On Saturday February 16, Nigerians will be heading to the poll to elect a new president that will steer the affairs of the country for the next four years. In this piece, Businessday’s research analyst outlines five things we have learned from the 2015 presidential voting trend and how these might mean for the forthcoming 2019 presidential election.
A crowded field
Over 70 presidential candidates across different political parties are gunning for the presidency compared to 14 presidential candidates fielded in 2015. Five candidates, namely, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and three other new entrants who many have called revolutionary contenders are also in the race. They are Kingsley Moghalu of the Young Progressives Party (YPP), Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress (AAC) and Fela Durotoye of the Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN).
Unlike in 2015 where the two main political parties, APC and the PDP, scored a combined vote of 28.3 million with the 12 other candidates jointly scoring a meagre 1.1 million votes, the turnout in some locations may be somewhat different in 2019, given the emergence of one or two stronger contenders who some have being dubbed “the third force”.
Going into the 2019 election, there is high likelihood that the amount of votes secured by the two main parties, the PDP and the APC, would see some moderation relative to the figures in 2015 – especially if the election is characterised by low turnout of voters and if the new entrants, Omoyele Sowore and Kingsley Moghalu, amongst others, record impressive gains in Buhari and Atiku’s strongholds across the country.
Buhari rode on political defections and alliances to claim victory in 2015
Prior to the election of 2015 that eventually saw him win in one of Nigeria’s keenly contested polls, Buhari had made three different unsuccessful attempts in the past.
Buhari has been a regular face in the Nigerian political scene since the return to democracy in 1999. Having contested three times and lost, Buhari’s resilience finally paid off when he dislodged the incumbent ex-president Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 presidential election – the first time a sitting president has ever conceded defeat to an opposition party. However, one factor that spurned that victory was the array of political defections and alliances that permeated the polity in the period leading to the election year.
Buhari’s three-time participation in 2003, 2007 and 2011 presidential elections, wherein he lost, was under the platform of the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC). With the coalition between the Action Congress of Nigeria (CAN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and several splinter parties in addition to the decamping of several top PDP governors such as Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers state), Murtala Nyako (Adamawa state), Musa Kwankwaso (Kano state), Aliyu Wammako (Sokoto state) and Abdulfatah Ahmed (Kwara state) to the APC due in part to internal rancour within the then ruling PDP, there was a fundamental shift in the political equation of the polity towards the 2015 general election.
The decamping opened the door for even more defections from the ruling PDP as senators, members of the house of representatives and other political bigwigs dumped the party and pledged their allegiance to the APC, the party they believed will bring the needed change Nigeria craved for. These incidences, in part, led to the victory of the APC in four of the states whose governors defected from the PDP. Rivers State was the only exception.
Political apathy was rampant across all the regions
From the savannah/sahel belt of the North to the tropical rain forest belt down South, political apathy was pervasive like a plague ahead the 2015 presidential election. The total number of voters captured in INEC’s Electronic Voters Register (EVR) was about 68.8 million. Of this, less than half (41 per cent) of these voters came out on the day of the election. To put it bluntly, over 40 million Nigerians did not vote in 2015!
Over 47 per cent of those who actually came out to vote were drawn from ten states comprising Plateau, Rivers, Lagos, Katsina, Kano, Kaduna, Jigawa, Delta, Bauchi and Akwa Ibom. APC won in 6 of these states while PDP secured a win from the other four – Delta, Plateau, Rivers and Akwa Ibom.
When it is assessed based on the geopolitical regions, the apathy was equally a reflection of what transpired across the states. Only in none of the geopolitical regions did the voters turn-out reach half the total number of registered voters. The North West which had the highest voters’ population of 17 million recorded 48 per cent of voters’ participation. This time around, many expect a higher voter turn out nearing the level of the 2011 election. Should this higher turn out materialise, it could signal trouble for the incumbent as has been the pattern in many parts of the world especially when the mood is marked by painful economic times.
Voting patterns mirror regional differences
One common trend that ingrained in the fabrics of the Nigerian polity is that regional and religious differences shape the people’s voting decisions. In 2015, the two leading candidates in the election, Buhari and Jonathan, were completely opposite in all fronts. While Buhari who is a Muslim and a former army general from the North and enjoyed massive support from his base, Jonathan who was the incumbent president, a Christian, from the South-South did enjoy support from his religious and ethnic base except in the South West.
These factors together with the massive cross-carpeting that saw important political bigwigs’ switch allegiance from the then ruling PDP to APC prior to the election saw a dichotomy of votes along tribal, religious and/or regional lines.
Majority of the votes won by the Buhari-APC were secured from the North-West and North-East including the South-West partly because Buhari’s running mate, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, hails from the region and also due to an already established, stronghold the of ACN, one of the key parties that formed the APC, in the region.
Looking at the numbers, APC won in four of the six geopolitical regions with the party securing 7.12 million votes from the North-West alone which is about 46 per cent of the entire votes the party secured across all the six regions and 25 per cent of the 28.3 million total votes secured by both parties.
The PDP cleared the votes in two zones: the South-South and the South-East. The combined votes recorded in these two regions by the PDP came to just 7.18 million or about the same amount of votes Buhari garnered in the North West alone. That picture is bound to change this time with Buhari and Atiku both Fulani Muslims and some measure of support from the whole north.
North Central and South West are still the swing regions
The ethno-religious dynamics of the North Central region plus the enlightened dispositions of voters in the South-West made both zones hotly contested in the 2015 election.
Over 4.12 million valid votes were recorded in the North Central in 2015 in a region of 10.65 million voters. Of the valid votes, the PDP candidate pulled a total vote of 1.72 million while the APC clinched a total vote of 2.41 million.
The highest votes in the region for the PDP came from Plateau state where the party garnered 549,615 votes. PDP won Plateau state in 2015. For the APC, the highest votes came from Niger state with over 657,000 votes recorded.
In Benue ,Nassarawa and the FCT which had 4.14 million voters (39 per cent of the registered voters in the region), the vote margins between the APC and the PDP did not exceed 100,000 while in Kwara, Plateau and Kogi states with a total registered voters of 4.49 million, the vote margin in each states did not exceed 200,000.
The difference between the total votes recorded by the APC and the PDP in the North Central was 695,195 votes compared with other regions where a large vote margin was recorded: North East (2.05 million); North West (5.78 million); South-South (4.30 million); South-East (2.27 million). The only exception was in the South-West where the vote margin of 611,777 was reasonably lower than that recorded in the North-Central despite the APC controlling four (Oyo, Ogun, Osun and Lagos) of the six states in the region prior to the election.
Across all the states in the South-West, the trend mirrors that of the states in the North Central: the difference in votes between the PDP and the APC was narrower. In Ondo and Ekiti, two states controlled by the PDP and Labour Party (LP) prior to the election, the vote margins were 48,521 and 56,135 votes respectively. In Ogun, Osun, Oyo and Lagos state, two states controlled by the APC before the election, the vote margins were 100,340, 133,674, 225,244 and 160,133.
Apart from Edo, Taraba and Adamawa states, there were no other state in the entire country where the vote margins between the two major parties were lower than the states in the North Central and South West. The North Central is expected to tilt somewhat to the PDP in Saturday’s election given the defection of the Benue state Governor and the combined effect of the bloody campaign by cattle heardsmen that has ravaged the region in the last two years. Last year’s hotly contested governorship elections in Osun and Ekiti have shown that the PDP retains a significant measure of appeal in the South West. So once again, expect the North Central and South West to swing states this time.
KELVIN UMWENI
