A strategy is a general plan or set of plans intended to achieve something, especially over a long period. Sentiment, on the other hand, means an exaggerated and self-indulgent feeling of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. Put simply, it’s a view or opinion that is held or expressed. One distinguishing factor between strategy and sentiment is the lack of any plan whatsoever in sentiment. It’s an emotional thing. Simplicita. A plan is the setting of achievable objectives and determining how such objectives will be achieved.
In politics, sentiment does not win elections, only a good strategy does. In 1999, Dr Alex Ekwueme founded the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) with about 34 other eminent politicians. He was the first interim chairman. There was no doubt that the sentiment was that he should naturally emerge as the PDP presidential candidate in 1999. It didn’t appear as if this sentiment was matched with adequate strategy. To win election at that level, you needed to have the backing of the incumbent, which was the then military government. The military made laws and executed them on their own. They are the legislature and the executive at the same time. They simply went to the prison, brought out Olusegun Obasanjo, and backed him to become President. Obasanjo beat Ekwueme in the PDP primaries and beat Olu Falae in the general election.
Olu Falae alleged that the election was rigged against him but the result was upheld by the Court of Appeal and defended by the military. Olu Falae withdrew his case from the Supreme Court on realising that it was a futile effort having no backing of the incumbent. Another reason Falae withdrew his appeal from the Supreme Court was the pressure he received from his people. Falae was from the South like Obasanjo, even from the South-West like Obasanjo. The South-West political elite even came out openly to prevail on Falae to withdraw the appeal. They said they were ashamed that a fellow Yoruba man can be contesting the election won by another Yoruba man. Nobody was sympathetic to Falae’s lamentation that he was rigged out or that he couldn’t get justice from the court.
The great lesson here is that one cannot use a politician from a section of the country to remove any aspirant or candidate that is supported by the incumbent or is the incumbent himself from that same section. Both Ekwueme and Olu Falae are from the Southern part of Nigeria and were more experienced democrats than Obasanjo. Indeed, Obasanjo was in jail when they formed PDP, but Obasanjo won the two giants simply because he had the backing of the incumbent. The reason is because Nigeria does not have free, fair and credible elections. The Independent National Electoral Commission writes results as they like for the highest bidder and the most powerful people and the results are largely confirmed by the courts.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari has been noted to have polled 12 million votes from the North. He was reputed to have a cult followership from the North. However, his 12 million votes got activated only when he was contesting against a Southern candidate. President Olusegun Obasanjo understood the strategy of defeating a very popular candidate who didn’t have the backing of the incumbent with another candidate from the same section of the country who has the backing of the incumbent, no matter how unpopular the candidate is. He brought Gov Umaru Yar’Adua of Katsina State, with the backing of the presidency, to compete with Buhari, another citizen of Katsina State. That year, 2007, Buhari managed to garner only 7 million votes against Yar’Adua. Again, it’s a herculean task to remove an incumbent or an incumbent-backed candidate with a politician from the same section of the country.
President Yar’Adua died in office after about three years. As the Vice-President, Goodluck Jonathan automatically became the President. When Goodluck Jonathan came into power, he was determined to bring about tremendous improvement in our electoral system. He appointed Jega to head the INEC. Jega conducted elections that were manageable as free and fair. That period confirmed that strategy brings victory over sentiment.
The death of Yar’Adua meant that the eight year rotational agreement between North and South was automatically breached. The 2011 presidential election became the first test of the inviolability of the eight-year rotation. If the eight-year rule was inviolable, it meant that North would have been allowed to produce the President by 2011 to end by 2015. In preparation for this, the North held a preliminary presidential primary election among themselves. Ibrahim Babangida, Atiku Abubakar, Gen Aliyu Gusau, and Bukola Saraki contested in the election and Atiku won.
Goodluck Jonathan was persuaded by the North to allow the eight-year rotational agreement to stand, but a different point of view was introduced. It was argued that Yar’Adua-Goodluck Jonathan ticket was a joint ticket for eight years and Goodluck Jonathan from the South should be allowed to do only four more years to complete the joint ticket. This argument modified the eight-year rotational agreement to become four-year rotational agreement whenever the incumbent could not finish the eight-year term for whatever reason.
This four-year rotational term meant that if a fresh candidate comes from the same section of the country as the incumbent that has spent four years in office, the candidate will do only one term to complete the section’s eight-year tenure. If, on the other hand, the other section wins in the general election cutting short the eight-year term of the initial section, it will do only one term and return power to the initial section. This means that they will share the eight-year term between them and do four years each. One interesting development was that the choice of which section of the country would bring out the candidate to complete the remaining four years in which an incumbent was replaced was always thrown open between North and South.
Goodluck Jonathan opted for the option of four years for each section. Obasanjo publicly declared that Goodluck Jonathan accepted to do only one term to complete the unfinished eight-year term of Yar’Adua. In 2011, Atiku pleaded with Jonathan to allow only Northerners to contest for the post of President in order to complete their eight years but he declined insisting that it should be thrown open to every contestant North or South to complete the broken eight-year rotational agreement occasioned by the death of Yar’Adua. Of course it was thrown open and Goodluck with the power of incumbency defeated Atiku in the presidential primary and went ahead to defeat Buhari in the general election.
Buhari lost due to a lack of strategy. He thought that only the northern sentiment could see him through without collaboration with the South. Before any politician becomes President in Nigeria, he must have the support of both North and South, because, in addition to winning the highest number of votes, the politician requires to have a national spread that entails winning 25 per cent of the votes in about 25 states of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). In this calculation, the incumbent will always have an upper hand.
The North felt humiliated and betrayed that the eight-year rotational agreement had been breached. They took solace in the agreement that Jonathan would do only one term. Unfortunately, Jonathan also reneged at the end of his four-year regime. He wanted to govern for more than nine years. The politicians realised that they required water tight political strategy to remove Goodluck Jonathan. The time for sentiments was over.
There was one smart politician from the South called Bola Tinubu that had the strategy. He had a life-long ambition to be President. But he realised that it would be futile for him to be President if he contested against an incumbent President from the same section, the South. He opted to recruit the retired General and retired politician, Buhari, from the North. With the 12 million votes he already garnered against every Southern candidate, he needed the support of the South to make his election unriggable. Tinubu supplied it and pushed an incumbent President out of office for the first time in history. After Buhari’s eight years in office, when there was no incumbent President in office, Tinubu launched his own campaign to be President and with the help of the power of the incumbent, he was declared the winner, no matter how flawed the election that brought him to power was.
Any party that wants to cut the regime of an incumbent from the South and thinks it can do it with a politician from the South lacks political strategy. The incumbent will swallow the politician up and simply buy up the North who will have no dog in the fight and that’s the end. Same applies with trying to remove an incumbent Northerner halfway through with another Northerner. The incumbent will eat the fellow Northerner like biscuits and buy up the South to support him. When Buhari spent four years in office in 2019, and PDP wanted to remove him by fielding Atiku, fellow Northerner with Obi as his running mate, Buhari ate both of them like biscuits and won re-election, leaving them to whine about the election being stolen.
The only strategy that works against an incumbent is a disruptive change by using a popular politician from the opposite section to sack the incumbent as it was meted out to Jonathan. Any other idea is simply a demonstration of sentiment not strategy, that will lead to failure not victory.
