Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election statistically and overwhelmingly failed to represent the majority of Nigerian citizens—let alone voters—and instead, delivered a new All-Progressives Alliance President in Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The incoming President, who showed numerous examples during the campaign that he was severely health-challenged, is now expected to deliver four more years of the policies of the failed, highly-corrupt, outgoing Muhammadu Buhari All-Progressives Congress (APC) administration.
The APC team of Bola Tinubu and running mate Kashin Shettima was declared the winner of the Feb. 25, 2023, presidential election on March 1, 2023, despite having polled only 36.61 percent of the votes, and carrying only 12—one-third—of the 36 states, plus the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria.
This ends the dream of Nigerians who had hoped for an end to the unremitting economic and security decline of the country over the past eight years. And it ends the hope that Nigeria would lead a continent-wide pattern of economic growth and stability. There are clear reasons why the system failed, but the immediate consequences should be expected to include protests, continued unrest and irregular warfare, and economic slippage on an increased scale.
The decline in foreign direct investment (FDI) in Nigeria over the past eight Buhari years was already profound. It is not likely to improve in the coming four years. FDI went from a high of $8.48 billion in 2011 to a low of $780 million in 2018, and rose marginally to $3.31 billion in 2021, but as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) hovers around the 0.75 percent level. Morocco’s percentage of GDP reflected in FDI in 2021, for example, was 1.5 percent, which is double that of Nigeria.
At this stage, as goes Nigeria, so goes much of Africa, given that most African states are in fairly depressed economic straits, and were looking to Nigeria, as the continent’s largest economy, to lead a revival.
Based on Nigerian public response to the results of the presidential election—as well as the statistics of the poll—it is fair to say that most military coups in the country have been received more favorably than the March 1, 2023, announcement that former Lagos Governor (1999–2004) Tinubu had been declared President-elect.
In short, and regardless of any positive intentions President-elect Tinubu might have, the election statistics show that the new Administration does not have a mandate to govern, nor, in fact, does it have a clear strategy for the country.
Allegations of election mismanagement, fraud, and voter and official intimidation aside (and there have been numerous examples of all of these during and since the polling), the voter turnout itself—about a quarter of registered voters—was unrepresentative of Nigeria’s 212-million population, however legal it was. Added to that was the reality that the governmental structure put in place after the collapse of the military government of Gen. Sani Abacha in 1998 did not account for the very different set of circumstances that arose in the 2023 election.
Gen. Abacha died of a heart attack on June 8, 1998, at the age of 54, enabling a transition back to democratic governance, but it was not a governmental form that replicated the pre-military structure. It moved to a situation that replicated the U.S. structure, dominated by only two parties.
In addition, voter turnout was very low. Only 26.71 percent of the 93,469,008 registered voters showed up, which was 8.04 percent lower than the lackluster 2019 voter turnout. As a result, President-elect Tinubu, the former Governor of Lagos State, failed to win a mandate to govern, considering that 63.39 percent—essentially two-thirds—of those who bothered to vote did so in protest against the APC, which had governed Nigeria for the past eight years.
The election, then, far from unifying Nigeria after eight years of increasingly poor economic and security performance and widespread factionalism, only served to create additional challenges. The two major parties that contested the election against the APC slate were the national People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the essentially regional new Labour Party. The PDP Presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, also carried 12 states and took 29.07 percent of the vote, while Labour’s Peter Obi took 11 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, and 25.4 percent of the votes.
Part of the problem lay in the fact that the 1999 Constitution, which created the (current) Fourth Republic, only demanded that the winning candidate receive a plurality of the vote, not a majority (more than 50 percent) of the votes cast. As well, the winning candidate must poll more than 25 percent of the votes cast in at least 24 of the 36 Nigerian states, plus the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). But in this election, essentially for the first time in the Fourth Republic, a third party developed into a major contender, splitting the vote, and a fourth “major regional contender” emerged to take a considerable further portion of the votes.
It could be argued that this situation was not the fault of the winner, Bola Tinubu, and merely the result of a weakness in the Constitution. However, there is emerging evidence that the fourth major party (of 18 parties in total) that contested the Presidency, was a “straw man,” specifically designed to take votes from Tinubu’s primary challenger, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Atiku Abubakar, a former Vice-President of Nigeria.
The fourth candidate was former Senator and Kano (APC) State Governor Mohammed Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso—a Fulani, like outgoing Pres. Buhari—under the banner of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPC). Kwankwaso carried only one state—his own, Kano—taking 1,496,687 votes (6.23 percent of the vote), in the full knowledge that he could not win the presidency. He and the NNPP did not have a national organization. Significantly, had he not run in the election, most of his votes would have gone to Atiku as he overwhelmingly dominated the northern states, where Kano is located. This, even without the surprise growth of the Labour vote candidate Peter Obi, would have made the race more level between the two major candidates.
There is widespread speculation that the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, and the APC leadership, pushed Kwankwaso to become a “straw man” contender to take votes away from Atiku. That speculation has been reinforced by reports from within the Kano elite, and coupled with the fact that Kwankwaso was formerly the APC’s Governor of Kano. He had, in fact, been the state’s governor twice, from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2015. The first time, he was under the PDP banner, but when the APC was formed in 2013, he switched allegiance to that party.
The role of Peter Obi is also significant. He decided to contest the Presidency on his own when his bid to win the PDP nomination was defeated. Obi essentially then shopped around for another political party to use as his vehicle for a separate run for the Presidency. He was articulate and charismatic, and, importantly, younger than the other candidates, and thus appealed to the younger voter. This worked well up to a point, but essentially carried only the urban youth outside the North.
What defied the pundits was the fact that although the Independent National Election Commission had campaigned hard to sign up young people for their permanent voter cards (PVC), they did not turn out to vote. It was thought that this would be a critical voting group, given that Nigeria has one of the youngest average-age populations in the world; the median age is 17.
But it was Obi’s ego-fueled race—given that his chances of winning the national vote with a small regional party were improbably small—that turned the tide. His campaign was exceptionally well-run, and his rhetoric motivated crowds; but that was never going to be enough. It was strikingly reminiscent of the 1992 race for the U.S. presidency by businessman Ross Perot, who, like Obi, built a campaign cadre of passionate supporters. They could, however, only pull voters away from the two major-party contenders.
In that 1992 U.S. race, Perot won 19.7 million votes, and, given Perot’s basic conservative approach, took votes away from Pres. George H. W. Bush’s attempts at re-election. Bush, as a result, polled 39.1-million votes, leaving Democratic Party contender Bill Clinton with 44.9 million. Without Perot’s titanic ego in challenging, with no real hope of winning, Bush would have been re-elected. Likewise, without Obi and Kwankwaso, Atiku would have won the election.
But that cannot be laid at the door, directly, of Tinubu. He won under the rules. But the fact that the rules enabled him to win when roughly two-thirds of the electorate voted very specifically against the APC/Tinubu agenda, augurs badly for Nigeria’s immediate future. Atiku and Obi offered credible visions for Nigeria’s improved future, and Atiku certainly had the detailed plan and long national experience to create a vibrant new Nigerian situation. Now, the prospect exists that a barely-articulate Pres. Tinubu will do little to strengthen Nigeria’s voice in African and world affairs.
So it is anticipated that the malaise in Nigerian governance will continue into the coming few years. And where in Africa, then, is the prospect of breaking the economic pall? Certainly, Morocco offers stability and economic/political dynamism; but the rest of Africa faces ongoing stress without the prospect of relief. That particularly applies to the other three major contenders: South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia.
