a bagman for drug dealers in Chicago. Basically, his bank accounts were used to launder the proceeds of drug dealing.
The United States didn’t convict him for his offence though. Rather, he forfeited a sum of $460,000 traced to his account, while also not admitting guilt for his alleged offence. In some circles, this is as good as writing “drug dealer” on his forehead. Spoiler alert, this would be a major issue in the aftermath of the elections.
The G-5
In the aftermath of Atiku selecting Okowa as his running mate, Wike campaigned for the removal of Iyorchia Ayu as the PDP chairman. In the run-up to the PDP primaries, Wike had orchestrated the removal of Uche Secondus as the PDP National Chairman. He did that because he felt that it would be easier for a Southerner, whose name rhymes with Nike, to become the presidential candidate if the PDP chairman isn’t from the South. He was replaced with Iyorchia Ayu, a Northerner. This was in the spirit of the zoning convention in Nigerian politics.
As fate would have it, a Northerner became the presidential candidate. Seeing his permutations fall apart, Wike wanted to reverse things by insisting on Ayu’s removal to balance things out. This was when the G5 group of governors was formed. They were five Southern governors who weren’t happy with Atiku’s emergence as the PDP’s flagbearers. The members of this group include Nyesom Wike(Rivers), Seyi Makinde (Oyo), Samuel Ortom (Benue), Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia), and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Enugu).
The PDP made overtures to reconcile with the members of the G5, but it was to no avail. The group insisted on the removal of Ayu, but the PDP refused. It’s possible that Atiku was reluctant to replace a PDP chairman who was loyal to him with another person of uncertain loyalty. Especially considering that this was close to the election.
Ultimately, the G5 governors decided not to support Atiku in the presidential elections. Rather, each of them would decide to work for whichever opposition candidate they so desired. Wike and Seyi Makinde ultimately decided to work for Tinubu in the elections, while Gabriel Ortom of Benue state decided to work for Peter Obi.
Naira Palaver
In the early iterations of Nigeria’s democracy, the winner of the election is usually the party that can do the most ballot box snatching and rigging. A slew of court decisions removing wrongly elected officials post-2008 made that a futile affair. Now, politicians have decided to change tactics by actually delivering cash to voters on election day in return for their votes in the ballot box.
What ends up happening is that the candidate with the most cash to dispense to voters would win the election. The amount is usually relatively quite little. Within the range of 10,000 naira to 30,000 naira per vote. Regardless, such an amount would make a difference to a random impoverished voter who is worried about where his next meal would come from.
Vote buying is “illegal”, but this is Nigeria. A lot of laws are suggestions to be conveniently ignored. And it’s usually hard to prove vote buying in court. No one wants to be the guy stopping someone else from cashing out. So, vote buying happens with the support of the police and other watchdogs, who have been settled, of course.
The art of vote buying is one that has been perfected by Tinubu, the Godfather of Nigeria’s richest state - Lagos. A case in point was the bullion vans that pulled into his Boudillon residence during the 2019 elections. He defended the action by saying it is his money and he has a right to spend it anyhow he likes.
He was obviously not Muhammadu Buhari’s preferred candidate to succeed him. But he became the APC flagbearer regardless. During the course of the campaign, Buhari was absent from most campaign functions. Showing through his body language that he was not a fan.
In a bid to address concerns about vote buying during the election, the CBN announced that it would be redesigning the naira. The rationale behind this was that the old naira notes stockpiled by politicians for the election would be useless and as such could not be used to buy votes.
This was a very terrible decision that wrought hardship on all Nigerians. The new naira notes were not readily available, and a lot of vendors stopped accepting the old notes. People had to queue in banking halls to get their money, and they were told that there weren’t enough notes.
Personally, there was a day I needed to go on a market run. And I had no cash on me. I had to beg okada riders to take me to and from the market. A lot of them were not accepting the old notes, and only a few of them were accepting transfers. It was a harrowing experience. It drove home the point that money in the bank doesn’t belong to depositors but to the government.
Buhari defended the policy, which was a brainchild of his alleged protege, Godwin Emefiele - the CBN governor.
It was an asinine policy. Nigeria being what it is, the same politicians who the law was trying to checkmate were able to use their connections to get access to the new notes. It was the poor masses who bore the brunt of everything.
The naira issue also coincided with a period of fuel scarcity weeks to the election. Things were so bad that Buhari was accused of trying to self-sabotage the APC government to make the APC flagbearer, Tinubu, get rejected at the polls.
In the end, a group of governors, led by Nasir El Rufai, sued the CBN to court to declare that the creation of the new notes was illegal. The court agreed with them and pronounced that the old notes should be legal tender till December 2023, months after the conduct of the election.
This did little to avail the situation, as vendors on the streets ignored the court’s judgment and still refused to accept the old notes. The state of affairs remained the same until after the election on February 25th.
Manifesto
Throughout the debate, there were numerous attempts to get the presidential candidates to debate each other. While Peter Obi and Atiku were open to a debate, Tinubu wasn’t. Maybe his handlers were scared of more gaffes from him during a debate. They were probably worried that he would be outclassed by Peter Obi in a debate. This is because Peter Obi is a very prolific and inspiring speaker. Tinubu is not. It would be a shame if the Obi wave exposed the BAT’s furore.
It could also be because debates haven’t really been important in Nigerian presidential elections. As far as I can recall, presidential debates became a thing from the 2011 presidential elections. However, all the winning candidates never appeared at a presidential debate, even though their opponents were willing to.
Ultimately, the bulk of Nigeria’s voters won’t be swayed by a presidential debate. They have more important things to focus on. Like the money they would receive on election day, who their local big men tell them to vote for, the tribe and religion of the candidate, and so on and so forth.
The closest the candidates in this election cycle came to a debate was the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) interviews of the candidates. Basically, the three candidates had separate interviews with the NESG where they espoused their different ideas for the country. I remember watching Tinubu’s interview and seeing that he was shockingly articulate.
Tinubu and Peter Obi also gave presentations at Chatham House on separate occasions. Atiku Abubakar didn’t, for whatever reasons. I wonder why candidates in a Nigerian election have to go all the way to the UK to give presentations on their agenda. This is all the more puzzling when you consider that Nigerians in the UK can’t even vote in the election.
The leading candidates also released manifestos. Throughout the campaign, the candidates had distinct leading narratives. Peter Obi campaigned on the soundbite, “We have to move Nigeria from consumption to production”. Basically advocating for Nigeria being a net exporter of goods as opposed to being a net importer.
Atiku Abubakar campaigned on privatisation and deregulation. While he was the Vice President under Obasanjo, he led the privatisation of a lot of Nigeria’s government-owned corporations. This privatisation drive bore fruits, especially the privatisation of NITEL and the opening up of the telecommunications industry. He planned to do more of this on becoming president. Public-run corporations like the moribund refineries were going to be on the chopping block if Nigerians voted him as president.
Tinubu, an accountant, campaigned on the notion of financialising the economy through the use of credit facilities. He proposed that credit should be made easily accessible to Nigerians. The easy access to credit would be used to boost economic activity and lead to growth.
The E-Day
The election was slated for February 25. The election would be for presidential, Senatorial, and Federal House of Representative seats. To combat electoral malpractice, INEC introduced BVAS machines and iREV (INEC Result Viewing Portal). Officials at the polling units would use the BVAS machines to upload results to iREV, which was accessible to the public. This would mitigate against situations where the election results are intercepted and altered in transit to INEC collation centres.
The election was largely peaceful across the country. Although of course, there was the occasional outbreak of violence in some localities. While there wasn’t widespread violence in the presidential elections, there was voter suppression, in Peter Obi strongholds in the South East. In a lot of polling units in these areas, INEC officials came very late to the polling units.
I have a friend in the east who went out to vote on that day, he was unable to vote after waiting at the polling units for hours. He ended up going back home. Funnily enough, he planned to vote for Atiku, not Peter Obi. But one can imagine the thousands of Peter Obi voters who planned to vote but turned back due to delays from INEC.
After the election, collation began, but INEC announced that there were attempts to hack their servers. As a consequence, uploading of election results to the iREV portal was halted midway. Curiously enough, only uploads of presidential election results were affected. The results for senatorial and house of representative elections were uploaded without a hitch.
The first state to be announced was Ekiti, and it was a handy win for Tinubu. The results from other states started trooping in. Shockingly, Peter Obi defeated Tinubu in his home state of Lagos. Regardless, Tinubu went on to win most of the votes in the South West.
Peter Obi handily won most of the votes in the South East, his home region. He also surprisingly did well in the North Central, especially the Eastern North Central states of Plateau, Nassarawa and Benue. He also got a significant chunk of votes in the South-South. Tinubu won the vote in Rivers state, although, there were allegations of crude election rigging by Wike.
While Kwankwaso won in Kano State, Tinubu came second with a whopping 500 thousand votes. In other areas of the North West and the North East, it was a neck-in-neck competition between Atiku and Tinubu.
At the end of the day, Tinubu won the election with 8.7 million votes. Atiku Abubakar came second with 6.9 million votes. Peter Obi came third with 6.1 million votes, while Kwankwaso came fourth with 1.4 million votes.
During the collation of the election results, the opposition parties (PDP, Labor Party, and NNPP) in a joint press conference, protested the jettisoning of the iREV and called for the collation to be stopped. INEC refused and went ahead to announce the results that originated from manual collation.
The opposition rejected the results and promised to challenge it in court. This was true to form, as all presidential election results since 1999 were challenged in court. The only exceptions were the 1999 election and the 2015 election. The 1999 election was the election on the transition to democracy after decades of military rule. The people were already fatigued by military rule and sought not to give an excuse for military intervention through another rancorous post-election process. As for the 2015 election, Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP conceded and even called to congratulate Buhari, the winner of the election.
The judiciary would once again be called upon to determine the fate of the country.