Why Goodluck Jonathan is likely to win the 2015 presidential election by a landslide, By Femi Aribisala
Goodluck Jonathan is currently the only presidential candidate in Nigeria. The others are nowhere to be found.
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I have been a student of elections for 42 years. I obtained my first
degree in History and Politics from Warwick University, Coventry,
England in 1975. In my second year at Warwick, I obtained a scholarship
to visit the United States to study the circumstances behind the 1973
election of Maynard Jackson as the first African-American Mayor of
Atlanta, and of a major Southern metropolis in the United States since
the American Civil War.
Since then, I have been fascinated by
elections. Unfortunately, Nigeria remained under military rule for an
inordinate length of time. The most fascinating election I have ever
observed was the first election of Barack Obama as the first
African-American president of the United States in 2008. Obama secured
the nomination of the Democratic Party against the formidable Hilary
Clinton; and he then went on to defeat the Republican nominee, John
McCain, in the general election.
Anticlimax
Obama’s
2007/2008 election campaign has since become a textbook-case of
outstanding political strategizing in the United States. His superior
tactics ensured that his victory quickly became inevitable, even against
all the odds. Therefore, some of us were able to call his nomination as
Democratic Party candidate and election as president very early; to the
discomfiture of doubting Thomases who could not imagine a black U.S.
president in their lifetime.
The forthcoming 2015 presidential
election in Nigeria is another election that has become easy to predict,
but for different reasons. Yes, it is a much ballyhooed election,
especially since the emergence of the All Progressives Congress.
However, the APC has turned out to be a newspaper political party and
nothing more. Its novelty has long died down and a new harsh and dismal
political reality now confronts it.
As a result, the 2015
election is not likely to live up to its hype. As a matter of fact, all
the evidence now indicates the election will be a cakewalk for the PDP.
Goodluck Jonathan will not only be re-elected as president, he will be
re-elected by a landslide.
PDP failure
Ordinarily, the
forthcoming election should be a problematic one for Goodluck Jonathan.
After 15 years, Nigerians are generally fed up with the PDP. 15 years
is more than enough time to change drastically the electrical power
situation in the country. But this has yet to happen to any appreciable
degree.
One year is more than sufficient to make a big impact
on the problem of corruption in Nigeria. Again, this has not happened in
15 years. The security situation in the country is now critical and is
likely to get much worse before it gets better. 219 kidnapped Chibok
schoolgirls are still missing, with only dubious promissory notes
offered by the president for their imminent rescue.
For these
and other reasons, the 2015 presidential elections should be a difficult
one for Goodluck Jonathan. When the Iranians held American diplomats
hostage under the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, it led to the
defeat of incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the United States
presidential elections of 1980.
However, in the case of
Nigeria, my contention is that the re-election of Jonathan in 2015 is
going to be easy. Jonathan will defeat his APC challenger convincingly.
He is also likely to obtain the requisite one third of the votes in
virtually every state of the federation.
Shambolic opposition
The main reason for this conclusion is that Jonathan is facing a
shambolic APC opposition that does not seem to have a clue about what it
takes to run an effective national presidential campaign. This explains
why, till date, Jonathan is still the only candidate running for the
presidency. Although he has yet to declare his candidacy officially,
even a three year-old Nigerian child knows he will be the PDP candidate.
However, his APC challenger remains unknown. It is incredible that
barely six months to an election where the opposition hopes to unseat a
president who has been in office for nearly six years, the APC bigwigs
have yet to agree on who will be his challenger. Moreover, the INEC
timetable favours the PDP as opposed to the APC. By decreeing that the
party primaries for the presidential elections must wait until October
2014, and the campaigns must not start until November, INEC has created a
situation where Jonathan has become virtually the only candidate. Just
by being president, he is already campaigning and running for
re-election.
This means there is now insufficient time to
socialize Nigerians about the APC candidate. The only opposition
candidates that need no national introduction are Buhari, Atiku and
Tinubu. But the candidacies of these men are dead in the water. Buhari
and Atiku have contested the presidency in the past and failed woefully.
Should they try again, they will fail again.
Tinubu’s
candidacy is a nonstarter, given Obasanjo’s recent eight-year
representation of the South-West in Aso Rock. This leaves the APC with
no candidates of note to field against Jonathan. The only realistic APC
candidate at this eleventh hour can only be a national nonentity; and
among the non-entities, I include men like Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano. An
APC nonentity cannot prevail against Jonathan and the PDP juggernaut.
Shallow party-structure
The only party that can field a nonentity and still win the
presidential election in Nigeria is the PDP. This is because it is the
only longstanding national party in Nigeria and, unlike the APC; it has
been in power for 15 years. That means the PDP has firm roots
nationwide. But the APC only has roots in the South-West, and even
there, this is beginning to unravel; as the recent elections in Ondo and
Ekiti indicate.
Buhari is very popular in the North, but he is
hopeless at building party-structures. Virtually every party Buhari
built imploded. Buhari is a one-man party. This is not very useful in an
election where Buhari himself is not a viable APC presidential
candidate. The APC has excited itself as a result of the defection of
some five PDP governors to its ranks. But this is also not very useful
because these governors could not defect with their PDP
party-structures.
The defector PDP governors have brought a
great deal of publicity to the APC. But whatever assets they had to
offer has long fizzled out. A testament to this is the ease with which
Murtala Nyako was impeached as governor of Adamawa State. With all the
noise Nyako was making, it was easy to forget that he had no roots on
the ground. It was all smoke and mirrors that did not go beyond
newspaper headlines.
No game-plan
Where then is the
APC taking the fight to the formidable PDP? Literally nowhere at the
moment! The APC peaked too early. As a matter of fact, it is the party
now in retreat virtually everywhere. It lost to the PDP in Ondo and
Ekiti, part of its South-West stronghold. Nyako of Adamawa has been
impeached. Al-Makura of Nasarawa is on the ropes. Other APC governors
are under threat of impeachment, but no such threat hangs over the head
of any PDP governor.
The defection of the PDP governors to the
APC has turned out to be a blessing in initial disguise. From the point
of view of political strategy, it would have been better if they had
remained in the PDP as APC wolves in PDP clothing. This might have been
useful in undermining Jonathan’s candidacy. Indeed, they could have
challenged him for the PDP ticket, not with any hope of winning, but
just in order to dent his strength and create some havoc within the PDP.
However, by defecting, the rebel PDP governors ushered in peace to the
PDP. Simultaneously, they exported their wahala to the APC where they
are now at loggerheads with the old APC brigade in bitter internal
struggles for supremacy. For a party that has yet to find its feet, this
has been disastrous. Indeed, the defections are now going in the other
direction, from APC to PDP; as happened recently in Zamfara. Even the
defector PDP governors are likely to lose their seats in the
near-future, because defection is proscribed in the Constitution and the
PDP has taken the matter to court.
So what exactly is the APC
game-plan? Nothing much! All we have at the moment is Lai Mohammed
coming up incessantly with bombastic broadsides against Goodluck
Jonathan and the PDP in the newspapers. If they really believe this is
the way to unseat a six-year-old president and dislodge a
fifteen-year-old government, then the APC bigwigs need to enroll in
NIPSS, Kuru for courses in “Nigerian Elections 101.”
Boko Haram factor
And then there is the Boko Haram insurgency and the albatross of the
kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls. The strategy of the terrorists is that
every explosion is supposed to discredit the Jonathan administration. In
spite of its hatred for the entire Nigerian political establishment,
there is no doubt that the Boko Haram would prefer a Northern Muslim
president to Southern Christian Goodluck Jonathan.
For this
very reason, a vote for APC is now more likely to be construed as a vote
of surrender to the insurgency. While Nigerians are very concerned
about the security situation in the country, they are even less likely
to succumb to its incorrigible purpose. The indiscriminate bombing of
innocent Nigerians for the sake of an agenda that is alien to Nigeria
cannot but rally people nationwide behind President Goodluck Jonathan.
A few days ago, Vanguard published a Special Report captioned: “Six
Months to Elections, Where Are the Presidential Aspirants?” The answer
is that Goodluck Jonathan is currently the only presidential candidate
in Nigeria. The others are nowhere to be found.
The APC is a
useful counterpoise to the PDP in the Nigerian political equation. But
it is only likely to pose a strong challenge to the ruling party in
2019, when there will be no incumbent president to contend with, and
after it might have sorted out its internal contradictions and developed
firm roots nationwide. But as it is today, the APC is not even likely
to survive impending defeat in 2015
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7/29/2014
Why Goodluck Jonathan is likely to win the 2015 presidential election by a landslide, By Femi Aribisala
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