The News
On Tuesday, July 21, a small crowd of protesters massed outside the secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja, Nigeria. Defying a heavy downpour, they carried placards demanding that Bola Tinubu, the party’s standard-bearer in next year’s presidential election, refrain from choosing a Muslim as his running mate. It was not an impressive crowd by any standard, and the fact, according to media reports, that the protesters had arrived in three luxury buses, suggesting that it may have been a ‘rented’ crowd, vitiates its claim to being taken seriously.
Yet, the size and pedigree of that crowd notwithstanding, its ostensible grievance is one that is gaining some traction and, it would appear, a degree of sympathy as Nigeria shifts into campaign mode following the conclusion of the presidential primaries of the two main parties, the ruling APC and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
For PDP standard-bearer Atiku Abubakar, the choice of where to pick a running mate could not be more straightforward. Having won his party’s ticket by making nonsense of the unwritten compact that the next president would come from the southern part of the country, it was clear that Abubakar, a Muslim from the North East, would pick a Christian running mate from either the South East or the South South. The South West, his opponent Bola Tinubu’s region, was out of the question. In the end, Abubakar settled for Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa. Okowa hails from Ika, an Igbo-speaking part of the South South state.
By contrast, the path has been more treacherous for Tinubu. Although Tinubu has submitted the name of the APC’s former National Welfare Secretary Ibrahim Kabir Masari to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), many believe this was done to meet INEC’s June 17 deadline for submission of candidate names, and that Masari would eventually make way for a substantive running mate. The smart money is on Tinubu eventually substituting his placeholder, his insistence that the relatively unknown Masari is his final answer notwithstanding.
Why does Tinubu seem to be hedging on the choice of a running mate? The answer to this question cuts to the very heart of Nigeria’s delicate ethnoreligious balance.
Being a southern Muslim, Tinubu, in theory, would be best served by a northern Christian running mate. But many believe this would be as good as throwing away whatever chance he has of becoming president since, it is contended, he would stand less chance of wooing the northern Muslim population, let alone splitting the northern vote with Abubakar. In short, having a Christian running mate, even one from the north, would be such a disadvantage that his own (southern) Muslim identity would not be enough to overcome…
