n this report, LEKE BAIYEWU X-rays the factors that will determine the victory or loss of the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, President Goodluck Jonathan, and the All Progressives Congress’ flag bearer, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), in the 2015 election

It has become clear that the battle for the office of the President of the Federal Republic is between the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and a former Head of State, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.). Jonathan is the candidate of the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party; Buhari is the flag bearer of the country’s biggest opposition party, the All Progressives Congress.

Fielding the most suitable and eligible candidate by any political party in any election is critical. The challenge before the parties was how to pick the most sellable candidate among their aspirants.

For Jonathan, he had so far enjoyed a smooth ride to the 2015 presidential poll, as he emerged as the consensus candidate of the ruling party. For Buhari, clinching the APC ticket was described by observers as a war.

The retired General had to contest against other strong contenders to win the ticket. They included a former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who was regarded as his biggest threat; the Governor of Kano State Governor, Rabi’u Kwankwaso; the Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha; and the Publisher of Leadership Newspaper, Sam Nda-Isaiah, at the primary.

Jonathan and Buhari have little or nothing in common politically, other than the fact that they represent the two biggest political parties in the country.

While Jonathan is going to the polls for the second time, Buhari is going for a record four times for the presidency alone. It will be the second time the duo will contest against each other.

The total number of votes won by Buhari in 2011 was 12,214,853, while Jonathan got 22,495,187 votes. Buhari also got the required 25 per cent votes from 16 states, while Jonathan met same target in 31 states. Both the total votes garnered and number of states won were more than half of Jonathan’s.

In the 2011 election, Buhari massively won the northern part of the country, while Jonathan won the southern part in a landslide.

Buhari, 72, is a Fulani-Muslim from Katsina State. He became Nigeria’s military Head of State on December 31, 1983 after a coup d’etat that unseated the civilian President, Shehu Shagari, on December 31, 1983. He was forced out of the position on August 27, 1985 by another coup. He has been active in politics since democracy returned in 1999.

Observers of his political career have described him as a ‘veteran presidential contestant’ for he had contested in the 2003, 2007 and 2011 presidential elections. He is set for his fourth attempt at the presidency.

In 2003, he ran on the platform of the defunct All Nigeria People’s Party against Olusegun Obasanjo and lost to the PDP candidate. He ran again on the platform of the ANPP, with Umaru Yar’Adua of the PDP as his biggest challenger. He lost to him. He left the ANPP in 2010 for the Congress for Progressive Change, where he contested against President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 and lost.

Jonathan, 57, an Ijaw from Bayelsa State, hold a PhD in Zoology. He became the Deputy Governor of Bayelsa on May 29 1999, until December 2005 when Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was sacked by the state House of Assembly after being charged with money laundering in the United Kingdom. He was the Acting Governor between December 9, 2005 and May 29, 2007. He was Umaru Yar’Adua’s running mate in the 2007 presidential election and was sworn in as Vice President on May 29 of that year.

Jonathan became the acting President on February 10, 2010 after Yar’Adua was flown to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment in November 2009. Following Yar’Adua’s death on May 5, 2010, Jonathan was sworn in as President on May 6, 2010. His first election contest was when he ran for the presidency in 2011, which he won. The 2015 election will be his second time.

All the APC looks forward to in 2015 is to sack Jonathan from office and end PDP’s 16-year-rule of the country. The ruling party has been in power since this Fourth Republic began in 1999, leaving the opposition parties with the control of few states. The National Assembly – both the Senate and the House of Representatives – had also been dominated by the PDP ever since.

Political pundits have hinted that the 2015 presidential election will be a different ball game for the PDP. They hinged this on the fact that the opposition was ‘scattered’ in the previous elections. The PDP, they said, was able to record a landslide victory in the 2011 poll over smaller opposition parties like the Action Congress of Nigeria, the Congress for Progressive Change and the All Nigeria Peoples Party, among others.

Apparently in a bid to unseat the PDP, the ANPP, ACN, CPC and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance merged to form the APC in 2013, on which platform Buhari is now contesting. This development, analysts say, is a bigger threat to the ruling party, unlike what obtained in 2011.

In 2011, Jonathan had contested against Buhari of the CPC, Nuhu Ribadu of the ACN and Ibrahim Shekarau of the ANPP. In 2015, a combination of these parties – now APC – will be behind a candidate – Buhari.

Today, the PDP governs 21 states, while the APC controls 14 states i.e. PDP has 60 per cent, while APC has 40 per cent of the states.

The ruling party has governors in Delta, Niger, Benue, Abia, Kebbi, Cross River, Bayelsa, Jigawa, Plateau, Ondo, Gombe, Adamawa, Kogi, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Enugu, Kaduna, Katsina and Taraba.

The opposition party governs Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Edo, Kwara, Nasarawa, Borno, Yobe, Imo, Sokoto, Rivers, Kano and Zamfara. The All Progressives Grand Alliance is left with Anambra State.

However, political analysts have pointed out that whichever political party governs a state may not determine which party the electorate would vote for, especially at the poll. They argue that even though the governor of a state belongs to a party, the electorate in the state may vote for the other party.

One of them is Prof. Emmanuel Onyebuchi of the Department of Political Science, University of Nigeria Nsukka, who said no political party or candidate could presume the voting pattern of specific states in the elections, especially presidential.

He told SUNDAY PUNCH that one could never predict which states would be won or lost, describing secret ballot system of voting as dicey.

“I know that Buhari will perform very well in the core North; I cannot predict how well he is going to do in the South-West. The South-South and the South-East will definitely go to Jonathan. The two zones are PDP areas. Despite what we have in Imo State (where Governor Rochas Okorocha defected from the PDP to the APC), all the South-East states are PDP states, same for the South-South.

“What is now left for contest is the North. The region is no more homogenous as it used to be because of the ethno-religious crises and several other factors. The Middle Belt may not actually be a fertile ground for Buhari. The South-West too is dicey, even though it is predominantly APC, especially for the presidential election,” the political scientist added.

In 2011, for instance, Buhari of the CPC massively won in Sokoto, Kebbi, Borno, Zamfara, Katsina, Kano, Bauchi, Kaduna, Niger and Jigawa, regardless of whether it was a PDP state or not. On the other hand, Jonathan had won in all the ACN states – Lagos, Ogun, Oyo and Ekiti – except in Osun, where Ribadu of the ACN won. Jonathan also won Ondo, then under control of the Labour Party.

Beyond the claim of which presidential candidate is popular in which state, political analysts have called attention to the silent majority of the electorate, who did not vote in 2011 but might decide to exercise their franchise in 2015. The interest of this category of people, analysts have said, is a game changer.

Another argument raised by analysts is that where the presidential election holds before the governorship – like it had been planned for the forthcoming general elections – it may have a “bandwagon effect” on the states.

Observers of the development in the north-eastern states mostly affected by Boko Haram insurgency have expressed their pessimism about recording free and fair elections in the region. It also remains uncertain which party will have a significant majority in the troubled zone. One, tens of thousands of the electorate in the region had been killed or while hundreds of thousands had been displaced. These states include Adamawa, Borno and Yobe.

In 2011, before the insurgency became intensified, Buhari scored 37.96 per cent votes in Adamawa, while Jonathan had 56 per cent in the last presidential election. However, while the state had 1,816,094 registered voters, only 49.98 per cent – less than half of them – cast their votes. Both candidates will compete to get the majority of the over one million indifferent electorate of 2011 in 2015. However, it remains uncertain how many of them will be available for the exercise.

It is a similar case in Borno State. Buhari got 909,763 votes against Jonathan’s 207,075 votes, and a combination of the votes was less than half of 2,380,957 expected to participate in the exercise. Today, more of the electorate in the state have become refugees in different relief camps.

Again, analysts have cited the example of massive voter apathy, as recorded in the 2011 presidential election.

They have identified Lagos and Kano states as swing states in the 2015 election. These are the most populous states in the country. In August, the Independent National Electoral Commission put the voting strength of Lagos and Kano at 5,426,391 and 4,751,818, respectively. Both states now have 10, 178, 209 registered voters. In the 2011 election in Kano, Buhari got 1,624,543 votes against Jonathan’s 440,666. Down south, Jonathan had 1,281,688 votes in Lagos, against Buhari’s 189,983 votes.

The total vote cast in the 2011 presidential election was put at 38,199,219, out of the 73,528,040 expected from registered voters nationwide. The ‘missing’ voters totalled 35,328,821. In the updated register, INEC puts the national voter population at 70,383,427.

Another example is Bauchi which had 2, 523, 614 registered electorate in 2011 but only 1,610,094 voted. Almost one million of them remained silent. Out of these, Buhari got 1,315,209, while Jonathan got 258,404. Should the silent electorate speak with their ballots in 2015, they may change the tide.

Even in Ogun State in the South-West, only 543,715 voted out of the 1,941,170 registered voters. The ruling PDP had lost the state to the opposition APC. The over one million voters are available for any of the parties in 2015.

In the neighbouring Oyo State, of the 2,572,140 registered voters, only 863,544 voted in the exercise. Over 1,708,000 of them did not participate.

In Gombe, for instance, 459,898 voted for Buhari, while 290,347 voted for Jonathan, out of the available 1,318,377.

Political pundits have hinted that an upsurge in the number of electorate in the least expected parts of the country might be recorded in the forthcoming elections. This, according to them, will be in favour of any party that had not left any of the states for granted.

Onyebuchi, however, advised the electorate to loom at the profiles of the two candidates in terms of who they think would better address the numerous problems facing the country. He noted that both Jonathan and Buhari were credible candidates.

“Buhari has been associated with anti-corruption crusade over the years. For Jonathan, being in charge of the affairs of this country is not an easy task. You can only know how good a person is after he takes over the mantle of leadership. Buhari has not been tested under a democratic dispensation. He is only being judge by his antecedent and posture as an anti-corruption crusader; nobody knows how he is going to perform under a democratic dispensation,” he added.

In his view, the Head, Department of Political Science of the University of Lagos, Prof. Solomon Akinboye, told SUNDAY PUNCH that Nigerians should brace up for the unexpected in the 2015 polls. He said it had become near impossible to predict the voting pattern of the electorate, except in the home-states of the candidates. He added that the 2011 elections results could not be compared with that would be the outcome of the next general elections.

He said, “I don’t see, for instance, how Buhari will not win in Adamawa State and his home-state, Kaduna. I also don’t see how it is possible for Jonathan not to win in Bayelsa. Again, it depends on the way they carry out their campaigns, the intensification of their campaigns and, of course, antecedence of the two candidates.

“You cannot really compare what happened in the last election with what is going to happen now because the situations are different. The kind of situation that they have is a major determinant of what is going to happen. In the last election, the issue of security was not on the front burner, now it is a major factor that will determine what is going to happen in 2015, especially in the most affected states.”

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with this analysis APC has uper hand.in 2015

team GMB