Nigeria 2015: analysis of election issues and future prospects

Nigerian elections 2015: an update

1. Outcome of the 2011 elections

Presidential and legislative elections were held in April 2011.

Goodluck Jonathan, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, won a decisive victory in the 2011 presidential election. He won 59.6% of the vote in the first round, meaning that no run-off was needed. He also won majorities of the vote in 23 out of the country’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.¹

The Congress for Progressive Change’s (CPC) candidate Muhammadu Buhari won 32.3% of the vote, gaining majorities in 12 states. The candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Nuhu Ribadu, won 5.5% of the vote and gained a majority in one state.

Map of the presidential election result

The map below provides a geographical illustration of the 2011 presidential election result:

Source: US Congressional Research Service

In the elections for the federal National Assembly, the PDP also prevailed, winning a majority of 205 out of 360 seats in the lower house, the House of Representatives. In the upper house, the Senate, the party won 73 out of 109 seats.

Goodluck Jonathan’s victory was decisive – but it was also highly controversial.

Until the 2011 elections, the PDP, which has won all the presidential and National Assembly elections held since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999, operated an informal ‘zoning’ arrangement, under which the presidency would alternate every two terms between southern and northern representatives of the party.

Jonathan is a southerner. He had been vice-president under President Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner who had won the presidency for the PDP in 2007. Yar’Adua had succeeded another southerner, President Olusegun Obasanjo, who served two terms in office between 1999 and 2007. When Yar’Adua died in office during his first term in 2010, Jonathan took over as president, as provided for under the 1999 Nigerian Constitution.

However, many northerners in the PDP viewed him strictly as a temporary figure and asserted that it should be the north’s turn to hold the presidency again in 2011. Goodluck Jonathan’s decision to stand in the 2011 presidential election – having originally said that he would not – aroused much consternation.

The breakdown of the PDP’s informal zoning arrangement in 2011 did not in the end greatly damage Jonathan’s personal prospects. The northern political elite was divided amongst itself, enabling Jonathan to build alliances with some of its members. He also deployed the power and resources that come with being an incumbent to great effect. Jonathan’s success in doing so was illustrated by the fact that he won the popular vote in the presidential election in a number of states where the PDP failed to win the vote for state governor.

Nonetheless, the map above shows that the country emerged from the election extremely polarised between north and south. Despite the fact that the 2011 elections were a significant improvement upon the 2007 elections in terms of administrative credibility and fairness, there was a major outbreak of violence in several northern states immediately after the result of the presidential election was announced. It was the worst post-election violence for decades.

Supporters of Muhammadu Buhari and the CPC alleged that the PDP had rigged the vote. Buhari called for an end to the violence but it went on for three days, during which at least 800 people were killed and up to 65,000 people displaced. Some of the violence had religious and ethnic elements to it.²

The CPC launched a legal challenge against the election result but it was unsuccessful. As the dust settled, the political scene looked superficially unchanged. But many underlying political tensions had been exacerbated by the 2011 elections. US Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell subsequently expressed fears for Nigeria’s future security and stability if its “fractured” elite consensus could not be repaired ahead of the 2015 elections.³

2. Build up to 2015 elections

After Jonathan’s 2011 victory, speculation began to mount that he would stand for a second term in 2015.⁴ Northerners in the PDP talked about putting forward a candidate from the north for the party’s internal election process. Opponents argued that a second term would mean Jonathan would in practice serve more than two terms, in violation of the Constitution, given that he first took up the reins on an acting basis in 2010. But the Supreme Court ruled that the circumstances in which he became president could not be counted towards a term in office and that Jonathan was therefore eligible to stand in 2015.⁵

2013: Jonathan on the back foot

During 2013, the odds against a Jonathan second term appeared to lengthen. He was starting to look like a liability in the eyes of growing numbers within his party. Boko Haram’s armed insurgency in the north was intensifying by the month.⁶ His administration appeared to lack dynamism and commitment in response. Even more worrying for him, the PDP was facing an unprecedented challenge from opposition parties. Four parties with support-bases ranging across both north and south, including the CPC and the CAN, combined forces to establish the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Then, towards the end of the year, six PDP state governors defected to the APC, along with about one-third of the PDP’s members of both houses of the National Assembly, leaving the PDP without a majority in the lower house for the first time since 1999. To make matters worse, a letter from former President Obasanjo to Jonathan was leaked, in which Obasanjo warned that the country was in danger of breaking up if Jonathan stood again.⁷ By the end of the year, some commentators were openly speculating that Jonathan might be close to throwing in the towel.

2014: the PDP and APC trade blows

However, during the first half of 2014 President Jonathan and his supporters had some success in stemming the adverse political tide. The PDP was able to prevent any more high-level defections and even managed to contrive some defections in the other direction. In August 2014 it pulled off a major political coup by persuading the prominent politician and anti-corruption campaigner Nuhu Ribadu to abandon the APC, which was by now experiencing growing internal divisions of its own, for the PDP.⁸

Another indicator that the PDP still had plenty of life in it came in June 2014, when it mounted a successful electoral challenge to a prominent APC governor in Ekiti state in the south-west of the country, Kayode Fayemi. The PDP threw vast sums of money at the campaign, delivering victory to its candidate.⁹ The PDP also sponsored several attempts to impeach sitting APC governors. Jonathan’s close advisors urged him not to withdraw from the race.¹⁰ Some of Jonathan’s more militant youthful supporters in the Niger Delta threatened to take up arms if he was not anointed the PDP candidate.

However, in August 2014 the APC was able to steady the ship in another of its strongholds in the south-west, Osun state, where it saw off the PDP in elections for state governor. In late October it was boosted further by the defection to its ranks from the PDP of the speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal.¹¹ The PDP subsequently sought unsuccessfully to remove him as speaker and a subsequent attempt to enter the National Assembly led to scuffles within the building, with the police firing tear-gas into its main lobby.¹²

While the positions of Jonathan and the PDP had certainly strengthened, it was not certain that he would win the party’s presidential primary if there was a contest at the National Convention scheduled for December 2014.¹³ However, in September, the need to do so was dramatically circumvented when the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) adopted Jonathan as its sole candidate. The NEC also endorsed all other current PDP post-holders being allowed to stand again uncontested. With Boko Haram’s vicious armed insurgency now at unprecedented levels, the APC criticised the PDP’s approach as deeply undemocratic and complacent. Jonathan formally declared his candidacy in November 2014.¹⁴

December 2014: the PDP and APC Conventions

The 11 December 2014 PDP National Convention was a coronation. Jonathan was duly elected its presidential candidate, with his current vice-president, Namadi Sambo, once again his running mate. The PDP had opted for the same Christian-Muslim ‘balanced ticket’ that had brought it victory in 2011.

Few expected that the APC’s presidential primaries would be a similar coronation and so it proved. In late September 2014, Atiku Abubakar, the former military leader who had overseen the transition to civilian rule in 1999, announced that he was putting himself forward to be the APC’s presidential candidate.¹⁵

This early announcement was viewed as an attempt to destabilise Buhari’s own campaign. As a Muslim, Abubakar’s prospects of securing the vice-presidential berth under Buhari were limited. Some speculated that Abubakar, who has major oil business interests, may have put himself forward to represent those who feared Buhari’s hostility to official corruption. In October, Buhari confirmed he would stand, calling on the party to rally around him as its “consensus candidate” in the same way the PDP had around Jonathan.¹⁶ But this was always an unlikely prospect.

The APC’s National Convention also took place on 11 December 2014. There were five candidates for the presidential nomination. In the end Buhari won easily, with Abubakar coming a distant second.¹⁷ Attention quickly turned to Buhari’s selection of a running mate. After a week or so of internal horse-trading, Buhari selected lawyer and academic Yemi Osinbajo. A relative newcomer to frontline politics, Osinbajo had two principal virtues as Buhari’s choice. He is a Christian from the south-west, so ensuring that the APC also has a ‘balanced ticket’ in the forthcoming presidential election; and he is very close to Bola Tinubu, who is widely reported to have only reluctantly accepted that, for a range of reasons – including the fact that he is a Muslim – he could not take the role himself.¹⁸

Aspects of the 2015 election campaign¹⁹

The 2015 election campaign has been characterised more by low politics than by high-minded pledges on policy. PDP leaders have persistently suggested that the APC is a pro-Shari’a law ‘Muslim party’ which is in not-so-secret sympathy with Boko Haram. This potentially combustible allegation was vociferously denied by the APC, which countered with accusations of PDP incompetence and complacency in dealing with Boko Haram.²⁰

Muhammadu Buhari has been clear in his condemnation of Boko Haram, which carried out a suicide attack against his convoy in July 2014. Buhari survived. In November 2014, an email emerged, purportedly from Muhammed Abubakar Shekau, claiming that President Jonathan was in cahoots with Boko Haram. It was swiftly dismissed as a fake.²¹

Another PDP line of attack on Buhari has been to question his democratic credentials. The party has contrasted his past as a former military leader with President Jonathan’s experience as a “tested and trusted democrat”, who emerged in the aftermath of the country’s return to civilian rule in 1999.²²

The large-scale sale of Western oil company assets to Nigerian counterparts in the summer of 2014 was viewed by some as indicating that the electoral campaign was about to begin in earnest – the divide between state and party expenditure, blurred at the best of times, becomes extremely fuzzy when elections approach. The APC has its own oil company links. Both the PDP and the APC have thrown enormous amounts of money at the campaign.²³ A significant proportion has been raised from their own candidates, who have been charged “eye-watering fees” to obtain nomination forms.²⁴ Standing for office is far beyond the means of ordinary Nigerians.²⁵

The security forces, which some claim are often closely linked with the ruling party in many parts of the country, are already struggling to maintain order. Rival politicians have – as in previous elections – again been recruiting private armed youth militias from the vast pool of Nigeria’s unemployed.

From October 2014 onwards, armed attacks, including abductions, by members of such groups began to rise.²⁶ In early January 2015, the APC accused gunmen with links to the PDP of shooting at supporters travelling to an election rally in Bori, Rivers state.²⁷ A few days later, the PDP alleged that APC supporters had set fire to one of President Jonathan’s campaign vehicles in the city of Jos.²⁸ There are reports that this time around politicians are also using young “internet warriors” to attack rivals online, often deliberately peddling misinformation and using inflammatory language.²⁹

There have been increasing examples of leading politicians making highly inflammatory speeches in the run-up to the elections. For example, the PDP governor of Katsina state, Ibrahim Shema, called his opponents “cockroaches of politics” in a speech.³⁰ The veteran Ijaw politician, Edwin Clark, a leading supporter of President Jonathan, suggested that the APC would be willing to kill the president in order to gain power in 2015.³¹

In late November 2014, the Nigerian State Security Service raided the APC’s Lagos office, reportedly destroying computers and documents in the process, as part of an investigation into claims that the APC was illegally cloning voter’s cards. The APC likened the raid to the 1974 US Watergate burglary.³²

On 14 January 2015, at a ceremony in Abuja attended by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former Commonwealth Secretary-General Chief Emeka Anyaoku, Jonathan and Buhari were joined by 12 other less-fancied presidential candidates in signing a pledge to ensure that the coming elections are violence-free. ³³

The APC has warned that it will not recognise the outcome of the elections if they are rigged but will instead form a parallel government.³⁴

Trying to hold the ring between the main protagonists is the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Every election cycle in Nigeria since 1999 has been characterised by a level of fraud and violence, but in 2011 the INEC was widely praised under its chairman Attahiru Jega, for doing a good job in difficult circumstances.

2015 is proving, if anything, even more challenging for INEC. The International Crisis Group warned in November 2014 that election preparations this time around were suffering from a deficient legal framework and a growing lack of confidence in INEC. It pointed to the failure of the National Assembly to pass amendments to the 2010 Electoral Act – including one which would create an Election Offences Tribunal to punish those who commit or sponsor violence in the run-up to the elections – and INEC’s slowness in producing a credible voter register.³⁵ The Commission has reportedly been trying to do its job with inadequate funding.³⁶ With less than a month to go until the elections, millions of voting cards have not yet been distributed.³⁷ INEC announced in mid-January 2015 that 68.8 million people had registered to vote and 38 million biometric permanent voter cards had been distributed.

Last but not least, INEC will have a role to play in deciding whether security conditions in the north-east are good enough to allow the elections to take place there next month; it has said that, while it has no plans to postpone them, it will take guidance on this from the security agencies.³⁸

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