With the 2019 presidential election barely 10 days away, reports from local and international research firms tracked by BusinessDay indicate that rising unemployment, poverty and insecurity in Nigeria are a major concern for voters.
Buhari, Nigeria’s incumbent president and candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), is seeking re-election for another term of four years in the presidential elections slated for February 16. His main challenger is the opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Nigeria’s unemployment rate has soared since Buhari took over in 2015, rising from 8.2 percent to 23.1 percent in the third quarter of 2018, according to the most recent data.
Another 20 percent of the working-age population is underemployed. For young people aged 15 to 35, who make up more than half of registered voters, the figures are even worse: 55.4 percent are unemployed or underemployed.
“The economy has slowed a lot since Buhari came in 2015. We have seen our sales fall. Cars are packed for months without anybody buying and tying down our capital in the process,” Nurudeen Tijani, a 41-year-old motor vehicle dealer in the Festac area of Lagos, said.
At a business forum in Lagos last month, Abubakar warned that jobless youths were “like a time bomb”.
“We must create jobs — if not, we will get mobbed one day by the unemployed youths,” he said.
Africa’s largest economy has similarly recorded increasing levels of poverty in the past few years, aided by an oil shock induced-recession and low growth rates that were worsened by unorthodox economic policies pursued by the incumbent president, according to some analysts.
Despite more money budgeted and spent annually across all tiers of government, Nigeria last year overtook India as the nation with the highest number of extremely poor people, according to a report by Brookings Institution in June 2018.
The report said Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty as at the end of May 2018, with the number of Nigerians in extreme poverty increasing by six people every minute.
In March last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Nigerians were getting poorer, stressing the need for coherent and comprehensive economic reforms.
Yusuf Sanni, national chairman, opposition Advanced Democratic Party (ADP), said the poverty rate in the country has been exacerbated in the past few years, adding, “Poverty is a state policy under this APC administration.”
Bukola Saraki, Senate president and director-general of the Atiku Presidential Campaign Council, said in a recent interview on Africa Independent Television (AIT) that Buhari’s support base was weakening across the country.
“If you recollect in 2015, majority of the security concerns was in the North-East, the issue of Boko Haram terrorists particularly in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. But today, if you move across to the North-West the challenge is in Zamfara, even in Katsina, in Kaduna; in some of the states there are serious security challenges that people cannot even go out. That was not there before,” Saraki said.
“In the North-Central, of course, places like Benue, Plateau, a lot of killings and we have seen that as one of the things that we’ve picked up concerns about. And, of course, the issue of the economy,” he said.
Ahead of the elections, no fewer than three international research agencies predicted a close race with the issues of unemployment and slow economic growth seemingly working against the incumbent and favouring the opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar.
In two separate reports, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a British business within the Economist Group, forecast a tight race between 76-year-old Buhari and 72-year-old Abubakar.
“The 2019 elections will be a close contest between the ruling All Progressives Congress and the People’s Democratic Party. However, we expect the PDP to win, but for the next administration to flounder against the same problems as the incumbent,” EIU said in its September 2018 forecast ahead of the 2019 general elections.
In another tweet by its African unit last week, the London-based firm affirmed its September prediction, insisting that a defeat awaits President Buhari in the February 16 presidential election.
“We retain our forecast for Abubakar to win, but the expected margin of victory is narrowing as the poll approaches,” EIU Africa said in a tweet.
Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s minister of information and culture, responded by saying the prediction was nothing but fake news.
In 2015, then opposition challenger Buhari broke a long-standing record after he defeated the then President Goodluck Jonathan with over 2 million votes to emerge the first ever candidate in Nigeria to unseat an incumbent president.
The EIU at that time had also predicted victory for Muhammadu Buhari over then-incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, noting that the former military head of state was “the least awful choice” that would be accepted by the people “with a heavy heart”.
“Voters have ample cause to send Jonathan packing. In a country where power has often changed through the barrel of a gun, the opposition All Progressives Congress has a real chance of winning through the ballot box,” The EIU said in 2015.
The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, a British multinational banking and financial services holding company, before closing its Nigerian operations received a backlash from the
Nigerian government after it tipped a win for the PDP candidate, saying that re-election of President Buhari for a second term would “stall” economic growth.
About 72 political parties will be present on the ballot paper in an election that has been described by analysts, technocrats and international bodies to be the most fiercely contested since the country’s transition to democracy in 1999.
The two major contenders, Buhari and Abubakar, are Northern Muslims. Both are of the Fulani ethnic stock.
President Buhari is promising to intensify his fight against corruption and get the fragile state of the economy to the next level, despite spending a large part of his tenure on medical trip abroad treating an undisclosed ailment.
A Buhari re-election carries tail risks,” according to a report by Eurasia Group, a Washington-based political risk consultancy firm. “A politically weak president, for health or other reasons, would open the floodgates for political infighting, increasing the chances that his ruling All Progressives Congress implodes.”
Eurasia said Buhari would be a lame duck from day one, “with powerbrokers in his own party quickly shifting their focus to the next electoral cycle in 2023”.
Abubakar, a businessman and a former vice president, promises to get the economy working again by cutting corporate taxes and, in turn, creating jobs and delivering a $900 billion economy by 2030.
Though silent on who the winner will likely be, Eurasia said if he wins, Abubakar will focus on enriching himself and his cronies, avoiding the difficult and politically unpopular tasks necessary for reform.

“A win for the challenger, Atiku, would create a brief, superficial boost to the country’s image – largely because of his better health and keener intellect. But it would also pose the risk of a return to an even more rent-seeking governing style,” Eurasia said.
MICHEAL ANI
