On February 25, 2023, Nigeria will vote in presidential elections for the first time in 20 years without Muhammadu Buhari on the ballot. He will be term-limited after serving the constitutionally allowable two terms, following three previous unsuccessful efforts between 2003 and 2011.

The nomination conventions of Nigeria’s biggest political parties have finished, revealing who would compete to succeed Muhammadu Buhari as the country’s 16th Head of State. The ruling All Progressives Congress will field former Lagos State Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu to face former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party. They will be the two top contenders.
Azubike Ishiekwene has described the APC’s candidate selection process as a chronicle of Buhari’s mastery of “strategic ambivalence.” There is scant evidence to suggest the existence of such strategic genius.

The day before the convention was supposed to begin, 11 governors of northern Nigeria, all on the APC platform, published a united position asserting that “the search for a successor as the APC’s presidential candidate be limited to our compatriots from the southern states”. In the same statement, they called on “all aspirants from the northern states to withdraw in the national interest and allow only aspirants from the South to proceed to the primary.” This was a major deal because the governors collectively determine who wins the party’s nomination for the presidency through their control of the delegates from their various states.

Only Abubakar Badaru (Jigawa), Yahaya Bello (Kogi), Ahmad Lawan (Yobe), and Sani Yerima (Zamfara) were from the North among the 23 presidential candidates nominated by the ruling party.

Moments after the declaration was made, news surfaced that President Buhari had also supported the northern governors’ position. This appeared to be a reasonable next step after the president informed his party the previous week that he wanted the privilege of appointing his successor to lead the party into next year’s elections. The northern governors advised all northern contenders to relinquish their ambitions and step down, whereas the president chose to  be silent on that.

Rather curiously, after alerting the party of his desire to appoint a successor, President Buhari hopped on the presidential jet and headed to Ibiza for three days. The president returned from Spain just three days before the Convention and flew back to Ghana. He was unable to devote the time and effort required to achieve the intended objective. There was no strategic genius there. Rather, he created a political vacuum that the northern governors were only too pleased to fill.

Concurrently with his claimed backing of power rotation to the south, the Vanguard daily reported a claim by senior northern politician and former Nigerian foreign minister, Sule Lamido, that President Buhari was privy to a conspiracy that would lead to the emergence of Senate President, Ahmad Lawan and former Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi as the presidential ticket of the APC. This seemed odd because Lawan, contrary to this position, is from the North.

On the same day, Lawan paid a high-profile visit to another APC presidential candidate and Ebonyi State Governor, David Umahi, following which they were said to have reached a mutual support agreement in the contest for the party’s ticket. At this point, in light of the northern governors’ announcement, Dr. Lawan should have withdrawn from the race rather than accepting endorsements from fellow competitors.

It should have been obvious that coincidences do not exist in politics.

Early afternoon the next day, on Monday, June 6, party chairman Adamu Abdullahi reportedly declared to a surprised National Working Committee (NWC) of the APC that their consensus presidential candidate will be Dr. Lawan, and all hell broke loose.

First, the 11 northern governors quickly responded to this news, reinforcing their position on the ticket shifting to the south. Next, a major portion of the NWC rejected the announcement, claiming it did not originate with them. Quickly, a statement was scrambled on the president’s behalf, stating that he had no favored choice and that he was determined to ensure that no nominee was imposed on the party.

Notably, Garba Shehu, the spare presidential spokesperson who delivered this statement, did not attend the frenzied meetings among party officials on the subject. The declaration also openly contradicted the president’s position, which he first declared in a high-profile interview in January 2022: he had a preferred successor.

It was difficult to know what to believe: the president’s statement or his own statements. In the end, the world waited in vain for Buhari to reveal his successor or to orchestrate his strategy around such a person.

None of this indicates a grasp of strategic ambivalence. Instead, the voyage to the APC Convention resulted in the organized chaos that has defined the second Buhari misadventure for the last seven years. Not for the first time in Nigeria’s recent history of democratic transition, a president of military origin looked to lose his cool when he needed to.

It appears inconceivable that Abdullahi Adamu, a veteran politician who had served eight years as state governor and two terms in the Senate before being installed as party chairman this year solely at the request of Mr. President, would have gone rogue to designate a “consensus” nominee without the president’s knowledge or approval. Indeed, the mere insinuation that he did not know harms Buhari far more than an admission that he did.

It appears more likely that what happened was that the president permitted or requested Mr. Adamu to make the announcement, then swiftly threw him under the bus when it became clear that he had probably underestimated the backlash that ensued.

Such a strategy would be completely consistent with the narrow, nepotistic perspective that has characterized the Buhari years. A look at the underlying realities of Nigeria’s trajectory reveals the logics that may be behind the North’s reluctance in the APC to cede power.

Violence has destroyed social capital, enterprise, and innovation in the region that has produced the majority of Nigeria’s leadership, to the point where its elite see their own survival only in terms of seizing power at the center, from which they can redistribute revenue obtained primarily from the south in order to deter or postpone further violence from an impoverished underclass. However, to maintain this would necessitate an internal colonial system that might endanger the Nigerian enterprise beyond a point of no return.

The alternative to gaslighting the country in this manner was to gaslight the party.

The result was a terrible demolition derby of a party primary, with the outcome decided in favor of the sole bidder who could afford the bullion vehicles to purchase the full delegate value chain from political manufacturing to wholesale and logistics to retail. As the governing party Convention began in Abuja, all foreign currency notes in the federal capital were depleted in banks and bureaux de change, ending up in the hotel rooms and pockets of party executives and delegates.

The contestants comprised “a sitting Vice-President, a serving Senate President, five current governors, five ex-governors, an ex-Senate President, and four former ministers.” In the end, Buhari’s callous incompetence caused him to become a spectator in the drama of his own party succession. He didn’t leave a legacy worth fighting for.

The outcome was a hostile takeover of the party by a co-founder who was distraught at his own exclusion from the party’s fortunes.

There will be time to examine the environment of the upcoming campaign, but the outcome is apparent. Rabiu Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party has emerged in the North-West, and Peter Obi’s Labour Party platform in the South-East. They could become kingmakers.

This lineup ensures that General Buhari, who promised enhanced security and coexistence in 2015, would lead Nigeria into maybe its first centrifugal elections since independence. It is a sad statement on Buhari’s misadventure that the race to replace him may become one in which the country votes on whether or not to remain united.