Dem
51
GOP
49
Nigeria is, far and away, the most populous country in Africa (its 206,139,589 people is far more than the 114,963,588 in #2 Ethiopia). Between that, its central location on the African continent, and its vast oil reserves, Nigeria is very possibly the most geopolitically significant country in Africa. And now, it has a new president. The voting was actually this weekend, but it took a while for all the votes to be collected and counted. The winner is Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC). As the current president, Muhammadu Buhari, is also an APC member, it means that there will not be a partisan change at the top of the Nigerian government.
If you did not know what the main issues in the Nigerian election were, and you had to guess, there's a decent chance you would guess correctly. They were—wait for it—the economy and crime. It turns out that it's harder to make a living these days than it was, say, 5 years ago. And that has led to an increase in both violent and non-violent crime. Where have we heard this story before? Besides everywhere, that is.
It was also an exceedingly dirty campaign, with all sorts of mudslinging and personal attacks and nasty debates and misinformation. It was enough of a soap opera that if our focus was Nigerian politics, we would have needed to find 2-3 more contributors to keep up. To give an example, one with a U.S. politics connection, a picture was circulated of Tinubu in the Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden during the Nigerian campaign. This would be inappropriate, along the lines of a U.S. presidential candidate presuming to meet with, say, Russian officials. The photo was eventually debunked, and Tinubu claimed that it was the work of one of his rivals.
The second- and third-place finishers in the election, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, have both cried foul, and are insisting the vote was rigged and that Tinubu didn't really win, despite a plurality of close to two million votes (8,794,726 for Tinubu to 6,984,520 for Abubakar and 6,101,533 for Obi). Our American readers might not know this, but sometimes, in some countries, people lose presidential elections and then refuse to admit defeat. It really happens!
That said, it's at least plausible that Abubakar and Obi are on to something here. Nigeria has had less-than-honest elections in the past. And the President-elect has often been the subject of whispers about his personal wealth, where it came from, and where it's located right now. He's refused to reveal any details at all, which is not usually the profile of someone who is on the up-and-up. Also, there were two major polls of the race just before the election, from Premise Data/Bloomberg and Redfield and Wilton Strategies. The former had Obi outpacing Tinubu by 48 points and the latter had Obi up by 40. In the actual results, Obi lost by 12%, which means the two pollsters were off by 60 and 52 points, respectively. Either there really were shenanigans, or that was some really, really, really bad polling.
Still, possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say. And the APC currently controls the presidency and the Nigerian Electoral Commission. So, Tinubu's victory has already been affirmed, and he's on pace to be inaugurated on May 29. We'll see if he develops a good working relationship with Joe Biden, or stays away to avoid another photo scandal. (Z)