Short of saying, whether you vote or not, we will win, Kano state
governor, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, who is locked in a supremacy battle with his
erstwhile boss, former governor of the state and current senator, Rabiu Kwankwaso,
for the political soul of Kano, was boasting, the other day, of his
capacity to mobilise and return five million votes for President Muhammadu
Buhari, if he contests, in the 2019 presidential election. That is quite massive
in a situation where it is realistic or doable!
For me, Ganduje’s declaration was nothing but a day-dream. But
then, it could be preparatory to some advanced forms of rigging because, in the
first instance, the figure of registered voters in Kano in the 2015 general elections was
4,943,862. Assuming, arguendo, that
the figure goes up to between five and six million after the continuous voter
registration, can the governor guarantee that five million voters would cast
their votes for Buhari, especially if the leading opposition party decides to
field a formidable northerner and possibly a Fulani man against the president?
I see Ganduje’s
braggadocio, which feeds on the desperation to secure the solid backing of
Buhari and the federal might with which to contain Kwankwaso and capture *President Buhari |
Without a doubt, the
manipulation of the presidential election in Kano was a mockery of the right of the
electorate to choose their leader. Despite the landslide victory that Kwankwaso
assisted Buhari to get in Kano, certain developments cast a pall on the squalid
narrative of how Jonathan was defeated, to wit: the strange one million votes
disparity recorded for the National Assembly and presidential elections
that held simultaneously; and, the controversial death of the Kano
Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Mikaila Abdullahi, his wife and two
daughters in a strange fire that gutted their home. There was speculation that
the late REC was ill at ease with the electoral fraud and was probably going to
spill the beans. But those who fixed it were apparently not ready to take
prisoner.
Jonathan did not
challenge the manipulation of the elections during which card readers were
discarded in Kano
and some other core northern states at the commencement of the presidential
election. So far, INEC had tactically refused to publish data from the card
readers because it was a colossal failure: the machine recorded about 85
percent failure in Kano ,
with little or no significant number of incident forms to complement it. It was
equally shocking that despite the fear of Boko Haram insurgents, which had led
to massive emigration from Borno, Yobe and Adamawa ahead of the 2015 elections,
Borno state, for instance, still returned huge votes of about 473,543 for
Buhari and 25,640 votes for Jonathan. It was illogical for a troubled state to
have returned huge votes while peaceful states in the south and north central
zone returned unusually low figures, having been deliberately pegged down by
the mandatory use of ineffective card readers.
Ganduje was perhaps
very familiar with the strategy that produced the 2015 farcical presidential
election results that gave victory to Buhari and is now probably planning to
re-enact it with some modifications. Otherwise, who could have believed that an
elderly Ganduje, who played the humble and loyal servant to Kwankwaso as deputy
governor from 1999 to 2003, special adviser to Kwankwaso when the former
governor was minister of defence and again deputy governor from 2011 until 2015
when Kwankwaso decided to enthrone him as his successor, has capacity for
political chicanery and electoral mischief?
The governor has shown
his combat readiness to embark on proxy battles for the powers-that-be in Abuja against any
opposition to Buhari’s re-election bid, if he decides to contest. It is obvious
that Ganduje is trying to be clever. He wants to ride on Buhari’s mythical
popularity to win re-election as governor. That strategy is not as assured as
it looks because Buhari’s popularity in the north and the cult-like
followership that he enjoyed prelude to the 2015 elections have suffered
serious setbacks. The president has lost enormous goodwill. The northern
consensus that produced him has been fractured. 2019 presents a different
scenario. It is going to be Buhari, if he contests, versus another formidable
northern candidate. Therefore, unlike 2015 when he enjoyed bloc votes from the
north against Jonathan, a southerner, the votes would be shared this time
round. The southern part of the country would become the game changer or the
poll decider.
In 2007, the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) presented Umaru Yar’ Adua, a Fulani, as its presidential
candidate in the election in which Buhari was also a candidate. Buhari was
beaten silly. Yar’ Adua garnered about 24 million votes while Buhari got a
little over 6 million votes. That has evidently knocked the bottom off the
assertion by a former Board of Trustees member of the PDP, Chief Don Etiebet,
that Buhari has a constant pool of 12 million votes in the north that he has
been appropriating since 2003 when he began his quest for the presidency.
Buhari got it in 2003
when he contested against Obasanjo; he got it in 2011 when he contested against
Jonathan and, of course, about 15 million in 2015 that saw him defeat Jonathan,
but he never got it in 2007 against Yar’Adua, a formidable northerner. The
records are there. I laughed off Etiebet’s analysis of Buhari’s northern
support base of 12 million ready-made votes in a newspaper report of February
26, 2018. The analysis was so simplistic, pitiably sycophantic and awkwardly patronising.
The APC chieftain called on a mutative political stereotype to justify his
jaundiced assertion. It was the height of political fraudulence designed to rig
12 million votes for Buhari.
In 2019, the northern
votes will be greatly divided by leading northern candidates of frontline
parties, especially now that the presidency of Buhari, these past three years,
has brought about further impoverishment of the masses, especially in the
north. There is, therefore, a desperate search for socio-political and economic
revivalism, which search cannot reinforce and sustain the languid old order.
The voting masses and
the non-voting elite are now united by the common pains occasioned by
leadership ineptitude, nepotistic disposition and ethno-religious chauvinism.
Therefore, the masses and the elite will expectedly deploy their power of
choice, using the instrumentality of their permanent voter cards, to determine
their respective fate and the fates of those who jostle to preside over the
affairs of the nation in 2019. It is not going to be about any 12 million votes
sitting pretty somewhere for Buhari, but about votes that will be prudently
cast after considering the anguish in the land and the need for national
redemption.
*Ojeifo is editor-in-chief of The Congresswatch magazine, wrote fromAbuja
*Ojeifo is editor-in-chief of The Congresswatch magazine, wrote from
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