By Rotimi Fasan

UNBIASED observers of developments leading to the February 25 elections would find it hard not to agree with supporters of Bola Tinubu, the declared winner, that President Muhammadu Buhari had something against him even if they wouldn’t go as far as saying that the policy that resulted in the seizure of money was tailor-made for him.

He had appeared not to be in the good books of the President who launched a series of harsh policies that could easily anger Nigerians and hurt the  fortunes of his party. There had been an ongoing energy crisis that began in September 2022. This had worsened the inflationary trend, with many people finding it hard to keep body and soul together even as companies folded and manufacturing was at its lowest. 

The All Progressives Congress, APC, therefore, had good reasons to complain loudly about the actions of the President who waxed lyrical about leaving a legacy of transparency in electoral practice. A few APC governors, led by Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, Yahaya Bello of Kogi State and Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State openly took the President to task.

El-Rufai responded to the President’s action, point by point. He took things a notch higher in a televised broadcast to the people of Kaduna State in which he countermanded the President’s orders. Bola Tinubu spent the last few days before the election campaigning on his own record and achievements as a former governor of Lagos State. The presidential candidates of the PDP and LP seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. But no sooner was the election over than the tune changed. 

All anger this time around was directed at the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for its failure to transmit the result of the election across the country via its result portal. As more results from the elections came in and there were indications that the presidential candidate of the APC was set for victory so did the other parties get more agitated. They demanded the cancellation of the election which they said was marred by fraud and violence. INEC acknowledged there were glitches in its transmission of the results but went ahead with the announcement anyway. This was what led to the dramatic outburst by a spokesperson of the Presidential Council of the PDP, Dino Melaye, who confronted the INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, and demanded that the results be transmitted in real time.

He led a walkout of members of his party and others when his warnings went unheeded. Ahmed Datti, the vice-presidential candidate of LP and Ifeanyi Okowa, the vice-presidential candidate of the PDP addressed a joint press conference where they repeated their call for the cancellation of the election result.  In the days that had followed, both the presidential candidates of the PDP and the LP have expressed their dissatisfaction with the outcome of the election and indicated their plan to challenge it in court. We await the fireworks.

Each party has claimed victory for itself in the election and accused INEC of complicity in the emergence of Bola Tinubu as the winner.  We are at the point now where critics of INEC have continued to reject the result, dredging up what they considered to be evidence of how the election was compromised. Beyond the apparent contradictions of the claims of the two leading parties that they each won the election, the question that is still to be answered is if the observed irregularities in the election were substantial enough to have produced a different result. This point is particularly significant in light of how some people have been describing the election as the worst in the history of the country. By what metrics? 

Such criticisms are particularly worrisome when weighed against the apparent gains that were recorded in the election. While INEC has to be held to its promise to deliver a technology-driven, malpractice-proof election, the criticism that there is nothing redeeming and redeemable about the elections is a stretch of the truth.

The result has thrown up some interesting questions which should not only be explored further but are also giving credence to the fact that the result might have largely reflected the wishes of Nigerians. It also underlines and proves the suspicion that the dominance of the political landscape by both the PDP and the APC can no longer be taken for granted. A major shift in the electoral configuration of the country has occurred. 

The final result shows that the three leading parties won exactly equal number of states, including, in the case of LP, the FCT. And this feat was achieved across the different regions of the country with Bola Tinubu of the APC even losing his Lagos stronghold. The PDP and its presidential candidate also lost out in their traditional areas of dominance. 

The lesson to be learned here is that, rather than the two-horse race that has characterised political contestation in the country in the last three decades following the contrived imposition of a two-party system by the Ibrahim Babangida regime, Nigerians now have the advantage of a third party and there’s now the probability of independent candidates standing for election.

If the LP could virtually defy the rule of thumb of party formation with little or no organisational structures across the country, save the personality of its presidential candidate, there is every hope then to believe that the stranglehold of both the APC and the PDP on Nigerian politics can and has been broken. Nobody should lose sight of this point. It is the baby that Nigerians must not allow to be thrown away with the bath water that were the irregularities of the 2023 presidential election. 

Only one of the PDP or LP could have won the election, were their claims correct. With the LP coming third where does it hope to make-up for the shortfall in its votes tally? Its grievance is focused on Lagos which it, nevertheless, won by several thousands of votes. What should happen in most of the Northern states where it not only lost but couldn’t possibly make up to 25 per cent of the votes cast?

The loss of the PDP are the gains of the LP. Which results does it want cancelled? What has worked for the APC is that it did well across most of the states of the federation except, perhaps, in those core LP states of the South-East where it scored less than 25 per cent of the votes cast.  Even at that, LP could not have won the national poll.  It should accept the fact that it had punched well above its weight but it would amount to an overreach for it to conclude that the in-road it made was enough to have given it victory.