Topic: How the Yoruba will determine who becomes President in 2015  (Read 4102 times)

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The voting pattern of the Yoruba people of South-West geopolitical zone in the 2015 presidential election may determine who wins and who loses. In 2011, even though the zone voted the Action Congress of Nigeria in all the elections, they voted more for the Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate in the presidential election. That helped in no small way to swing victory for President Goodluck Jonathan.

Many had fingered the ACN leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for that massive vote for Jonathan because of the last-minute discussions he reportedly had with the latter. But that would be saying that the South-West people are sheep that don’t have their own mind. Weeks before the 2011 presidential election, even while talks were on between the Congress for Progressive Change and the ACN, many South-West people had made it clear that they would vote for Jonathan for the Presidency, even though they would vote the ACN in all other elections. The appreciable population of other non-Yoruba residents in the South-West also helped to increase the number of votes Jonathan garnered in the zone.

President Jonathan has not stated clearly whether he will contest the 2015 election. But his unspoken words seem to point more to the fact that he will contest than the other way. Even though he completed the remaining term of his former boss, the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, after he died in office on May 5, 2010, and won an election in 2011, he is constitutionally qualified to run for office in 2015.

Ethnicity and religion play a great role in Nigerian politics, and they will play a role in the 2015 election. The North, especially the North-East and the North-West zones, has never hidden its sadness and anger over the loss of presidential power as a result of the illness and death of Yar’Adua. The North feels that it was cheated out of power. Some even alleged that the cheating was pre-planned by former President Olusegun Obasanjo with his choice of Yar’Adua, who was known to have a health condition. Supporters of power rotation felt that Jonathan should have completed Yar’Adua’s term and allowed a Northerner to contest the presidency, so that the North could complete its eight years just like the South. There was some sense of justice in that viewpoint.

But Jonathan and many of his South-South people and some other Nigerians who opposed power rotation felt that given that the South-South or the entire Niger Delta region, the producer of Nigerian oil wealth, had not produced an elected president in Nigeria, even though the North had produced same many times, he should run for office for the sake of justice and fairness. There was also some sense of justice in that point of view. In addition, many wondered if Jonathan were not to contest for the presidency, would the Northerner that would take over from him do only a term and leave office, since Yar’Adua had done about three years of his four-year tenure?

There are those who believe that the rise in violence of the Boko Haram sect after the 2011 elections had direct links with that feeling of loss and cheating that the North had. Even though Boko Haram started as a religious sect, there is no denying that it has had political influence in recent times. Some people have even said that if Jonathan were to drop his political ambition for 2015, Boko Haram would fizzle out.

Before the run-up to the 2011 elections, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) and his Congress for Progressive Change, the major challenger to President Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party then, handled the merger talks with the Action Congress of Nigeria with some presumptuousness. They presumed that Jonathan would not win the election on the first ballot, since the South-South, South-East and some North-Central voters would vote for him, while the North-West (with its perceived high population) and the North-East would vote for Buhari, with the South-West voting for Mallam Nuhu Ribadu of the ACN, thereby making the election go into a second ballot. Even though the South-West vote was split between Jonathan and Ribadu, but with more going to Jonathan, that made it easier for him to win on the first ballot. That seemed to have taught Buhari and the CPC a lesson that working with the Yoruba and ACN was not just necessary but critical, if the PDP would ever be beaten. But it is true that the South-West vote did not come from only the Yoruba, given the high population of other-Southerners in the South-West, especially in Lagos.

And so, rather than wait till 2015 to commence merger talks, the CPC, ACN, ANPP and a part of the All Progressive Grand Allaince began early, which is a great plus. And rather than the hard lines that characterised the 2011 merger talks, the talks for the merger are being treated with more respect for each other as well as without any pre-conditions. Anybody who says that the PDP is not rattled by the merger talks of the All Progressives Congress is economical with the truth. The reason the PDP has ruled for 14 unbroken years is because the opposition parties had displayed disunity, pride and greed. Having a united opposition against the PDP is the first step towards thwarting the fulfilment of the prediction of Chief Vincent Ogbulafor in 2008 that the ruling party would rule Nigeria for 60 years!

 

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