Nigeria’s General Election, With Ebenezer Obadare

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Nigeria's general election.

 

With me to discuss the results of Nigeria's recent presidential election, and their consequences, is Ebenezer Obadare. Ebenezer is the Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written or edited eleven books including Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria. He has also recently written two pieces for CFR.org on Nigeria's elections. One's titled appropriately, "What's at Stake in Nigeria's General Elections," and the other is entitled, "A Chance to Consolidate."

 

I should also note that Ebenezer knows Nigeria very well, having been born and raised there. Ebenezer, thanks for joining me.

 

OBADARE:
Thank you, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Ebenezer, Nigeria's general election is much like a U.S. general election in that there are a lot of positions up for grabs. In Nigeria's case, that means 109 Senate seats, all 360 seats in the House of Representatives of Nigeria's National Assembly, and eighteen of Nigeria's thirty-six governorships were open for election. Of course, the headlines are all focused on the race for the president. Before we sat down today, Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos State, had edged out all the other candidates to win the presidency.

 

Now, I want to hear a little bit about President-Elect Tinubu, but before we do that, perhaps you could sketch what this election was about and who was competing.

 

OBADARE:
Thank you, Jim. The election was about everything. It was about the state of the economy, it was about widespread insecurity in the country, it was about young people being irate, being angry, wanting a change in the way things have been done in the country. It was also about an administration, the Buhari regime, that was on trial.

 

People felt that the promises the administration had given when it came to power in 2015, that those promises had not been kept. People felt that Bola Tinubu, who we're going to talk about at length, would be an extension of that administration, and people also felt that Peter Obi ... again, we're going to talk about him. That he will represent a departure from the existing order.

 

LINDSAY:
Peter Obi was the third-party candidate.

 

OBADARE:
He was.

 

LINDSAY:
Had previously been the governor of one of the states in Nigeria.

 

OBADARE:
He was governor of Anambra State, yes.

 

LINDSAY:
He surprised everybody by running quite strong. I think he came in third, at least in the numbers we saw.

 

OBADARE:
Yes. He surprised everybody, including himself, I believe.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. We have this race. The third candidate, you might want to mention.

 

OBADARE:
You mean Peter Obi?

 

LINDSAY:
Besides Peter Obi. We also had ...

 

OBADARE:
We also had Bola Tinubu, of course, the front-runner who eventually won. Then we had Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the People's Democratic Party, the main opposition party, who has run several times before.

 

LINDSAY:
He's been a perennial candidate.

 

OBADARE:
He's a perennial candidate. I wanted to say, and I've written, that he's run for the last time and then maybe-

 

LINDSAY:
He's seventy-six years old, right?

 

OBADARE:
He's seventy-six, yeah. Hey, maybe he might take a shot again in four years, who knows? The question is, what's he going to do with himself?

 

LINDSAY:
We're looking at this group and the incumbent president, President Buhari, could not run for reelection, correct?

 

OBADARE:
No.

 

LINDSAY:
Since he was term-limited out?

 

OBADARE:
Yes.

 

LINDSAY:
Why is it that you think that Tinubu won the election?

 

OBADARE:
That's a great question. I think the map favored him. There's several reasons why he won. As with politics everywhere, you don't succeed in Nigerian politics without having a strong political base. He became president of Lagos State, Nigeria's most commercially viable state, in 1999.

 

LINDSAY:
It's also the most populous state, correct?

 

OBADARE:
Yes, 20 million. 22, depending on who you listen to. Then he left in 2007, but since then he's been carefully putting together a political machine. Across the country, he has name recognition, he's dispense largess, he's sitting at the top of a very extensive system of political patronage. That worked in his favor and people expected him.

 

When he came out to say that he was running, everybody was like, "Welcome, we've been waiting." The other thing that I think really rebounded in his favor is that the coalition that he puts together ... and we're going to talk about this some more when we talk about Peter Obi. The coalition that Tinubu put together was and remains a pan-national coalition.

 

LINDSAY:
What do you mean by that?

 

OBADARE:
If you just think about the places where he won votes, he won votes obviously in his own ethnic stronghold in the southwestern part of the country, but he also won in the riverine areas in the south. He took Rivers State. He won in part of the north. He won Jigawa State, he won Niger State. He won in the northeast. He won in Borno, meaning that his influence was not just limited to one region of the country.

 

LINDSAY:
Which is impressive because Nigeria's very diverse in its population.

 

OBADARE:
Yes.

 

LINDSAY:
It has, I read, 250 distinct ethnic groups in the countries.

 

OBADARE:
Ethnic groups, yes.

 

LINDSAY:
There's a lot of variation as you go from one part to another.

 

OBADARE:
It's an extremely diverse country, and in order to claim the presidency, you have to be able to cobble together a coalition. You have to get together, not every ethnic group, not every political sentiment, but a cross section that will help you prevail over the field. Tinubu was able to do that.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense is that Peter Obi, on the other hand, didn't have that same kind of infrastructure.

 

OBADARE:
No, he did not. What he lacked in infrastructure, he had in the passion of the people who supported him. Young people ages eighteen to thirty-five, or as I've said elsewhere, young people of all ages, every Nigerian who was harbored a sentiment against the way things have been done in the country, rallied around Obi. People really wanted him to win, not necessarily because they thought he was formidable as a political candidate, but because they thought that he had a moral cause. Sixty-one, younger than Tinubu's seventy, younger than Atiku's seventy-six. People felt that he could do the job.

 

To that extent, what actually he stood for had been there. What he did was to tap into that historic grievance and he did run with it. Together with that, he also faced certain limitations. If you look at the map, he succeeded in the Southwest. He took Lagos from Bola and Tinubu.

 

LINDSAY:
That was quite significant. That's losing your home state when you're considered to be the political king maker, is quite a failure.

 

OBADARE:
I know, I know. Totally unexpected. He took that partly on account of the strength of the Obidient, partly on account, also, of the fact that Lagos State is a cosmopolitan state. There are Igbos there, there are Yorubas there, there are foreigners there. Everybody owns Lagos and he was able to tap into that energy. He won his ethnic stronghold in the southeastern part of the country. It took a couple of states in the north central part of the country, but that was just about it. He failed in the northern part of the country and if only he had been able to strike an agreement with elements in the northern part of the country, we'd be saying something different right now, but he did not.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. Let's talk about whether we had a free and fair election. As we're sitting down here right now, neither Atiku nor Obi have conceded the election.

 

OBADARE:
Yes.

 

LINDSAY:
There have been some scattered protests. There have been calls for Nigeria to essentially have a do-over. Before we get to the question of whether you can have a do-over, run fresh elections, I'm curious, how flawed do you think these elections were and why were they flawed? Is this a question of votes being stolen, votes being bought, just the inefficiencies or ineffectiveness of the electoral system? Something else?

 

OBADARE:
That's a great question. Two things that I would like to talk about. One is to make an important separation between an irregularity and a fraudulent act. There were many irregularities and they've been widely documented, but the key thing about them is I think they had a national character.

 

There were several cases all across the country of ballot boxes being stolen, people being prevented from voting, hoodlums storming election venues, and driving people away. Those things definitely affected the outcome. Here's a way to think about it, there were 176,000 polling units across the country. As far, as we can tell, less than 1,000 polling units were affected by these irregularities. The second thing, even before the elections were held, INEC itself had suspended voting in 240 polling units, because of insecurity. I don't think the case for systematic orchestrated rigging of the election has been made. There are wide irregularities. There were flaws, not that you would not expect in an election of that magnitude in Nigeria. 

 

The other thing, let me quickly go into this, is it's important to remember the context in which the election took place. There was a monetary policy that was instituted by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the so-called cash swap.

 

LINDSAY:
Explain that, because I think it has had a big impact on the ability of many people to vote.

 

OBADARE:
The central bank came out with this policy saying, "We're going to redesign the naira, the Nigerian currency. We're going to swap the old notes for new ones. As to why we are doing this, we want to reduce corruption. We want to make sure that politicians are not able to bribe people on the day of the election. We want to reduce the elicit financial transactions." All noble goals that every Nigerian would agree with, but then the question is why do that, two weeks before a major election? It's a puzzle that I have not been able to resolve. Many people believe that it was targeted at a particular candidate, that they felt that that particular candidate or maybe several candidates had stashed up a lot of cash that they were going to distribute. It's still a very curious thing to do on the eve of an election. There was that. There was food shortage, there was widespread insecurity, there was limited mobility. People could not move from one part of the country to another.

 

LINDSAY:
I heard that was in part, because you couldn't get the cash to go about doing it because of this currency scare.

 

OBADARE:
If you had the cash, you couldn't get the fur. If you had the fur you were afraid for your life. It was a triple whammy. I'm saying that, because it's important to keep in mind the context in which the election took place. If you keep all these things in mind, INEC actually performed a miracle to the extent that they could distribute election materials, get people around the country. It's a very vast country; not always easy to travel around. My sympathies with INEC here, in saying that I'm not dismissing the fact that there were several irregularities and that there were several flaws that characterized the conduct of the election.

 

LINDSAY:
Just as a reminder, INEC is Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission. 

 

One of the surprising numbers I saw, Ebenezer, looking at the election results, is that voter turnout appears to have fallen. Now, Nigeria does not have extremely high voter turnout, at least, historically, since it went back to the civilian rule in 1999. I think four years ago turnout was roughly 35 percent?

 

OBADARE:
Yes.

 

LINDSAY:
This time it looks like turnout was about 29 percent.

 

OBADARE:
Yes.

 

LINDSAY:
Should we read something into that? Is this about Nigerians tuning out on democracy? Is it that voting was suppressed? Is it that people thought it was rigged, why bother? What is your sense of that?

 

OBADARE:
93 million people registered to vote; just 28.6 percent voted. In 2019, as you said, 35.6 million of the same number of registered voters voted, which raises the question. There's a 12 percent drop. I think I would treat this particular election as an outlier. As an outlier, because of exactly the circumstances that I had outlined. It's difficult to compare this with previous elections, because with previous elections, especially the last one, there was no monetary policy that was being implemented. There was insecurity, but not as bad as what we've been witnessing in the country over the last two to three years, reaching a crescendo over the last two to three months.

 

I wouldn't make too much out of this. I will wait to see when Nigeria conducts "a regular election", but the larger point is you can increase the number of people who are going out. If 93 million people register, that's a good sign. That's like 88 percent of the entire population. That's very good. The fact that young people took part in this particular election, it's a great thing. I wouldn't read too much into the turnout of this particular election precisely because of some of those problems that I outlined earlier.

 

LINDSAY:
Are we going to see the election be rerun? I have read some people calling for fresh elections. I know you've chatted about this in your piece, "A Chance to Consolidate." Tell me a little bit about whether Nigeria has a mechanism in which you can nullify election results and have a do-over.

 

OBADARE:
The answer is no. There is nowhere in the statute where it's stated that you can have a rerun. I sympathize with people who want a rerun who are disappointed, but, one, it's unlawful. There is no room to do that. The other thing is, I think the law clearly states how you can go about things, if you have a legitimate grievance. You can take your case to court. It's been done successfully in the past at gubernatorial level, at senatorial elections. People have successfully challenged the outcome of an election, and I would hope, as a Nigerian, that that's what the two main opposition candidates do next.

 

LINDSAY:
Do you worry about political violence in the wake of these results?

 

OBADARE:
I do. Especially because I'm of a generation that witnessed large scale violence and eventual military takeover before. I made a mention of that in my piece. I will hope that does not happen, and that these two main opposition leaders carefully explain to their supporters what happened. I can understand their disappointment, but I don't think the case for large scale, carefully programmed, orchestrated rigging of the election has been made. Look, President Buhari lost his own state of Katsina. Tinubu lost in Lagos State. Lagos State is Tinubu's personal domain. He lost it. Atiku Abubakar won in Arochukwu State in the heart of the southwest. The presidential running mate of Atiku Abubakar, Ifeanyi Okowa, the current governor, the sitting governor of Delta State lost in his own state.

 

LINDSAY:
So if they rigged it, they didn't rig it right way.

 

OBADARE:
Yeah. No, I don't think ... look, we addressed this earlier. The election had several flaws, but flaws and fraud are two completely different things.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. Tell me a bit about President-Elect Tinubu.

 

OBADARE:
As I mentioned earlier, was governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007, has very deep pockets, has a lot of connections, not just locally, but internationally. Had good to very good record as governor of Lagos State, and since then, has carefully chosen, its successors as governor. That's something positive about him to the extent that the people he has chosen ... now, you may not like the fact that he's been the one doing the choosing, but the people he has chosen have actually done really well. Babatunde Raji Fashola, who is now the current minister of works. Akinwunmi Ambode who succeeded him. Sanwo-Olu, the current governor. Now he has been the one who has handpicked those people to succeed him. He's an empire builder. Nigerians, Lagosians, also admit that the people he has put in place are people who can actually govern. Now, to the extent that tells us something about his technocratic expertise and his willingness to delegate to people who can actually get the job done, that bodes well for his presidency.

 

LINDSAY:
Why do you think then, if he had that record and he was a political kingmaker in Lagos State ... at least that's description I've seen repeatedly. Why did he end up losing Lagos State?

 

OBADARE:
That's a great question. Apparently, there are things that even kingmakers can't control, which again goes back to the point I made earlier that you start to wonder was this thing actually rigged? I think he lost for at least two to three reasons. Let me try quickly go into them. One, I think the Obidient, the supporters of Peter Obi, massed in urban centers decided to just go for it. They needed to make a splash in Lagos and they did. The other thing about Lagos, and I mentioned this earlier, the Obidient are not just people of Igbo extraction. The Obidient is a truly pan-youth coalition. Every young person in Lagos State; people who protested in October 2020 in the End SARS demonstrations against police impunity, these people live in Lagos; pentecostals, a section of whom decided not to vote because Tinubu was at the top of the Muslim-Muslim coalition. Many things converged for Peter Obi in Lagos that made Tinubu lose Lagos State. However, his party, the All Progressive Congress, still claimed all the three senatorial seats.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. Explain something else to me. I found Tinubu's campaign slogan to be fascinating. As I understand that it's campaign slogan was, "It's My Turn". How is that a successful campaign slogan?

 

OBADARE:
Once you understand patronage politics in Nigeria, you understand what he's talking about, but he's talking about it in two senses. Let's break them down. One is, "I have put so many people in place as governor, Senator, people in the House of Representatives. It's time for payback." Two, "I single-handedly picked Buhari after I had drawn three times and I'd given up any hope of becoming president. I put him there. We had a deal. It's my turn. It's my turn." As I said, the third very important sense in which it's my turn, makes a lot of sense. People forget that Tinubu is also Yoruba. In Yorubaland, the gold standard for politics is the late nationalist and philosopher Obafemi Awolowo. He's the standard everybody wants to be compared with.

 

In that very interesting declaration, when he said, it's my turn, he said something else, which I'm going to translate that people have omitted. He also said, "I don't want to be a footnote in history." If the most important thing ... it's not that "it is my turn" that is important. It's what followed that people tend to alight, which is, "I don't want to be a footnote in history." For him, he has always wanted to be compared with Obafemi Awolowo, to be spoken of in the same breath as a philosopher, a statesman, a political leader.

 

LINDSAY:
He's looking to history?

 

OBADARE:
Yes. That should tell us something about how he's going to govern. I don't know if he's going to fail or succeed, but given his consciousness of history, I think he's going to give it a go.

 

LINDSAY:
You think he has big ambitions?

 

OBADARE:
He does. He wants to be remembered as somebody to be spoken of in the same breath as Obafemi Awolowo. He wants monuments named after him. He wants streets named after him. He is a student of history, so to that extent, we should expect him to give it a good go when he's eventually sworn in as president.

 

LINDSAY:
Ebenezer, help me understand the situation that he is inheriting from President Buhari. Is he running downhill with the wind at his back or is he running uphill carrying a 100 pound napsack in a rainstorm?

 

OBADARE:
I think it's more of the latter. He's in trouble, because the country's in trouble. The country's not in a good place. The economy is in the toilet. Young people, seven out of ten of them in a recent poll said, "If we have the opportunity, we're going to leave the country." The infrastructure is radically degraded on the point of collapse in many places. Power supply is very erratic. There is just a general feeling that things are not heading in the right direction. Most young people, the Obidient, they're profoundly disenchanted with the state of things.

 

One of the things that Tinubu will have to do as president is to begin to search through these problems, determine which one should have priority, and begin to attack them. The other thing that you will have to pay attention to, speaking of problems, is the incipient political divide, strong ethnic divide in the country. One of the main elements of the Obidients, one of the key elements, is the ethnic part. The Igbos put all their eggs in the basket of Peter Obi. Since the end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, no president has come from Igboland. The Igbos are conscious of that.

 

LINDSAY:
They're about 15 percent of the population, more or less?

 

OBADARE:
They're very vibrant, extremely entrepreneurial, very diligent. They also want their own share of the political cake, as Nigerians characterize it. They were all rooting for Obi. This loss is a body blow for that ethnic group. One thing that Tinubu will have to do is, in response to that, either he brings Peter Obi in, gives him a ministerial position, but he has to find a way to reach across the Niger and talk to these Igbo people.

 

LINDSAY:
Help me understand that, because obviously in a country that has very large number of different ethnic groups, all of whom want to be recognized, fear being shut out. What is the current state of ethnic relations? Also, it's overlaid with a religious element. We have a country that is more or less split between a Muslim north and a Christian south, but even among the Christian south, a difference between Pentecostals and more traditional religions. If you look at Nigeria today, are there positive trends you see in those divisions, like they're getting either knitted together or being downplayed? Are there these issues, like with the Igbo, where you're worried that there is a split that may be getting wider?

 

OBADARE:
The state of play is that the ethnic element is always simmering, always bubbling under the surface. Let me use the Igbos again as an example. As soon as the viability ... as soon as it emerged that Obi could actually become a viable third party candidate, something happened. I've written about this in one of my blogs. The Independent People of Biafra, the group that has been advocating for self-determination for the Igbos, many of them started gravitating towards Obi. They did that because they wanted to kill two birds with one stone. They wanted an Igbo in Aso Rock, the seat of power. At the same time, they saw that everything that they had been talking about in terms of self-determination, they could achieve with having their ethnic king in Aso Rock, the seat of power. It's not only in the east that you have this. In the southwest, too, there's a group, the Oodua People's Congress, OPC, that has been agitating for a restructuring of Nigeria.

 

What tends to happen ... this is maybe the good news, is that you have these intense moments of agitation, and then as soon as people access political power, the temperature tends to get reduced. My worry ... and this connects to what you were saying earlier about the possibility of political violence. My worry is that the Igbos have a legitimate grievance. If that is not addressed, you can expect the independent people of Biafra, representing Igbos' legitimate case for self-determination, to get more attention. I will hope that Tinubu, as I said earlier, reaches out to members of the Igbo elite, young people, and give them a sense of belonging, because they do have a case.

 

LINDSAY:
I take the point that Tinubu, if he wants to make the positive impact on Nigeria that he hopes for, he needs to pay attention to the ethnic divisions and to try to knit them together by giving people a sense that they have a seat at the table.

 

OBADARE:
There is no alternative. He has to do that.

 

LINDSAY:
What issues should he prioritize? As you point out, Nigeria has so many problems. We have problems of corruption. You have problems with infrastructure, education, youth unemployment. Where should he start?

 

OBADARE:
I would start with two things that are connected, infrastructure and the economy. You could boil that infrastructure to one word that everybody's familiar with, electricity. That's one.

 

LINDSAY:
Wait, say that again because I don't think most people, particularly in the United States, think of electricity as infrastructure, because we seemingly have it, unless you have an ice storm.

 

OBADARE:
Yeah. People's understanding of electricity in the United States is constant electricity and then power outage. There are no power outages in Nigeria, because there is no power, period.

 

One of the things, in dealing with infrastructure as an aspect of dealing with the economy at large that Tinubu will have to address, is take on both. The Nigerian economy has been in bad shape. One of the fundamental reasons why it's in a bad shape is that Nigeria is a monocultural economy. Everything goes back to the price of a barrel of oil. That has to change. It won't change in four years, because the problem was not created in four years. Well, gesture now have to be made, concrete plans made to make sure that Nigeria reduces its reliance on oil. 

 

The other thing we have not spoken about, which connects, infrastructure on the one hand and the economy on the other, is corruption. Corruption, as I've written repeatedly in my blogs, is endemic in Nigeria. You can't get anything done. Even the most, well meaning regime, a combination of Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu will not be able to solve Nigeria's problems, if the problem of corruption is not tackled head on.

 

LINDSAY:
Can it be tackled head on?

 

OBADARE:
It can be tackled head on if you understand the problem. The basic diagnosis here, which I disagree with, is it's an official problem. Those people in government are corrupt. That's true, but corruption is not just an official problem in Nigeria. It's a cultural problem. What do I mean? It's something that is in every space with which you interact.

 

LINDSAY:
It's interwoven into society.

 

OBADARE:
Exactly. It's a normative problem. Until you begin to think about how you change the structure of everyday norms, you're not going to be able to address it. The positive thing is that because it's normative, because it has a history, it can be changed. We've seen in the history of Western societies, other societies, how they've dealt with problems of corruption and how they succeeded. That gives me hope that Nigeria, too, can succeed.

 

LINDSAY:
I want to look to the future, Ebenezer, and I'd love to get your thoughts on what you think the United States or the West should do in terms of trying to help President-Elect Tinubu succeed. I will note that currently the population of Nigeria is estimated to be 225 million people, the most populous country in Africa. Also, Africa's largest economy. Projections are that by 2050, there'll be somewhere in the order of 375 million Nigerians, making Nigeria either the third or fourth most populous country in the world, either just above the United States or just behind it. If you were speaking to staff on the National Security Council here in Washington, DC, what would you like to see them do in terms of U.S. policy toward Nigeria?

 

OBADARE:
Thanks for that. I would ask them to think in two ways. I would ask them to think short term. I want them to think long term. Short term, you want to help the current administration facilitate a peaceful transition to power. You want to make sure that the elements within the opposition that are disenchanted, that they're pacified and that they buy in. That's very important in the short term, so that there is no outbreak of violence. Long term, again, I've written about this in my blogs.

 

Long term, the United States has to think about how to help Nigeria become an economy that responds to the aspirations of its citizens. It has to help Nigeria take political rights and civil liberties seriously, and it has to help civil society groups, social movements that are fighting exactly for the realization of those things within Nigeria. Those are the things that I think outsiders can help Nigeria achieve. There are many young people in Nigeria who are desirous of a different future. They are very energetic. They're working in the education sector, in the technology sector. The problem right now is that they don't see their future in Nigeria. The United States working in the broad direction, which I've outlined, can actually help Nigerians to begin to reimagine their future and see themselves as Nigerians living in Nigeria, flourishing in Nigeria.

 

LINDSAY:
On that positive, indeed inspiring, point, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ebenezer Obadare, the Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. You can find his writings on his blog, Africa in Transition, which is available at cfr.org. Ebenezer, it is always a delight to chat.

 

OBADARE:
Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Let me assure you, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.