BOLA TINUBU AND THE DANGER  OF IDENTITY POLITICS

Tinubu deployed the weapon of identity politics to worm his way into power, contends Ike Okonta

                                        if you want to know the secret of Bola Tinubu’s long and continuing grip on the politics of Lagos State, examine closely the utterances of two of his key lieutenants – Bayo Onanuga and M.C. Oluomo. Bayo Onanuga is the chief executive officer of The News magazine and latterly Head of Media of the Bola Tinubu Presidential Campaign Council. M.C. Oluomo is a glorified motor park tout who has been Tinubu’s right hand man in everything political in Lagos since the advent of the Fourth Republic in May 1999.

Some commentators have written that Bayo Onanuga’s ethnic profiling of the Igbo residents of Lagos began following Peter Obi’s defeat of Bola Tinubu in Lagos State during the presidential election of February 25th. But this is wrong. Onanuga’s diatribe against the Igbo began as soon as he was appointed head of media by Tinubu’s presidential campaign council. Onanuga’s tactic was to zero in on the Obidient Movement and characterize them as a bunch of young Igbo rascals. Not done, Onanuga went on to blame Igbo youth for turning the mayhem that followed after the peaceful End Sars protests into a deliberate Igbo bid to destroy the infrastructure of Lagos State.

Not to be outdone in this campaign of calumny against an ethnic group, M.C. Oluomo went public a few days before the March 18 governorship election in Lagos and declared that anyone who did not intend to vote for the All Progressives Congress (APC) should not bother to come out on election day. This of course was a barely concealed dart lobbed at the Igbo in Lagos.

Since 2007 after he stepped down as two-term governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu has made a career of finessing ethnicity and religion to achieve his political ends. Realising that he had milked his membership of NADECO and the fight against the Abacha dictatorship for all it was worth during his two terms in office, Tinubu had to come up with a new political weapon in Lagos State. He cleverly transformed the then Action Congress into a political party representing the interests of the Yoruba people and began to subtly depict the Peoples Democratic Party as the party of the Igbo and other ‘outsiders.’ Jimi Agbaje ran into this formidable obstacle when he ran as candidate of the PDP against the AC twice. Agbaje was told to his face that he was an ‘Igbo hireling’ and not a true Yoruba son.

No attempt was made to examine the policies and programmes Agbaje had to offer. He was tarred with the ‘Igbo’ brush and this was enough to scupper his bid to become governor.

Bola Tinubu turned to the dangerous weapon of identity politics again when he ran for president last February. Northern Christians expected him to choose one of their own as his running mate as this would make for religious balancing, Tinubu being a Muslim himself. It is not only that northern Christians have long complained that they have been politically and economically marginalized in northern Nigeria for long, it is also the fact that their Muslim counterparts do not consider them as ‘real’ northerners when it comes to sharing out rewards in the polity. Bola Tinubu ignored these facts and chose a Muslim from the northeast political zone as his running mate.

This is identity politics at its lowest. Bola Tinubu’s calculation was simple. He was sure to garner the southwest vote. To make assurance double sure that he would also perform well vote-wise in the northwest and northeast, he would pair with a Muslim in the area, assuring its political heavyweights that he was not only one of them, he would have a Muslim vice president by his side to look after their interests in Aso Rock Villa. This gambit worked very well, at least going by the results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

However, the danger of identity politics is that it elbows out of the political arena such vital issues as policies and programmes. Even as the countdown to the May 29 handover date began following the declaration of the presidential election results by INEC on March 1, nobody knows precisely what Bola Tinubu promised to do for Nigerians in terms of policies and programmes. They however remember that up north a vast swathe of the population who identify as Christians feel shortchanged and marginalized and are not looking forward to a Bola Tinubu presidency in which they will play second fiddle.

Identity politics – the sort Bola Tinubu has been practicing since 2007 has a way of dividing the country into ethnic and religious silos, all at each other’s throat and ignoring the common ground. We have been there, once upon a time. The First Republic collapsed in January 1966 because politicians from the three major ethnic groups – the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba and the Igbo looked after the interest of their ethnic blocs and were willing to take the country to the brink and even beyond to achieve these ends. Politics is primarily about negotiation and consensus building. When ethnic and religious hegemons dig in and refuse to give way come what may, then chaos and bloodshed are the end result.

The beauty of democratic elections is that it enables voters to put out of office politicians who did not perform well. There is overwhelming consensus that Nigeria under President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC these past eight years is a study in disaster. Ordinarily therefore, Bola Tinubu and the APC should not have been returned to power. The powerful anti-APC current running through the length and breadth of the country presently is only a confirmation of the thesis that the results of the 2023 presidential election as announced by INEC runs against the grain of what ordinary Nigerian voters expected. What actually happened was that Bola Tinubu simply deployed the weapon of identity politics to worm his way into power when ordinarily the APC should have been shown the doorway.

Nigerians are sharply divided and the nation on a tinderbox presently. This is what Bola Tinubu’s brand of identity politics has done to the country. We can only pray that Nigerians will somehow find a way to overcome this latest danger.

Dr Okonta was until recently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Oxford. He now lives in Abuja.