Nigeria's Marmite President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is by no means a religious fundamentalist. He is a moderate, even moderate Muslim, surrounded by Christians, including his family. However, for selfish political calculations, Tinubu played the religious card by choosing Kashim Shettima, a fellow Muslim, as his running mate to become president in 2023. Perhaps more than any other columnist in Nigeria, I wrote differently on this issue. I found it to be a deep mismanagement of Nigeria's diversity and a gross betrayal of the national interest to prioritize personal political gain before religious balance and harmony in Nigeria. Sadly, with an equal-confidence ticket, Tinubu put naked self-interest above national interest.
What is more, Tinubu's explanations for choosing a fellow Muslim as his running mate were lame, disingenuous and provocative. He said he chose Shettima not because of religion but because “he is an exceptionally talented human being with excellent intellectual ability”. Yet, in office Shettima is a mediocre and weak Vice President, reduced to attending meaningless international meetings. Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, Shettima said that, after coming to power, Tinubu would look after the economy, while he (Shettima) would be “in charge” of national security. But according to the National Bureau of Statistics, within a year of Tinubu-Shettima becoming president, 614,937 Nigerians were killed and 2.2 million abducted, and hundreds of thousands more have been killed and several million abducted since then. So again, so much for Shettima being “extraordinarily talented”!
Of course, Tinubu opted for a Muslim-Muslim ticket because only by pushing the issue of religion could he secure the Muslim votes he felt he needed to become President. In fact, leaders of Tinubu's party APC were candid on the decision. The then National Chairman of the APC, Abdullahi Adamu, said: “In our understanding of politics in Nigeria at this time, the Muslim-Muslim ticket is the best decision for us because we want to win the elections.” Soon after Tinubu secured the presidential ticket for his party, Abdullahi Ganduje, then governor of Kano State, later national chairman of the APC, told Muslim clerics, “We have advised him (Tinubu) to choose a Muslim deputy and he has agreed.” And in a viral video after the election, Nasir el-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State and Tinubu's campaign chief, said religion was used to get him “victory”. El-Rufai said Tinubu knew he had “no choice” but to choose a Muslim running mate, “otherwise, he would lose the election”.
So, undoubtedly, Tinubu openly played the religious card and used a Muslim-Muslim ticket to win the presidency. But if the 2023 presidential election was a referendum on a Muslim-Muslim ticket, Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected it. Only 8.79 million or 36.6 percent of the 24 million voters voted for Tinubu in that election. In other words, 14.6 million or 63.39 percent people rejected his anti-Muslim ticket. This matters because a Muslim-Muslim presidency in a country with a roughly 50-50 split between Muslims and Christians requires massive electoral support to legitimize such a fundamental shift. Of course, based on only 36.6 percent of the vote, some will hide behind constitutional technicalities or Nigeria's plurality voting system to claim legitimacy. But in the so-called one-person, one-vote democracy, you cannot reject the 63.39 per cent of voters, an absolute majority, who rejected the anti-Muslim ticket.
“Truth be told, Tinubu cannot ignore the Trump factor in 2027: He needs President Trump to, at the very least, be neutral in the election. But Trump will not be neutral if he believes Christian genocide or persecution remains an issue in Nigeria.”
To be fair, once in power, Tinubu tried to move towards some semblance of religious balance by appointing Christians to key offices of the state. This made Muslim-North feel cheated to some extent. Recently, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a head of the Northern Elders Forum, said on Channels TV: “I left Tinubu’s government when I realized that he turned against Shettima and the North after he cheated with the Muslim-Muslim ticket to get elected.” This sense of betrayal has been heightened by speculation that Tinubu may drop Shettima as his running mate and replace him with a Northern Christian ahead of the 2027 re-election bid. Those speculations inevitably raise two questions: Does Tinubu have buyer's remorse and if so, why?
Buyer's remorse means experiencing a feeling of remorse after making a choice or decision. Well, it is beyond comprehension that Tinubu has even the slightest regret for choosing the Muslim-Muslim ticket, without which he would not have become President. So, why might he be considering a northern-Christian candidate for his second term? Well, there are three possible explanations.
First, Tinubu may indeed be concerned about the religious tension created by the Muslim-Muslim ticket and may try to reverse the situation in his projected second term, leaving a legacy of religious balance. Second, after using the anti-Muslim ticket to get elected in 2023, he may find that he has another path to re-election, such as playing the southern card. Assuming that Tinubu does not face any serious southern rival and can garner the southern solidarity vote, he can win with a northern-Christian ally by garnering the northern-Christian vote and some votes from the Muslim-North, in addition to an overwhelming southern vote. The third explanation has an international dimension: the prospects for a pro-Muslim presidency are poor when the world believes that Christian genocide took place in Nigeria. Thus, strategically, Tinubu may be leaning towards a fellow Christian to appease President Donald Trump and blunt his narrative about Christian genocide.
Truth be told, Tinubu cannot ignore the Trump factor in 2027: he needs President Trump to at least remain neutral in the election. But Trump would not be neutral if he believed Christian genocide or persecution was an issue in Nigeria. That is why recently when President Trump praised Tinubu’s wife, Oluremi, as “a very respectable woman”, the President and the APC were overjoyed. But a day after Trump made the comments at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, he sparked global outrage by tweeting a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes and refused to apologize. Yet some people in Nigeria chose to trust President Trump's judgment, considering his fabricated comments on Mrs. Tinubu as genuine, credible support of her.
But others are not so confused. President Trump is a transactional leader who will not do or say anything unless it benefits him or America. Since the US now has a strong military base in Nigeria, which is also purchasing American weapons, Trump is more relaxed about the country's leaders. Additionally, the Nigerian government is paying an American lobbying firm $9 million, or $750,000 monthly, to lobby the US government on the Christian genocide narrative. Trump likes that too; He is thrilled when American companies win foreign contracts. And the American lobbying firm did a great job: attending Mrs. Tinubu's national prayer breakfast and recognizing her in a written remark to President Trump, who noted her role as “a Christian pastor in Nigeria's largest church.”
However, American evangelicals and lawmakers are not impressed by President Tinubu's “my wife is a Christian” mantra. Furthermore, they are disgusted by their government's use of American lobbyists to change the narrative of Christian persecution, while structurally little has changed regarding the plight of Christians in Nigeria, especially Northern Christians. They are right: Northern Christians face deep injustice.
Recently, Faruq Aliyu, an APC chieftain, was asked on Arise TV whether the North would accept a Christian-Christian ticket, he replied: “Based on the answers I know, the North will not be comfortable with a Christian-Christian ticket.” Thus, by implication, a Northern Christian will never be Vice President in Nigeria, leave alone President. This is the distortion that Tinubu imposed as a Muslim-Muslim ticket in Nigeria in 2023. Of course, he won't regret that selfish choice as a buyer, but will he repeat it in 2027 or will he abandon the trend? National interest demands the latter!
