Adamu Muhammad Hamid PhD
There’s no denying the fact that religion played a significant filter in the public opinion process and voting pattern in the last week’s presidential election in Nigeria. As directed by the church, almost all Christians in the country voted for LP’s Peter Obi, apparently not based on his competence or personal traits but in reaction to APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket of Tinubu and Shettima. Conversely, a significant number of Northern Muslims voted for APC, not really on their perception of Tinubu and Shettima as more competent than other candidates but in reaction to the threat from Babachir, a Christian, and the like that they’ll ‘teach APC a lesson if it went ahead with the plan for Muslim-Muslim ticket”. Understandably, it’s true that to a considerable extent, religion discretely played a role in voting decisions, but becomes crass incivility if it is played out in the public sphere. Implications for allowing religion to be the central filter for voting decisions among Nigerians, as discussed by a number of analysts, are that it would only exacerbate our difficulty as a nation. The late political scientist and African intellectual colossus Professor Ali Mazrui specifically notes as far early as 1986, “In those African countries, where Islam is in serious competition with Christianity and both are politicised, the two creeds become divisive rather than unifying, destabilising rather than legitimising. Where religion reinforces ethnic differences on regional variation, governments become less stable rather than more… On the whole, the two Semitic religions in Nigeria Christianity and Islam reinforce regional and ethnic differences, and make stability more difficult.’
The purpose of this column this week is not to highlight the consequences of the notion of our religion-based voting behaviour on the polity. These implications have been extensively discussed by seasoned analysts in print and broadcast. The column extends the discussion to the meaning of winning an election based on religious sentiments in Northern Nigeria. Let me begin with the caveat that though I’m aware that there’s a considerable population of Christians in northern Nigeria, the discussion will consider the North as a Muslim bloc because the region (which population of voters always determines who becomes Nigeria’s president) is predominantly Muslim.
After the declaration of presidential election results by INEC last week, euphoria gripped entire of northern Nigeria because the Muslim-Muslim ticket won. The writing on the air suggests the Muslim electorate demonstrated its might in the democratic process, seemingly giving a big ‘answer’ to Babachir, who claimed to ‘teach them a lesson’. Muslim clerics immediately followed with a polemical combat of provocative insinuations. One of them that disturbed me which appears to be the essence of this analysis is the slur by one of the Muslim clerics “ I have four wives and 23 children and you have one wife and two children and you think of defeating me in an election?’ He said this by comparing population propagation between Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians. This I consider absurd in argumentation and the notion itself spells doom for the future of the entire northern region. The region compares abysmally worse to other regions of the country in terms of economic prosperity, education, etc. Less than ten of the major commercial banks in the country are owned by business interests in the North. The economic and social inequality between the North and the South makes competition for power a sensitive issue. In terms of socioeconomic indicators, the South is much richer and boasts far better than the North. Except for recent oil discovery in Bauchi-Gombe and in Nassarawa, extensive oil reserves are located in the Niger Delta, and the South houses Lagos, which is the commercial and media capital of Nigeria as well as one of the biggest metros in the world. While there are several ethnic groups in Nigeria, the two largest, the Yoruba and the Ibo, constitute the majority of the Diaspora that provides ever more significant foreign exchange remittances from abroad. It is true that Christians are a majority but worthy of note is that there is also a significant Muslim population in the whole of Yorubaland and across the South.
Given the history of imbalances between the two regions, southerners over and over dismiss the North as backward and therefore a parasite.
By distinction, the North’s population is bigger, but as I was saying, it is much poorer than the rest of the country. Its economy is in decline due to a glaring lack of industrialization and absence of value chain investment in agriculture and infrastructure, and a much insignificant proportion of its population has access to education as compared to that of the South.
The number of out-of-school children threatens the future of the region especially security-wise. And there is the issue of Almajiri to deal with. Roaming the street begging as of 2014, there’re an estimated 9.5 million Almajiri in northern Nigeria (according to Unicef), constituting about 72% of out-of-school children in the country. People give birth to children and leave them on the streets to feed, with no decent shelter or healthcare. This is the population the cleric cited earlier is bragging of, as a comparative advantage of a voting population! I table this discussion so the North can refocus itself and rearrange its order of priority.
The clergy in unison beat the drum of religious sentiment to vote for Tinubu due to the Muslim-Muslim bid, or to vote for Peter Obi because he’s a Christian alternative rather than the candidates’ perceived or tested abilities. Akeredolu says, ‘Any so-called religious leader, who ignores knowledge and competence as necessary criteria to measure leadership capacity, is an apostate’, going on to submit, “The downtrodden are clothed with ethnoreligious identities which suit the political whims of the manipulators. The point of difference is emphasized for maximum effect. The sentiment of religion is employed as a weapon of mass mobilization to confuse the easily impressionable. The real issues are relegated or taken down, completely, from political discourse and replaced with manipulative and emotive outbursts to achieve a desired end. The promptings and warnings of the few, who dare to think and act differently, are ignored or misrepresented. We must not be tired of joining issues with them at all times. We fail if the benefit of education does not reflect in our tactics to confront perfidy.”
Many Nigerians see the mixing of religion and politics as an impediment to progress. This idea can be traced to Europe. The Middle Ages were a time when religious authorities and political authorities clashed in European states, resulting in instability. The need to separate religion from politics thus became normalized in western political thought by the early 20th century. Over the years the idea found its way into other societies.
Recent studies have shown that, in fact, the relationship between religion and politics isn’t always unproductive. Religion embeds some doctrines such as love and obedience to political authority that support secular authorities and the development process. And religious authorities and their followers have the capacity to be tolerant.
Distrust of the South remains widespread, and there is the long-standing view that only through political power can the North catch up to, or even hold its own with, the South. Those holding to this notion do that only to satisfy a complex. Literally, this mentality means the northern region cannot work hard to compete favourably with other regions economically and educationally but instead resorted to multiplying birthrate to increase population which would electorally determine where political power goes, all the time.
After the presidential election, the North boasted of determining the outcome of the election by giving Tinubu a substantial number of votes to appoint him president. Commentators say the Northern Muslims have proven a political weight that despite dividing their votes to three candidates, Atiku, Tinubu and Kwankwaso, one of the candidates of their choice still won the election. This is despite the fact that Christians all over the country were instructed by the church to vote in unison for Peter Obi to ‘teach a lesson to the Muslim-Muslim ticket.’ Temporarily a section of the country would be happy as a result of the victory, but this political development would be inimical to the unity of the country. Public opinion, voter choice and elections generally should base on issues of competence and inclusiveness rather than mundane discriminatory considerations such as religion, ethnicity, region or gender. Civilized societies have long dealt with those considerations.
Though our discussion emphasizes downplaying religion as the sole factor of political behaviour, it is also pertinent to appreciate that religion is influential and a reality of our sectional and communal tapestry. For example, the political arrangement that has successfully worked for Nigeria is the regional consideration of rotating power between the North and the South; and the president and vice president mustn’t come from the same region. So, while picking a vice president, politicians have been careful not to pick a Muslim to represent southern Nigeria because of population realities. In the same way for practical necessity, they’ve not picked a Christian from the North to be vice president. And this reality is what has kept postponing the ambition of Ahmed Bola Tinubu for a very long time, and is what is dealing with him now. Tinubu could have been the vice president of Nigeria for the last eight years to perfectly represent the South if he were a Christian. He had to drop the ambition for politicking to be plausible. And now for him to be electable in the North he had to choose a Muslim. In the same way, Buhari could not have been electable in the South if he had chosen a Muslim from there as his running mate. Nigeria has to learn to work with this reality!
