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In
his weekly column on Saturday, Kperogi stated specifically that a
Tinubu win in the 2023 presidential election would escalate the Biafra
agitation.
 Abroad-based Nigerian professor, Farooq Kperogi has projected what
will happen should Bola Tinubu or Atiku Abubakar emerge as President in
2023.
In his weekly column on Saturday, Kperogi stated that a Tinubu win
in the 2023 presidential election would escalate the Biafra agitation.
Tinubu is the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress.
According to him, the reason is because of the marginalization being suffered by the South East region.
He also wrote about the chances of Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party.
Sharing his thoughts, Kperogi wrote:
If the general election holds in February next year, one of
three people will be declared president: APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, PDP’s
Atiku Abubakar, or Labor Party’s Peter Obi. Only a natural disaster,
such as death, can change that reality.
There is no foretoken of indications at the moment that can
reveal with certainty which presidential candidate will prevail next
year. Opinion polls in Nigeria are often no more than preposterously
unscientific partisan delusions. Campaign crowds are misleading gauges
of acceptance, can be bought, and can be mere signs of the level of
curiosity that a candidate excites.
Money may not be as decisive in determining the outcome of next
year’s election as it did in previous years. And no candidate can bank
on the assurances of primordial loyalties alone to coast to victory
since that alone won’t be enough in a three-way race. So, more likely
than not, no candidate will win an outright majority of the vote.
What seems fairly certain, however, is the shape of the
governments that will emerge from the three leading presidential
candidates. None of it, from my sober introspection, is pretty. Of
course, as always, I hope and pray that I am completely wrong. Let’s
start with Peter Obi.
Obi will be stymied by two lumbering burdens should he become
president. The first is what sociologists call the crisis of rising
expectations. Like Buhari before 2015, Obi has presented himself—and has
been touted by his supporters—as “different,” as the “savior” that
Nigeria needs to take it to the Promised Land. That’s a dangerous
expectation to create for a politician, any politician.
Obi is just like every Nigerian politician who, like Buhari, is
being estimated beyond his paygrade. The overly optimistic expectations
built around him will ensure that he is closely marked. Being overrated
is always a disadvantage because it makes the bar to impress almost
impossible to attain. Underrated people have an easier opportunity to
impress because the bar isn’t raised high for them in the first place.
Nonetheless, the wildly farcical religious fervor among Obi
supporters in the belief that Obi is Nigeria’s last opportunity for
redemption is in such sharp contrast with Obi’s own earlier position
about the impossibility of changing Nigeria through changes to who
becomes president.
In one of his most watched videos, he described Nigeria as a
motionless car with a dead engine. Instead of fitting the immobile car
with a new engine, he said, we keep changing the drivers in a forlorn
effort to get the car to move. In a March 25, 2022, article titled
"Peter Obi: Applying to Be Driver of a Knocked-Out Car,” I described his
characterization of Nigeria as “the profoundest metaphor anyone has
ever conjured up to explain Nigeria’s problems.”
“It’s interesting that Obi is now putting himself up as another
prospective driver to move a motionless car with a knocked-out engine.
Perhaps, he wants to be the driver who’ll tell us that we need to change
the engine,” I wrote. And that’s where his second problem lies.
If Obi becomes president, it’s almost certain that the National
Assembly will be dominated by the APC and the PDP both because the
Labor Party hasn’t fielded candidates in all National Assembly positions
across the nation and because most of the people it has fielded are
weak candidates with weak chances of victory.
Although he himself was a PDP member, which makes him a
political kindred of the APC/PDP political family, his upset victory
might cause him to be treated as a pariah, which would frustrate his
legislative agenda. He could, in fact, be impeached and removed from
office. Although he survived a similar fate when he was governor of
Anambra, Nigeria isn’t Anambra State. So, as a driver, he won’t be able
to change the engine of our motionless car.
Should Atiku Abubakar become president, his most immediate
burden would be dealing with a deeply divided nation. It’s obvious that
the prevailing sentiment in the South is that a southerner (and, for
some, a Christian) should succeed Muhammadu Buhari. And that’s not an
unreasonable sentiment in the light of the power of symbolic
representation in a complex, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious country
like Nigeria.
Atiku’s election after Buhari would be made worse by the fact
that they both share the same ethnicity. Although Buhari doesn’t speak
Fulfulde (the language of the Fulani), is culturally and linguistically
Hausa, and can only imagine what it means to be culturally Fulani, he
nonetheless self-identifies as Fulani and is phenotypically Fulani.
Atiku is culturally and linguistically Fulani. And they are both
Muslims.
The sense of righteous indignation that the emergence of Atiku
as president would provoke in the South might convulse the foundations
of Nigeria. It would also deepen the alienation of the Igbo and probably
push Biafra agitation to the mainstream in the Southeast.
The Southwest might also partake in calling attention to
“northern domination” and recoil to its “Yoruba Nation” shell, which
would embolden other subnationalist fissiparities. This would be ironic
because, with all his faults, Atiku is probably the most cosmopolitan
politician to ever emerge from northern Nigeria. But the likely revolt
of the South against his presidency won’t be against him as a person but
against the idea of one northern Muslim succeeding another northern
Muslim.
A Bola Tinubu presidency would be hamstrung by multiple
burdens. The first is a moral one. His U.S. drug forfeiture in the
1990s, which is now more public knowledge than it has ever been, would
perpetually undermine his moral authority as a president. He is also
clearly physically and mentally unwell and would have a surrogate
presidency that would be worse than Buhari’s.
But it would be a factious surrogate presidency. Remi Tinubu,
his wife, would head one faction. Seyi Tinubu (whom I learned isn’t the
son of Remi) would head another. In other words, it would be another
Buhari presidency, except that it would be on steroids. It would become
clear that the fears about a Muslim-Muslim presidency were groundless
since both Remi and Seyi are Christians.
I also foresee an open confrontation between Kashim Shettima
and Tinubu’s inner circle, and the confrontation would assume a regional
coloration. Shettima is a studious, strong-willed, and self-assured
personality who would revolt against his exclusion—unlike Osinbajo. It
won’t take long for the North to sour on Tinubu and for regional
animosities to ensue.
Of course, a Tinubu win, like an Atiku win, would most likely
add fuel to the flames of Biafra agitation and mainstream it. It isn’t
just because people in the Southeast rightly feel that this is the time
for a president from their region but also because Tinubu doesn’t seem
to show any warmth toward them. His election, like Atiku’s, would
exacerbate the sensation of alienation in the Southeast.
What is obvious to me is that whoever emerges president in 2023
would have a more difficult country to govern than any president since
at least 1999. That means the formation of a government of national
unity, which some people already advocate, is inevitable.
But a government of national unity is merely elite appeasement.
To have a chance to succeed even minimally, the next government has to
be more attuned to the pulse of the people in more ways than any
government we have had in recent time.
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