When digging a trap, make it shallow

The Nigerian politician has always lived in mortal fear of the “bandwagon effect.” This year his fears were fully realised. During the presidential and National Assembly elections of March 28 the opposition APC’s presidential candidate won an outright victory in 21 states. APC triumphed in 20 of those states at the weekend; only Gombe State […]

The Nigerian politician has always lived in mortal fear of the “bandwagon effect.” This year his fears were fully realised. During the presidential and National Assembly elections of March 28 the opposition APC’s presidential candidate won an outright victory in 21 states. APC triumphed in 20 of those states at the weekend; only Gombe State flipped back to PDP control. Then it grabbed one more, Imo. Even though they had the backing of incumbent governors PDP candidates went down to defeat in Katsina, Jigawa, Kebbi, Bauchi, Adamawa, Niger and Benue states. PDP’s candidate in Plateau was also on the verge of defeat last night.
The most prominent PDP casualty this weekend was Kaduna State’s Governor Mukhtar Ramalan Yero. This young man had completely hitched his political star to Vice President Namadi Sambo’s.  Since Sambo was no longer in a position to pull a rabbit out of the hat as he did for the late Governor Ibrahim Yakowa in 2011, Yero’s defeat in the APC tsunami was all but assured. The only PDP candidates in the North that survived the APC tsunami were Governor Ibrahim Dankwambo of Gombe and the party’s candidate in Taraba. Dankwambo made it back to the Government House despite President-elect Buhari’s last minute campaign stop in the state. While Dankwambo’s spokesmen would attribute his survival to a good record in office, APC men are already saying that some of their folks engaged in anti-party activity. After Yero, the most prominent PDP casualty was Nuhu Ribadu of Adamawa. His defection from APC to PDP last year, lured by the assurance of a governorship ticket, would be remembered as one of the most ill-timed moves in Nigerian politics.
APC governors running for re-election all over the country had a good time. All of them were re-elected, some with huge margins; Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima garnered 95% of the vote.  In the West, East and South results of weekend’s elections near completely mirrored the results of the March 28 elections. Despite fears that the Oba of Lagos’ gaffe about all Igbos drowning in the lagoon could sink APC’s candidate, Akinwunmi Ambode won the race with a comfortable margin. First term APC governors in Ogun and Oyo states also had easy victories. In Osun State where the governor’s chair was not up for grabs, APC won the state assembly election.
Neighbouring Ondo State however continued its see-saw swing between the major political camps. Though Buhari won the state two weeks ago, Governor Olusegun Mimiko’s PDP reasserted itself in weekend’s state assembly elections. This guarantees that the tug-of-war between Mimiko and APC national leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is set to continue into the future. Tinubu bankrolled the costly election petition that retrieved the Akure Government House from the late Chief Olusegun Agagu in 2008. Tinubu thereafter expected Mimiko to fulfil his own part of the bargain by defecting to ACN but Mimiko refused. Tinubu tried to unseat Mimiko when he came up for re-election in 2012 but his Labour Party beat ACN to third place.
APC leaders must be very disappointed that despite their sweeps in the North and West, the South East and South South resolutely defied them in this election, as they did two weeks earlier. Some pundits had speculated that following PDP’s defeat in the presidential election, the South Eastern voter could hop onto the bandwagon train during the governorship election. He did so only in Imo State. PDP swept four of the five Igbo states but APC’s lone governor in the region, the rambunctious Owelle Rochas Okorocha, managed to clinch victory.
Days before this election, Rochas held a highly publicised campaign event in Owerri that had in attendance all APC governorship candidates in the South East. He delivered a powerful speech, rebuking fellow Easterners for not electing a single APC senator and thereby depriving the region of the exalted seat of Senate President. His sermon apparently had some effect, at least in Imo State.
In the South South region the most promising APC candidate, Dakuku Peterside was defeated in Rivers State. Of all Nigerian states Rivers had the most troubled election on March 28 with APC alleging that PDP mobilised security agencies, INEC officers as well as heavily armed thugs to unleash an electoral scorched-earth policy. Even though the allegations were slightly less strident at the weekend, Peterside was still going down to defeat. This is a severe blow to Governor Rotimi Amaechi but it would hardly diminish his standing in APC’s top ranks. Nyesom Wike’s impending win in Rivers is the biggest consolation prize possible for outgoing First Lady Patience Jonathan whose bitter personal quarrels with Amaechi created tectonic political shifts in the region.
Many a pundit might wonder if PDP was really defeated in these elections since most of the winners on APC’s platform were PDP decampees. For example, Sokoto’s Governor-elect Tambuwal was the PDP House Speaker, as was Governor-elect Masari of Katsina. Kebbi State’s Abubakar Atiku Bagudu was a PDP senator, as was Adamawa’s Jibrilla Bindo. Ganduje twice became Kano’s deputy governor on PDP’s platform. Ortom of Benue was a PDP minister, as was Kaduna’s Nasiru el-Rufai. The newly elected helmsmen of Bauchi and Niger, Mohamed Abubakar and Abubakar Sani Bello both had PDP pasts.
Assuming PDP lost this election, many factors caused the defeat but the main aggravating factor worth mentioning today was the election order that put national elections before state-level elections. This curious arrangement had a history. In previous polls national assembly elections were held first, followed by governorship and state assembly and then presidential elections. In the run up to the 2011 elections however, the Jonathan Presidency and the National Assembly connived and wrote into the amended Electoral Act an order of elections that brought National Assembly and presidential elections ahead of governorship elections. They did this for a reason. The lesson of Nigerian politics since 1999 had shown that governors were the most potent election weapons. Even the president’s seemingly unassailable power of incumbency actually relied upon his control over a large number of PDP governors. Legislators are particularly vulnerable during elections and they could survive neither party primaries nor general elections without governors’ help. President Jonathan asked the National Assembly to change the order of elections and place his election to come first. The MPs seized on it and made their election to come first and the president’s second. Since the governors’ election was the third one, they were forced to work hard to deliver the first two in order to improve their own election prospects.
Now, even though the courts later ruled that INEC and not the National Assembly has the power to fix the order of elections, it was too late to change it in 2011. In the run up to 2015 INEC reduced the elections from three to two by collapsing the first two elections into one. This arrangement pleased the Jonathan Presidency and PDP national leaders even though it carried with it enormous risks. They assumed that PDP will win the presidency and thereafter benefit from a bandwagon effect in the state elections. They ended up losing the presidential election and last Saturday PDP suffered from a reverse bandwagon effect. It reminds me of the old Hausa adage that when you are digging a hole to set a trap for your enemy, don’t make it very deep in case you happen to fall into it. How come that no one transliterated this adage to PDP’s NEC and Board of Trustees?