Circumventing Power Rotation Could Spell Doom For APC, PDP And Nigeria Post 2023

By Godwin Anaughe

The primaries for the 2023 presidential election are a few days away, and the political dynamics could yet change. But as political parties prepare to nominate their candidates in the next few days, it is time to speculate on the elections for political parties and potential prospects who are fretting about mounting a bid for the presidency.
Winning the presidency in this most up-for-grabs electoral landscape will not be a cake-walk for any of the political parties.

The two major parties, and even an insurgent candidate in any other party have a good chance of winning the presidency. However, a lot will depend on how well the parties understand history and the mood of the electorate which are merging together to shape the outcome of the next election.

With President Muhammadu Buhari’s term limited and will not be on the ballot, both the APC and the main opposition party, People’s Democratic Party, PDP are scrambling to best position themselves in an open contest in what promises to be a very competitive election in 2023.

President Muhammadu Buhari is from the North. Accordingly, proponents of zoning and power rotation expect that the next president would come from Southern Nigeria, hence the widespread clamor by Southerners for power to shift to the South in 2023 on the basis of equity, justice and fairness.
Even within the South, the South East geo-political zone which has not produced an executive President in the history of Nigeria wants the major political parties to pick their presidential candidates from the five states of the zone.

On the other hand, antagonists of power rotation, mostly from the North, advocate that the contest should be based on competency or merit and made open to all qualified Nigerians irrespective of their geography. This thinking reflects a mistaken belief that a free-for-all, so to speak, contest would ensure that the presidency remains in a much-taunted majority North.

There are good constitutional and other legal provisions that make it mathematically almost impossible for the North to wield electoral power without support from the South.

First, to win the presidency, a candidate must score the majority of the votes and at least a quarter of the votes in two-thirds of the states. Second, political parties are required to have national character.
Combined, these requirements make it impossible for either the North or the South to win the presidency without the support of the other. This was what played out in the last three presidential elections, where the winning candidates won at least four geo-political zones to clinch the presidency.
In 2011, when President Muhammadu Buhari contested against the then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, he lost in all three Southern geopolitical zones and lost the election, whereas, President Goodluck Jonathan won in three geopolitical zones of the South and the North Central to clinch the Presidency.
In 2015 and 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari won the three political zones of the North and the South West to emerge victorious. Both Jonathan and Alhaji Abubakar Atiku won only the South East and South South geo-political zones.

If Buhari could not win the presidency with only Northern support at a time when the turn of the North was cut short by the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, it is doubtful if any Northern candidate can in 2023, when it would be the turn of the South to produce the President. What this means is that for the North to retain the presidency in 2023, a Northern candidate must find a geopolitical zone in the South that will vote against the collective interest of the Southern people. The probability of this happening is practically zero, given the present mood of the people.

Simply put, there is no viable, nay practical, path to holding power in the North in 2023, even though there are some people in the North who feel that the North was shortchanged by the death of Umaru Musa Yar’dua midway into his first tenure on 10th May, 2010.

What is more, such a feeling is easily vanquished by the fact that in all, for the sixty two years that Independent Nigeria has existed, the North has been in power for forty two years while the South has only been in power for twenty years.
While power rotation is not unconstitutional, it is also not mandatory, hence, political parties are under no obligation to zone their presidential ticket.

However, like all previous elections since the return to democratic rule, power rotation is the vexing and pressing issue that will determine the outcome of the 2023 election. And electoral history has shown that it has not been good at all for the party that fails to embrace power rotation in the nomination of their presidential candidate.

For instance, as competent and promising as Awolowo (Southerner) was, the Unity Party of Nigeria could not go far fielding him as a successor to the then out-going military Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo (Southerner) in 1979. Shehu Shagari from the North took the trophy.
In a related token, it had to take a Southerner to succeed General Abdusalam from the North in 1999. And in 2015, not even the incumbent Jonathan could succeed himself, faced with the flowing history of succession equation in Nigerian politics.

This explains why in the last five general elections, the incumbent party has won the presidency in all except in 2015, when the People’s Democratic Party PDP, which pioneered, perfected and plied the principle of power rotation at every previous election to hold on to power for 16 years.

And when it breached the rotational arrangement in 2015, it lost the presidency to the All Progressives Congress, APC, which emerged on the political stage a few months before the historic election.
Considering the fact that power rotation remains a very deeply emotional matter among the people and that majority of Nigerians still believe in it and have even adopted zoning and power rotation in the administration of some of their communities and associations across the length and breadth of the country, it would be suicidal for any of the two major political parties to abandon this principle that has determined the outcomes of recent past presidential elections.
Thus, a deeply divided and apprehensive Nigeria would go into the election facing the three unprecedented possibilities in 2023.

First, if one of the major political parties, the APC and the PDP fields a Southern candidate and the other fields a Northern candidate, the party that aligns itself to the principle of power rotation and fields a Southerner would have the conventional edge and would more likely win the presidency in 2023.

Second, should both major parties ignore the reality that power rotation has now become an unconscionable and, worse, accepted fact of Nigerian politics and field candidates from the North, it would potentially open the door to a third party to win the presidency with an acceptable candidate from the South.

Third, a failure of these two possibilities, leading to the emergence of another Northern President by either APC or PDP, will clear the way for possibilities that are not desirable but are inevitable. Another Northern President would cause an outrageous instability as the country becomes ungovernable to the extent that this Republic could end or Nigeria as a country could even cease to exist.

This is why it is a patriotic duty for the two major political parties to embrace power rotation in full, that is geographically and by religion, not only to win the presidency but also to move Nigeria from the brink. The reason being that the outsized impact of power rotation is so large that it has become not only vital to winning the presidency but also the tool to paper over the rifts in the nation and keep the country together pending when, where the president comes from or the religion he or she practices do not matter.

Zoning was first deliberately introduced to select political party officials during the Second Republic by the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, to ease interethnic tensions in the aftermath of the civil war. Later, following the annulment of the 1993 elections which further exacerbated ethnic tensions in the country, a number of prominent leaders advocated rotating the presidency among the country’s six geopolitical zones (north-central, north-east, north-west, south-east, south-south, and south-west) during the National Constitutional Conference of 1994 -1995.

But the proposal was rejected in favour of North and South rotation to reflect the religious cleavage and persuasive bents between the mostly Christian South and the mostly Muslim North, leaving political parties to decide from which geopolitical zone to produce their presidential candidates. And rightly so, because the political parties have different support bases, and should be left alone to determine their different election strategies.

Since then, the idea of rotation and balancing power between the north and the south has been codified by a number of parties. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) included the zoning principle in its Constitution in 2009.
Section 7 (2) (c) of the PDP Constitution provides that: “In pursuance of the principles of equity, justice and fairness, the party shall adhere to the policy of rotation and zoning of party and public elective offices and it shall be enforced by the appropriate executive committee at all levels”. Also article 20(vi) of the APC constitution provides: “Without prejudice to Article 20(ii) and (iii) of this Constitution, the National Working Committee shall subject to the approval of the National Executive Committee make rules and regulations for the nomination of candidates through primary elections.

“All such rules, regulations and guidelines shall take into consideration and uphold the principle of Federal Character, gender balance, geo-political spread and rotation of offices, to as much as possible, ensure balance within the constituency covered.”

The question, though, is whether the APC and the PDP will bear true faith and allegiance to their constitution and uphold its provision on zoning and power rotation? That’s the big question everybody is trying to answer right now, and there seems not to be a definitive answer yet.

The fact that the aspirants for the presidential tickets of the two major parties are predominately from the South is a reflection of the mood of the people and fortunately for both parties there is a Southern strategy.
In the South, PDP is more popular in the South-East and the South-South geo-political zones, while APC holds sway in the South-West. Also, current party affiliations of Southern governors indicate that PDP and APC have eight governors each and All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) one. On the other hand, APC won the three geopolitical zones of the north in 2019 presidential election and now controls thirteen state governments, as against PDP’s six.

The pro-PDP advantage in the South is the key to their end game, meaning PDP’s top goal in 2023 should be to keep both the South-South and South-East geo-political zones in its corner. And there is no better way of achieving this than by nominating a Southern presidential candidate in 2023.

Sadly, the party does not seem to appreciate this unambiguous Southern strategy that is obvious to all and they risk losing both geopolitical zones should the Party foolishly field a Northern presidential candidate as was the case in 2015 when it fielded Jonathan from the South when it was the turn of the North.

And having already had President Olusegun Obasanjo from the South-West and President Goodluck Jonathan of the South-South, the only possible option for PDP is to field a South-East presidential candidate in 2023, if its overriding interest is to protect its southern wall and keep its voters in both the South-East and the South-South, rather than field a Northern candidate to further the personal ambition of a dominant force in the party from the north.
Should PDP deny South East its presidential ticket in 2023, it would amount to the greatest betrayal of a people in the political history of Nigeria. And the price could be too high for PDP as it runs the risk of losing the South-East, a zone that has reliably voted for the party in all presidential elections since 1999. Even the near total support of Nd’Igbo nationwide would be seriously jeopardized.

That in effect would result in a double jeopardy of losing the presidential election and a reliable base.
For APC, it’s less tricky, as it has never produced a Southern president.

However, it must choose between consolidation and expansion of its Southern political base. If the strategy is that of consolidation, it must field South West candidate. But if it wishes to expand its base and be competitive in all zones of the South, it must choose its candidate from either South-South or South-East, should PDP go North, even if PDP picks a Northern candidate.

Doing otherwise would mean surrendering both zones to PDP in 2023 without a fight from APC, while the North, which is the base of the APC becomes a battleground to the disadvantage of the APC.

As the ruling party, APC must not and should not pick its candidate from the North or from the same geopolitical zone in the South with PDP as a rule for obvious reasons.

Therefore, in the event that the PDP nominates a South-East candidate, the APC must strategically pick a South-South or South West presidential candidate to achieve its electoral goal in the South and win the presidency in a landslide.

Godwin Anaughe, a political strategist, wrote from Abuja