Last weekend Bola Tinubu was elected president of Nigeria—the world’s sixth largest democracy, and Africa’s most populous country and largest economy. Winning a presidential election in a country as complicated as Nigeria requires monumental effort. But incredibly, winning the election may be Tinubu’s least difficult assignment in the next four years. The new president will have to walk a three-sided gauntlet among a rancorous electorate (the majority of which did not vote for him), sniping opposition parties, and intra-government squabbles within his own party.
The victory of Tinubu’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party tells only a very partial story. In contrast to the two prior elections—in which 97 to 98 percent of votes went to either the APC or the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which governed Nigeria from 1999 until the APC displaced it in 2015—votes in the latest election were fragmented across several parties. This maturation of Nigeria’s democracy is good news for the electorate and opposition parties, but bad news for Tinubu.
After all, six million more people voted for the president-elect’s rivals than for him, and the APC should be alarmed that its share of overall votes cast shrank almost 20 percentage points, from 56.8 percent in the 2019 election to 36.6 percent in the latest election.
Last weekend Bola Tinubu was elected president of Nigeria—the world’s sixth largest democracy, and Africa’s most populous country and largest economy. Winning a presidential election in a country as complicated as Nigeria requires monumental effort. But incredibly, winning the election may be Tinubu’s least difficult assignment in the next four years. The new president will have to walk a three-sided gauntlet among a rancorous electorate (the majority of which did not vote for him), sniping opposition parties, and intra-government squabbles within his own party.
The victory of Tinubu’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party tells only a very partial story. In contrast to the two prior elections—in which 97 to 98 percent of votes went to either the APC or the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which governed Nigeria from 1999 until the APC displaced it in 2015—votes in the latest election were fragmented across several parties. This maturation of Nigeria’s democracy is good news for the electorate and opposition parties, but bad news for Tinubu.
After all, six million more people voted for the president-elect’s rivals than for him, and the APC should be alarmed that its share of overall votes cast shrank almost 20 percentage points, from 56.8 percent in the 2019 election to 36.6 percent in the latest election.
This splintering of political support is an outcome of the Nigerian electorate becoming more selective, and the voting process becoming more sophisticated. The young electorate (nearly 28 percent of whom are students and 76.6 percent of whom are under age 35) is more willing to dump underwhelming candidates and vote for new political movements. As Lara, a young medical doctor based in the northern city of Kaduna told me: “People around my age are now more aware of what’s going on. … People are not very patient anymore. They can only tolerate so much. Evidence of progress is the only coolant they need.”
The introduction of biometric voting using fingerprint and facial recognition technology has made elections harder to rig, thereby improving the chances of smaller opposition parties that lack the resources to use bribes to inflate their votes.
In response to being presented with septuagenarian candidates such as 70-year-old Tinubu and the PDP’s 76-year-old Atiku Abubakar, many young people rallied around 61-year-old Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who tapped into the frustrations of Nigeria’s youths to build a cult-like following of young urban people who nicknamed themselves “Obidients.” The Labour Party, which won fewer than 1 percent of votes in the 2019 election, garnered 6 million votes in last weekend’s election, or 25 percent of the total.
Although these votes did not propel Obi to the presidency, the Labour Party showed Tinubu that he has no impregnable home ground when it won Tinubu’s home state, Lagos, and Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. The APC governor of Lagos seems to have taken note, and has become more conspicuous in reminding voters about his achievements prior to the March 11 governorship election.
The opposition also has dirt to throw at Tinubu. The defeated parties made their standard accusations of electoral malpractice against the APC, called on the head of the electoral commission to resign, and vowed to challenge the election results in court. Tinubu may spend the first few months of his administration distracted by litigation. If Tinubu settles the litigation using his famed dexterity and deal-making skills, an unpredictable electorate is watching his every move.
Nigeria has a large and mysterious silent majority of voters. Of the 87 million people who collected their voter cards, less than 25 million voted. This low turnout defies rational explanation. However, the latent voting bloc of 62 million may become an important constituency. The success or failure of Tinubu’s policies will determine whether the silent bloc is encouraged to vote for him next time, or provoked to vote for the opposition instead.
New governments are usually welcomed to office with a wave of optimism. However, decades of failed promises have made the Nigerian public cynical. As Saratu Abiola, a writer and communications strategist based in Abuja, put it, “The economy is shit, the insecurity is scary, our salaries are increasingly worthless, and the price of everything is soaring.” Hers is a succinct and brutally damning summary of Nigeria’s current predicament.
The number and complexity of Nigeria’s problems (insecurity, inflation, a cash shortage, debt, unemployment) cannot be addressed without implementing drastic and unpopular reforms (such as raising taxes and removing fuel subsidies) that will further antagonize the aggrieved electorate (two-thirds of which did not vote for the president) and give ammunition to the opposition.
On the campaign trail, Tinubu made grandiose promises to increase Nigeria’s GDP by 10 percent and halve youth unemployment within the next four years, but gave few details on how he would achieve these remarkable outcomes. The promise he is most likely to deliver is also the one that is most likely to get him into trouble with the electorate: tax.
Tinubu made his name as governor of Lagos State, a teeming state with a population estimated to be as high as 20 million. Tinubu boasted “When I was governor of Lagos State, my team and I … changed the face of the state. It became a safe place for residents and an engine room of prosperity. … What my team and I achieved in Lagos, together we all can achieve for Nigeria.”
Although Tinubu exaggerated his success in Lagos, one of his favored tactics was to engage private sector businesses to execute projects for the state, and then incentivize their performance by giving them a share of the revenue generated from such projects. Tinubu also boosted Lagos’s revenues by simultaneously raising the number of taxes and aggressively enforcing their collection.
However, Lagos has an idiosyncratic economic and political pulse that is different from the rest of Nigeria. It is almost a country within a country, and Lagos State’s GDP alone is higher than the national GDP of 45 of Africa’s 54 countries.
If Abuja is Nigeria’s Washington, then Lagos is Nigeria’s New York and Los Angeles combined. It is the home to both Nigeria’s banking and entertainment industries. The rest of Nigeria does not have Lagos’s concentration of big businesses and high-net-worth individuals, and there is no guarantee that the “Lagos model” will work if implemented across Nigeria—where 80 percent of people do not pay income tax.
Economic reforms will require Tinubu to cooperate with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The CBN’s pre-election policies have already put its governor, Godwin Emefiele, on a collision course with the president-elect. Only two months before the election, the CBN suddenly changed the design of the three highest denominations of Nigerian cash notes. As the Nigerian mint could not print enough new notes to replace the trillions’ worth of decommissioned notes in only two months, a severe cash shortage erupted and caused public anger.
Tinubu’s allies severely criticized Emefiele, accusing him of deliberately orchestrating the cash crisis to block Tinubu’s path to the presidency by starving him of much-needed funds required to prosecute his election campaign, or to build animosity against Tinubu’s incoming government.
Emefiele had sought the nomination to be the APC’s presidential candidate before Tinubu secured it. Emefiele’s relationship with politicians is so bad that some of them hatched a plot to get the State Security Service (Nigeria’s equivalent to the FBI) to arrest him. The fiercely independent Emefiele is very unlikely to keep his job beyond next year. Tinubu is not someone who tolerates insubordination, and there is likely to be score settling between the two men.
A bizarre irony is that the easiest way through the gauntlet of problems awaiting Tinubu on the presidential desk is for Tinubu to pave the road for his own replacement. He can survive the multiple approaching fronts of opposition by positioning himself as a transitional leader between Nigeria’s current elite generation and the next generation of younger leaders whom he will groom.
APC member Nasir El-Rufai (a close ally of Tinubu) said, “You will see an extensive collection of young people in the administration because [Tinubu] sees his role as that of a transitional leader to fix some of the problems we have [and to] build a new leadership class.”
If this turns out to be campaign PR and not a real statement of intent, the impatient electorate may issue Tinubu with a jump-or-be-pushed ultimatum at the next election. The young electorate has time, but Tinubu does not.
