Some members of Northern Nigeria’s political establishment are fond of stamping their feet and threatening to withdraw (voting) support to Southern Nigerian presidents who do not kowtow to their (sometimes unfair) demands.
They nearly succeeded in using the National Economic Council, made up of the vice president, governors of the 36 states and the Central Bank of Nigeria, to railroad President Bola Tinubu into dropping the new tax bills.
They are now using the approaching 2027 presidential election to blackmail him. Presidential aide, Tunde Rahman, notes, “President Tinubu has barely spent two years in office, yet political opponents (are)… in a desperate move to grab power in 2007.”
He identified opposition politicians, enemies within the All Progressives Congress and erstwhile APC stalwarts as the culprits. Though he excluded the Northern Nigerian political establishment, he made the deft observation that “power rotation between the North and South over two terms, may work against the opposition”.
Ahead of the 2023 general elections, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, now ensconced within the Tinubu Presidency, was notable in threatening that the political North could vote for another Northern Nigerian to succeed former President Muhammadu Buhari. Politics, he averred, was, after all, a game of numbers.
The other member of the tag team, Prof. Usman Yusuf, is currently facing probable storm-in-a-tea-cup corruption charges, years after former President Muhammadu Buhari placed him on a forced administrative leave from the Nigeria Health Insurance Scheme.
And his legal prosecution is looking like a political persecution. While the Northern Elders’ Forum declared his arrest as politically motivated, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, his acquaintance of 49 years, warns President Tinubu against sycophants who may want to destroy his goodwill (in Northern Nigeria?)
But the law must run its course for Prof Yusuf, who childishly splayed in the media a photograph of himself and Sheikh Gumi, at a rural Oyo North town, maybe as a cheeky game-baiting of Yoruba nation agitator, Sunday “Igboho” Adeyemo, who confronted a Fulani that he thought was a threat to the Yoruba.
The myth of Northern voting supremacy is probably accentuated by the decision of Northern APC governors who defied President Buhari and insisted that presidential power should return to Southern Nigeria, a fulfilment of an agreement embedded in the Constitution of the opposition People’s Democratic Party.
Of course, the massive vote that President Tinubu received in Northern Nigeria gives the impression of the North honouring that gentleman’s agreement. It is commendable that the Northern governors and the electorate voted accordingly.
It confers a great economic advantage on Northern Nigeria: The number of unemployed Northern youths (who are also running away from insurgency and banditry) in Southern Nigeria shows why even Northern Nigerian plebians bought into the project of a Southern Nigerian president.
If they had voted otherwise, they (and their Sahel cousins, mostly in the ECOWAS breakaway Alliance of Sahelian States) may be going through tough and expensive visa procedures to cross the border to come and drive “keke NAPEP” or serve as night guards with free accommodation in Southern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria could have retained the presidency using Section 135(5) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which says, “In default of a candidate duly elected under subsection (4) of this section, the Independent National Electoral Commission shall… arrange for another election… and a candidate at such election shall be… duly elected to the office of President if he has a majority of the votes cast at the election.”
But if they had taken advantage of that provision, with its simple majority, which does not require winning one-quarter of votes in at least two-thirds of the states in Nigeria, as provided in Section 135(4), the “Northern President” may by now be ruling Nigeria north of River Niger only!
Southern Nigeria, whose governors declared in 2022 that the next President should come from Southern Nigeria, may have aligned with separatist tendencies within their domains, and Nigeria may have been balkanised. God forbids!
The days of Northern Nigeria annulling an election, or disregarding gentleman’s agreements, to deny other regions of the presidency of Nigeria have gone past its sell-by date. No region of Nigeria will accept that disrespect anymore.
Northern Nigerian military boys took advantage of the blunder of Head of State Major General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi (helped by his Igbo law professor compatriot) who abrogated the 1954 Constitutional Conference resolution for a federal system with strong regional governments for Nigeria.
Former Kaduna State Governor Nasir el Rufai, who appeared to have led the Northern APC Governors to insist that Bola Tinubu, and not Senate President Lawan, should be APC’s presidential candidate may not have been in love with Tinubu.
But he knew realpolitik, the politics of reality, common sense and expediency. He and his cohort knew that a presidential candidate from Northern Nigeria could have meant game over. The separatist Indigenous People of Biafra and Yoruba nation agitators were watching with hawk-like concentration.
If the hunch by Aminu Jaji, representing Kaura Namoda/Birnin Magaji Federal Constituency of Zamfara State in the National Assembly, is correct, namely, that “el Rufai is more focused in 2027”, maybe neither el Rufai nor the Northern Nigerian political establishment is a long-distance political runner.
And el Rufai, Arewa Consultative Forum, the Northern political establishment and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who seem determined to upset the regional presidential pact, must accept responsibility if Southern Nigeria responds in kind.
To rework a pregnant phrase from the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria, if a branch snapped, the bird would fly away. The Northern Nigerian vote for Tinubu is probably the glue that is helping to achieve former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon’s dream of keeping Nigeria one.
The Chairman of the APC and former Governor of Kano State, Dr Umar Ganduje, has pinched his Northern Nigerian compatriots in the back, to warn them of the probable consequences of failing to return President Tinubu (or at least another Southern Nigerian) to Aso Rock in 2027.
Ganduje said: “Our President, who has come from the south, is going, Insha Allah, for the second term in 2027. And after that, it will be the turn of the northern part of the country.” But the Arewa Consultative Forum insists that the North cannot wait till 2031 for the presidency.
Though their argument that the North cannot be compelled to re-elect Tinubu in 2027 is spot on, they must, however, realise that if the next President is not Tinubu, it had better be another Southern Nigerian. To borrow a phrase from former American President Barack Obama, “Elections have consequences.” Another pregnant, and realistic, phrase from the streets says, “This country belongs to all of us.”
When Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Britain, she once vehemently declared that the idea of Britain losing the Falkland Islands to Argentina was “unthinkable!” One could also assert that the idea that the presidency is going back to the North in 2027 is unthinkable.
But the North should stop this unnecessary “shakara” posturing and remember that they started this “me-too” attitude, which they have used as an equal opportunity platform to (sometimes) gain (undue) advantage over their Southern compatriots.
But then, maybe Nigerians should agree with Dr Usman Bugaje of ACF, who is wondering (albeit without passion) why Nigerians should be arguing over the region of presidential candidates instead of their competencies.
•Written by Lekan Sote
X:@lekansote1, lekansote.com
