ANALYSIS
Nigeria: battle for a cohesive national identity With the recent elections clearly heightening Nigerians’ sense of awareness, with many of them, more than ever before, beginning to question their Nigerianness, President-Elect Bola Tinubu must consider ways to reconcile the people, says Toyin Falola
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HE February 2023 presidential poll has proven that although trends and history exist to provide insights into the past and how that relates to future occurrences, they do not fully determine how the future is designed. This message was lost on many analysts who posited that the election this time will go in the way of past elections where the country’s two heavyweight parties will punch heavily during the elections while other contestants scramble for the crumbs. This was the case when Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari received
about 90 per cent of the votes in 2011, leaving the remaining 10 per cent to the other 18 candidates; or as the duo picked up 99 per cent in 2015, leaving the other 12 contestants with one per cent; or even in 2019 when the two leading candidates garnered 96 per cent of the total, with the other contestants, numbering up to 60, contesting for just four per cent. Therefore, widespread prediction by most Nigerian analysts was that it would be business as usual and either Bola Ahmed Tinubu or Atiku Abubakar would win the election; that while the bulk of
Tinubu had the lowest percentage of results by any winner in Nigeria’s Third Republic
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the votes would be between the two, other candidates, including the favourite of young Nigerians, Peter Obi, will scramble for a small percentage of the total votes. This prediction was often supported with justifications such as the peculiarity of the Nigerian electoral scene. This involves electoral malpractices, vote-buying, voter intimidation by the country’s major parties, and the use of wealth, whether state-funded or personally amassed, that cannot be traced to any clear legal means of acquisition. During research with my team, we