More than meets the eye
The personal archives of Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, a Nigerian pro-democracy activist, suggests that same-faith presidential tickets are not necessarily about religious domination.
A computer generated image of a young Hausa man exploring archival records. Generated by Artificial Intelligence via Midjourney.
Can there be a label more reviled in Nigeria today than “Muslim-Muslim ticket?” This refers to when both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of a political party are followers of the religion of Islam.
“Zoning,” by contrast, is when a party agrees on balancing slots for the contest of top posts between members of different ethno-religious groups in the country. Most Nigerian voters support a political party based on their ethnic and religious identities; hence the parties’ likelihood to share presidential and vice presidential slots along the dominant Muslim/Christian, Northern/Southern divisions.
First introduced by the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in 1977 as a strategy to win the 1979 general elections, the logic of zoning birthed NPN’s Muslim-Christian ticket, which beat the all-Christian ticket of the leading opposition party, the United Party of Nigeria (UNP). Since then, zoning has become a ritual in Nigerian politics.This explains why in the run-up to the recently concluded 2023 presidential election, the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) was not only condemned by Christian citizens, but also blamed for the potential fracturing of the country along religious lines.
The massive support among young people garnered by Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) was as much a protest against the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the APC as it was a longing for diversity. The APC opted for a Muslim-Muslim ticket only after the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the second of Nigeria’s two largest political parties since the return of democracy in 1999, chose a Muslim candidate. This propelled many Christian voters to line up behind Obi, who is a Christian.
The 2023 Muslim-Muslim ticket win for the ruling party, harkened back to the 1993 presidential election for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), whose members were mostly opponents of the then Federal Military Government (FMG) under General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (also known as IBB). TheSDP’s all-Muslim ticket of 1993 was, however, arrived at after myriad political realignments in which many Nigerian leftists transitioned from radical and pro-democracy activism to strategizing wins for bourgeois parties.
