By Justus Nwakanma

THE victory of President Muhammadu Buhari at the 2019 presidential election is a story already written in bold and capital letters.

Make no mistake about it: Only a miracle will stop Buhari in 2019.

It is not the miracle of the inconceivable travesty dotting the ecclesiastical altars where miracle-seeking actors fall at the whimpering whizz of General Overseers or their mystical fingers.

It is the retelling of that story in small, self-mangled letters; that Buhari should heed his inner prodding and decline the entrapments and accoutrements of a second term.

If he presents himself for re-election, he would win convincingly.

Buhari would win, not because he has delivered on his campaign promises or has surpassed the achievements of Goodluck Jonathan. No!

Buhari would win because the forces that brought him to power are now more emboldened and more empowered. He would win, given Nigerian’s predilection for doltishness and our vulnerability to deceit and lies.

The signs of his victory are crowing like the cock. Nobody is taking them as a wake-up call; nobody is willing yet to challenge the infractions and illegitimacies that are already playing out and threatening to dress our electoral culture in borrowed plumes.

Did you remember that the common denominator in the 2015 was to see the sack of Jonathan and return power to the north? Even a goat would have been declared a saint better than Jonathan.  What did the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) do to actualize this? Just before the elections it introduced additional 30,000 polling units and this gave the North 21,615 units against the South’s 8,412 units. The Northwest 7,906 units, a thousand less than the entire south.

The South-South was allocated 3,087 units, with Federal Capital Territory getting 1,200 units more than the 1,167 units allocated to South East.

The implication was that the votes of the Northwest and the FCT conveniently cancelled that of the South East and South South.

INEC under Attahiru Jega also implemented a loyalty-integrated backward policy that saw INEC State Commissioners restricted to their states of origin. This permitted unhindered inflation of votes in the northern states, including the use of underage and immigrant voters from neighbouring countries.

All of that now is history. The recent scenario is even more frightening. The latest statistics by INEC show the number of registered voters as at January 2018 as 74 million. Almost 70 per cent of this number is from the north. The North-West alone has the highest number of registered voters with 18 million voters.

In the coming elections, this number will easily cancel out that of the South-West assuming no voter votes from this zone for a northern candidate. With a little help from the North Central, the votes from the South East and South South would become insignificant.

Added to this is the issue of under-aged voters as recently recorded in the Kano State local government elections. Sule Lamido once boasted that those under-aged voters, the Almajiris, were the weapons of warfare the north used against Jonathan. They are still potent and active.

Southern voters are too docile, too disunited, too easily compromised to rattle Buhari. If decides to run in 2019, these factors would work in his favour.

May be an Atiku may change the equation. Maybe.

– Mar. 2, 2018 @ 18:10 GMT |