Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s Marmite president, is by no means a religious bigot. He is a moderate, even liberal, Muslim, who is surrounded, including in his immediate family, by practising Christians. However, for self-interested political calculations, Tinubu played the religious card to become president in 2023 by picking a fellow Muslim, Kashim Shettima, as his running-mate. Perhaps more than any other columnist in Nigeria, I wrote severally on the issue. It struck me as a profound mismanagement of Nigeria’s diversity and a monumental betrayal of the national interest to place personal political gain ahead of religious balance and harmony in Nigeria.
Tinubu’s explanations for choosing a fellow Muslim as his running mate were lame, disingenuous and provocative. He said he picked Shettima because “he’s an exceptionally gifted human being with superior intellectual capacity”. Yet, in office, Shettima is a mediocre and lacklustre vice-president, reduced to attending meaningless international meetings. Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, Shettima said that, once in power, Tinubu would look after the economy, while he (Shettima) would be “in charge of” national security. Yet 614,937 Nigerians were killed and 2.2m abducted within one year of the Tinubu-Shettima presidency, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and hundreds of thousands more have been killed and several millions more abducted since. So much for Shettima being picked as Tinubu’s running-mate because “he’s exceptionally gifted” with “superior intellect”!
Of course, Tinubu opted for a Muslim-Muslim ticket because it was only by deploying the wedge issue of religion that he could secure the Muslim vote he felt he needed to become president. Indeed, leaders of Tinubu’s party, APC, were forthright on the decision. Abdullahi Adamu, then APC national chairman, said: “In our understanding of politics in Nigeria at the moment, the Muslim-Muslim ticket is the best decision for us because we want to win the election.” Shortly after Tinubu secured his party’s presidential ticket, Abdullahi Ganduje, then Kano State governor, later APC national chairman, told Muslim clerics: “We have advised him (Tinubu) to pick a Muslim deputy and he has agreed.” And in viral video after the election, Nasir el-Rufai, a former Kaduna State governor and a linchpin of Tinubu’s campaign, said religion was used to give him “victory”. Tinubu, el-Rufai said, knew he “had no option” but to pick a Muslim running-mate, otherwise “he would lose the election”.
So, unquestionably, Tinubu blatantly played the religious card and used the Muslim-Muslim ticket to win the presidency. But if the 2023 presidential election were a referendum on the Muslim-Muslim ticket, well, Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected it. Of the 24 million voters in that election, only 8.79 million, or 36.6 per cent, voted for Tinubu. In other words, a whopping 14.6 million, or 63.39 per cent, rejected his Muslim-Muslim ticket. This matters because legitimacy for such a fundamental shift as a Muslim-Muslim presidency in a country broadly split 50-50 between Muslims and Christians requires an overwhelming electoral support. Of course, some would hide behind constitutional technicality or Nigeria’s plurality voting system to assert legitimacy, based on just 36.6 per cent of the vote. But in a supposed one-person, one-vote democracy, you can’t dismiss the 63.39 per cent of the electorate, an absolute majority, who rejected the Muslim-Muslim ticket.
To be fair, once in power, Tinubu tried to pivot towards some semblance of religious balancing by appointing Christians into key offices of state. This left the Muslim-North feeling somewhat betrayed. Recently, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a chieftain of the Northern Elders Forum, said on Channels TV: “I left Tinubu’s government when I realised that he turned his back against Shettima and the North after deceiving them with Muslim-Muslim ticket to get elected.” That sense of betrayal is heightened by speculations that Tinubu might drop Shettima as his running-mate ahead of his 2027 re-election bid and replace him with a prominent Northern Christian. Those speculations inevitably raise two questions: Is Tinubu having buyer’s remorse and, if so, why?
To have buyer’s remorse is to experience a feeling of regret after making a choice or decision. It is inconceivable that Tinubu even remotely regrets his choice of a Muslim-Muslim ticket, without which he wouldn’t be president. So, why might he be considering a Northern-Christian running-mate for his second term bid? Well, there are three possible explanations.
First, Tinubu might genuinely be concerned about the religious tension created by the Muslim-Muslim ticket and seek to reverse the situation in his putative second term, leaving a legacy of religious balance. Second, having used the Muslim-Muslim ticket to get elected in 2023, he might feel he has another route to getting re-elected, such as playing the Southern card. Assuming that Tinubu faces no serious Southern opponent and can garner the Southern solidarity vote, he might win with a Northern-Christian running-mate by, in addition to an overwhelming Southern vote, harvesting the Northern-Christian vote and a smattering of votes from the Muslim-North. The third explanation has an international dimension: A Muslim-Muslim presidency is bad optics when the world believes there’s Christian genocide in Nigeria. Thus, strategically, Tinubu might be leaning towards a Christian running-mate to appease President Donald Trump and blunt his narrative about Christian genocide.
Truth be told, Tinubu cannot ignore the Trump factor in 2027: He needs President Trump to, at least, be neutral in the election. But Trump won’t be neutral if he believes Christian genocide or persecution is still an issue in Nigeria. That’s why the presidency and the APC were ecstatic last week when President Trump praised Tinubu’s wife, Oluremi, as “a very respected woman”. But a day after Trump made those remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, he provoked global outrage by tweeting a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes, and refused to apologise. Yet some in Nigeria chose to trust President Trump’s judgement, treating his contrived comments on Mrs Tinubu as a genuine, credible endorsement of her.
But others are not so beguiled. President Trump is a transactional leader who won’t do or say anything unless there’s something in it for him or the US. With the US military now having a strong base in Nigeria, Trump is more relaxed about the country. Furthermore, the Nigerian government is paying a US lobbying firm $9m, or $750,000 monthly, to lobby the US government on the Christian genocide narrative.
Trump likes that too; he’s thrilled when US companies win overseas contracts. And the US lobbying firm did a great job, getting Mrs Tinubu to attend the National Prayer Breakfast and getting President Trump to recognise her in a scripted comment that played up her role as “a Christian pastor at the largest church in Nigeria”. However, truth be told, US evangelicals and lawmakers are not impressed about President Tinubu’s “my-wife-is-a-Christian” mantra. Furthermore, they loathe his government’s use of American lobbyists to change the Christian persecution narrative while little has changed structurally about the plight of Christians, particularly Northern Christians, in Nigeria.
They’re right. Recently, an APC chieftain, Farouk Aliyu, was asked on Arise TV if the North would accept a Christian-Christian ticket, he replied: “Based on the North I know, the North will not be comfortable with a Christian-Christian ticket.” Thus, a Northern Christian will never be vice-president, let alone president, in Nigeria. Sadly, Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket foisted that perversity on Nigeria in 2023. Of course, he won’t have buyer’s remorse over the self-interested choice he made in 2023, but would he repeat it in 2027 or buck the trend? The national interest demands the latter!
*Dr Fasan is the author of ‘In The National Interest: The Road to Nigeria’s Political, Economic and Social Transformation’, available at RovingHeights bookstores.
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