By Isma’il Hashim Abubakar
I was primarily not comfortable with the idea and bid of a Muslim-Muslim ticket, which the ruling party APC had issued to Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Kashim Shettima as its presidential candidate and running mate, respectively. I held this view for several reasons, some of which were equally articulated by various analysts, commentators and opinionists.
Like many thousands of Nigerians, particularly Muslims, I also believed that the Muslim-Muslim ticket was a necessary deceptive winning strategy rather than an intrepid move toward the triumph of Islam in a pluralistic country that has been suffering from the demographic competition. In 2015 when Muhammadu Buhari became the flag-bearer of the APC, there were indications that Bola Tinubu (a major stakeholder in the political merger that culminated in the sweeping victories of the APC during the 2015 elections) had a strong zest to be picked by Buhari as the latter’s running mate. But the old general refused to do so, obviously to carry along the Christians and canvass their support and secure their votes; no farsighted politician would risk hurting the sensibilities of even a small number of voters, let alone a big population that once claimed to possess demographic supremacy in the country’s entire population.
The Muslim-Muslim presidency was thought by the Christian population but, in fact, to many Muslims as well to be a permanent impossibility in Nigeria’s political arena. Christians, who are a Nigerian minority as it has been proven now beyond the cobwebs of doubt, had been regarding Muslim-Muslim presidency as a unique Muslim utopian vision and a fruitless attempt of flying a kite either to see how high it would go in the sky or to gauge the direction of the wind.
Thus, Nigerian Christians never hid their opposition to the development and spared no effort to fight the bid. Churches became platforms for homilies on Christian unity and mobilization of support and strong, formidable religious support and solidarity in favour of the Labour Party’s candidate, Peter Obi, the only Christian who contested against three Muslims in the race for the highest political office in the land.
The defeat of Peter Obi, as portrayed in the milieu of Christians, was akin to the fall of the rising Christendom and the failure of the Christian cause in Nigeria. Therefore, not minding the huge irrecoverable costs of putting their eggs in one basket, Christians unanimously gathered their voting strength on their own candidate and wholeheartedly threw their support to Peter Obi. Although, like their Christian counterparts, Muslims had also used religious infrastructure to mobilize support for Bola Ahmed Tinubu and framed casting votes for him as a “political Jihad”, it was understandably impractical since Muslim votes must be inevitably divided between the three other contenders, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso of the NNPP and Bola Ahmed of APC.
After all, many northerners were yet sceptical of Tinubu’s nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and he was certainly viewed as an ethnic champion and a pursuer of Yoruba’s agenda. Added to this, the fact that Tinubu’s wife (and an acclaimed pastor, for that matter) and the majority (if not all) of his children are said to be Christians, some northern Muslims felt that Tinubu’s victory should in some form be considered as the triumph of Christians. As such, Muslims believed that the influence of these important organs around Tinubu must be beyond imagination.
In the runoff to the 2023 presidential election, the Muslim society in northern Nigeria, which, as always, largely relies on the homilies of the clerical establishment in the region, became extremely divided as to which of the three candidates Muslims should support. Scholars who were loyalists to northern governors, some of whom were/are among their political appointees, had preached in favour of Tinubu and showed his election as a necessity that Muslims must wholeheartedly work for. Other scholars, most of whom were independent and largely young scholars, openly campaigned for Atiku Abubakar and warned northerners against voting for someone outside their region. The majority of scholars, however, seemed to take a neutral position and advised that Muslims could vote for any of the three candidates since each of them is a Muslim.
Despite the respected Jos-based cleric Shaykh Jingir defied this order, it was the position popularized and voiced loudly by the outspoken Izala, the proto-Salafi group which in the past used to explicitly campaign for Buhari and make it a religious obligation upon all Muslims to vote for the old general. It appeared that the group decided this time not to openly side with any of the candidates since some people had been launching attacks on the group for asking them to vote for Buhari, but then the group failed to criticize Buhari’s leadership failure. It was even argued that Izala (whose top figures are friends and loyalists to some northern governors) was inwardly supporting Tinubu’s candidature, but it was afraid of the protest and condemnation of its followers and the larger Muslim public. Thus, it decided to exhibit outward neutrality.
Whatever the case, the Muslim-Muslim ticket has, despite these binaries, scaled through and Muslims in the North had already accepted the development as a valid testimony of their numerical supremacy in the country. And here is why.
Out of 23377466, the total valid votes cast, 17275933 represent the voting strength of Muslims who divided their votes for the three Muslim candidates. No analysis of the results of this election can ignore the possibility of overlaps of votes between Muslims and Christians in favour of each of these three candidates. But since this was very minimal, the outcomes of the elections have solidly reflected the religious affiliation and sociopolitical orientation of the voting population. After all the mobilizations in churches and social media platforms, including the voluminous circulars disseminated to all chapels and chapters by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and sister bodies, the results of the election show that Peter Obi had merely scored 6101533, fewer than 27 per cent of the whole valid votes cast.
Of course, a case cannot be made on fixed and exact statistics on Nigeria’s population through the results of polls, but some circumstances, like elections, are yet crucial in arriving at some useful hints. A lot of factors have combined to contribute to the rapid increase of Muslims and give them a numerical edge over their counterparts.
The Muslims, who still retain the age-old culture of growing extended families, have a prevailing polygamous lifestyle and have not, to a large extent, assimilated to the western childbearing orientation. Research has shown that Muslim women have a higher fertility rate than non-Muslim women.100 According to the data of Nigeria‘s National Population Commission, as of 2008, birthrates per woman in the North West and the North East stood at 7.3 and 7.2, respectively, while in the South, it was less than 5 children per woman (available on https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/fr222/fr222.pdf).
Although democracy is a game of numbers and it depends on the principle of “the majority carries the votes”, Nigeria’s democracy has since 1999 been characterized by zoning and rotation between the two major regions and religions (North and South and Islam and Christianity). And although many politicians have adopted zoning and rotation in the spirit of carrying everyone along, there are places where rotation based on faith is an impossible matter. For instance, Muslims in Gombe State account for about 75 per cent, yet the state has been electing a Muslim and Christian governor and deputy governor for over two decades.
In Kaduna State, until 2019, when Governor Nasir El-Rufai chose a Muslim deputy governor, the state has been pairing a Muslim and Christian for these two powerful ranks. Other examples can be confidently cited, and it is Muslims who make the most concession. In states like Plateau and Benue, however, which although having a sizable population of Muslims ranging from 40 per cent to above in the case of the former and about 25 per cent in respect of the latter, no Muslim has ever been selected as deputy governor since the return of the present democratic dispensation in 1999.
Politicians do not toy with the matter of votes irrespective of who the voter is, but the 2023 presidential election will go down in history as a solid testimony establishing the fact that Muslims can determine their political fate and can win the election of the highest political office in the land without the votes of the Christians. And going by the case study of Plateau and Benue states, one may be justified if he alleges that had it been that it was Christians who possessed similar numerical strength to Muslims, no one could guarantee that they would concede the position of vice president to the Muslims.
Whatever the case, it is now clear that propaganda and powerful and frequent presence in the media is not and can never be the practical elements with which to substantiate persistent claims of being half of Nigeria’s population.
Despite the foregoing arguments, a question that may yet beg for an answer is, does the faith of a president necessarily ensure that his coreligionists enjoy the dividends of democracy better than those with whom he does not share his faith? No clear-cut answers can be supplied to this question. But the attitudes of some presidents since 1999, starting from Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’adu’a, Goodluck Jonathan and the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari, testify that some presidents may be too partial to members of their faith to the detriment of others.
The Muslim-Muslim presidency may benefit Nigerian Muslims through the pleasure they will derive, which is inherent in sharing the same faith with the commander-in-chief and his deputy, but also in putting an end to the fact of their disputed majority. Meanwhile, it is likely that Christians, who will henceforth restrategize to launch further onslaughts on the presidency, and of course, consistently cry wolf where there may be none at all, will, in the long run, be the greatest beneficiaries of Tinubu’s leadership. The justification for this assertion is obvious; Christians recorded bigger gains from his two terms as a governor of Lagos State and perhaps even in the succeeding years.
And despite that it is now clear that there is a wide numerical margin between Muslims and Christians, this may not be radically reflected in the constitution of the presidential cabinet; out of the 40 (or thereabout) ministers that the new president will be appointing in the next few months, it will be hard if he will summon enough courage to appoint 11 Christian ministers which is the proportionate numerical representation of Christian population supplied to us by the 2023 presidential election.
During my childhood, I used to hear Muslims say that Saudi Arabia had a diplomatic policy of raising or lowering the flag of each country according to the faith of its president. I could remember vividly when after Muslims were tired of the Obasanjo administration and Umaru Musa Yarauda, the unfavourable candidate had defeated Buhari (the saint as of then) when some people, despite the dark outcomes of the election results, expressed delight and commented that at least Nigeria’s flag would be raised in Saudi Arabia after it had been dumped on the ground for about eight years. If this diplomatic principle in Saudi Arabia is true and still valid, Tinubu’s victory will now mean that Nigeria’s flag will at least spend twelve uninterrupted years flying in the Saudi sky, and only God knows when it may be lowered.
In a different essay I penned more than a year ago. I argued that if the situation would warrant that Tinubu’s victory would only be guaranteed if he embraced Christianity, he might end up becoming a Christian just to realize his lifetime ambition. Based on the goings-on of the present political season and the outcome of the 2023 presidential election, it is also safe to argue that despite being admittedly a nominal Muslim as shown by his self-orchestrated Fatiha recitational suicide, Tinubu had, by picking a Muslim as his running mate, audaciously accomplished what many Muslim politicians could never mull over not to talk of giving it a try.
Ismail wrote from Souss, Southern Morocco, and can be reached at ismailiiit18@gmail.com.
