The Limits of Identity Politics -By Chris Ngwodo

Our dominant intellectual and political paradigm views Nigeria’s social order through the prisms of ethnicity and religion. All realities and facts supposedly make sense only when interpreted in tribal and religious idioms. Complex socio-political and economic issues are reduced to their sectarian dimensions and transmitted to the centre of public discourse. This is even more so during an election cycle. But Nigeria will always confound those who subscribe to the bipolar reductionisms of north and south, majorities and minorities or Muslims and Christians. Our politics has rarely been that simple.

In his book, Witness to Justice, Matthew Hassan Kukah observes that many victims of state torture under the Abacha junta suffered at the hands of torturers who “shared their faith, their class, their region or religion.” Any presumed parochial fraternity disappeared in the confines of the torture chamber. The pain that Nigerians underwent at the hands of state-torturers was “all-encompassing and all-consuming”; it was a “phenomenon that did not respect class, religion, tribe or region.” Many victims felt betrayed by their tormentors because they imagined that ethnic or religious solidarity would mitigate their sufferings. It did not. The perpetrators were unmoved by appeals to tribal conscience and simply said they were carrying out orders from above.

The victims’ tribulations demonstrate the finite and ultimately illusory nature of tribal solidarity where power is concerned. Their sordid experiences dramatised in a small way the larger ordeals of Nigerians who have long been abused by a delinquent state. Power presents its own logic and imperatives, and dictates allegiances and affinities that trump allegedly omnipotent nativist sentiments. The calculus of self-interest, issues and class interest often prove thicker and weightier than blood. The insistence on sectarian frames of political analysis simply blinds us to this reality.

The 2015 presidential election which pits a Southern Christian incumbent president against a Northern Muslim challenger seems tailor-made for cliché-ridden analyses that invoke Nigeria’s fabled cleavages. On the face of it, this ought to be a straight forward fight between Nigeria’s north and south, or, her Christian and Muslim communities. In practice, Nigerian national elections have never followed this principle.

No northern candidate can win the presidency by simply winning all the 19 northern states and no northern candidate has ever won all 19 northern states. No southern candidate can win the presidency by simply winning all the 17 southern states and no southerner has ever won all the southern states. Contrary to ill-informed opinion, the north and south are not political monoliths but complex mosaics of ethnic and confessional identities. Since 1979, presidential victors, from Shehu Shagari and Moshood Abiola to Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, have won largely with votes from ethnic communities other than their own. Those candidates who got the most votes from their states and ethnic communities lost.

The architects of our presidential system rightly created a majoritarian presidency – an office that could only be claimed by winning at least 25 percent of the votes cast in two-thirds of the states of the federation. In other words, a president can only be elected by a broad and diverse national support base. In this regard, the Nigerian electoral system has worked as designed. No regional party strongly rooted in the identity of a particular ethnic group, region or religion can win a national victory.

This self-evident principle is as close as there is to an iron law of Nigerian politics and accounts for the failed bids of Obafemi Awolowo, Emeka Ojukwu and, in times past, Muhammadu Buhari. These men, while popular in their home regions, failed to win national leadership because their political platforms were regional or parochial at best. It is also why Jonathan’s campaign strategy which seems exclusively based on mobilising southern and Christian voters to the exclusion of Northerners and Muslims is genuinely mystifying. Never has a presidential campaign gone out of its way to brazenly alienate sections of the country. From the Vice President and the First Lady to campaign apparatchiks, Team Jonathan’s approach has consisted almost entirely of vulgar chauvinism, bigotry, hate speech, ethnic slurs and faith-baiting. It has been forgotten that a presidential mandate requires Southern and Northern, as well as, Christian and Muslim support.

Historically, Nigeria’s democratic politics has been dominated by parties like the Nigerian National Alliance, the National Party of Nigeria and the Peoples’ Democratic Party – behemoths with vast national networks. In contrast, regionally-based parties like the Action Group, the Alliance for Democracy, the All Progressive Grand Alliance and the Congress for Progressive Change, have often simply lacked the required reach to win national leadership.

In recent years, there has been a remarkable reversal of this dynamic. Under Jonathan, the PDP has shrunk to a provincial party with its base in the heartland of the South East and the Niger Delta, although it retains a tenuous presence in the Middle Belt. For the first time, owing as much to widespread frustration with Jonathan as to its own smarts, the opposition has sufficiently broad national networks to mount a viable challenge.

Buhari’s message of change is finding favour among Nigeria’s emergent demographic of independent young urbanites that simply want good governance and are tired of the ethno-religious dog-whistling that is the current administration’s default mode. Defined by a cosmopolitan broad-mindedness, this increasingly hyphenated, intermarrying, mobile and socio-culturally hybrid generation holds the keys to the future of Nigerian politics. Its emergence bodes well for the evolution of a more intelligent issues-oriented brand of politics at the expense of the primitive bigotry retailed by incompetent rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Of course, the revolution is still in its infancy but there have been some encouraging signs of progress in this election cycle.

An interrogation of the rhetoric emanating from both camps reveals an incumbent dangerously committed to promoting sectarian prejudice and an opposition challenger who has struck nationalist and welfarist notes. Jonathan may go down in history as the man who took a national party and reduced it to an ethno-regionalist personality cult.

One of the great ironies of the incumbent administration is that many of the tragically displaced legions from Nigeria’s terror-stricken North East actually voted for President Jonathan in 2011. They were part of an impressive electoral coalition that claimed votes from the Niger Delta, the Southeast, the South West and the Middle Belt and which carried both southern and northern minority communities. A lot of Northern minority voters identified with Jonathan variously as a fellow “Christian” or as a member of an “oppressed” and “marginalised” region and a welcome departure from the faces that had long dominated the political scene. Their subsequent abandonment by his administration in the face of a brutal terrorist onslaught must rank as a particularly pungent betrayal and an object lesson in why choosing leaders simply because of their creed or clan is a disastrous electoral choice.

Apart from smearing the opposition, Team Jonathan seems to have made appeals to ethno-religious solidarity the main basis of its campaign – a polarising and grossly limited strategy, for while identity does matter in Nigeria, its role is often overstated.

In his 1995 book, Igbos: Twenty-Five Years after Biafra, the political activist Joe Igbokwe advocated an electoral coalition comprising the south, southern and northern minority communities to wrest power from what he saw as the hegemony of the “core north” or the “Hausa-Fulani”. It was a different time and the concept of a nefarious “North” made for a fashionable pantomime villain. In 2011, Jonathan arguably built an electoral support base according to Igbokwe’s specifications but in the short space of four years, he has taken a wrecking ball to that coalition and to his own party. Twenty-years after he published his book, Igbokwe is now an APC operative and a staunch advocate of a Buhari presidency. There is a growing realisation that the plagues assailing Nigerians are indifferent to tribe, tongue and theology and that they will yield only to a post-sectarian politics of common purpose. As Bob Dylan once sang, “the times, they are a-changin.’”

Chris Ngwodo is a writer, consultant and political analyst.