2023 Polls and the Differentiation Game

Postscript by Waziri Adio

It is a game as old as electoral politics. All over the world, politicians strive to enhance their chances at the polls by playing a game of contrast: presenting their opponents as the undesirable other and framing themselves as the perfect fit for the contested positions. It is the differentiation game. This game acquires extra salience in electoral contests that are seen as open. We are going to see spirited attempts at differentiation in the 2023 presidential poll.

In fact, we are seeing this already, and at multiple levels. The reason for the heightened appeal of differentiation is simple: Beyond being seen as open, the 2023 presidential election has been dialectically constructed as a contest between the good and the bad. This distinction is not as neat as those who deploy it make things look. But you can’t blame or stop politicians and their supporters from painting their camps as white and the others as black. It goes with the terrain and the season, especially when the competition is keen.

This is one of the poignant points that stood out for me at the Presidential Townhall Series which was hosted last Sunday by Arise News in conjunction with the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), and which continues today. The candidates of the four parties on the stage last Sunday collectively piled into, and tried to differentiate themselves from, the ruling party, whose candidate avoided the event. But they also laboured to differentiate themselves from one another. It was differentiation galore.  

As mentioned in another piece on this page, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the leading opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have been successfully narrativized as not just the old order but also as more or less the same: two rotten peas in the same pod. The two parties reject this label, and labour to show how different they are from each other. As part of differentiation within the ‘old order’, we are going to hear a lot about ‘the 16 years of PDP’ and ‘the eight years of APC’ in this election cycle. These phrases will be thrown around in accusatory and defensive forms by those who, rightly or wrongly, believe the 2023 race is still between the two parties that have been in power at the centre since 1999.

There are those who believe that the old guard has grossly underperformed and should be upstaged. Those in this group are not persuaded by what they see as the six-and-half-a-dozen distinction between APC and PDP and brim with anger against the current political establishment. Since APC was not represented at the event of last Sunday, the full brunt of the negative othering fell on the PDP. But Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta State governor and running-mate to the PDP candidate, had a brilliant riposte: the two candidates on the stage who join in tarring the PDP were, until very recently, members and beneficiaries of the same party.

Indeed, the only candidate at the event who could truthfully claim to be truly different and new is Mr. Kola Abiola, the candidate of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). And he repeatedly reminded his fellow discussants and the rest of us of these: he had never held any elected or appointive position and the last time his party ruled at any level was in the Second Republic when PRP won the governorship elections in old Kano and Kaduna states. Of course, Mr. Abiola in his opening remarks said he was a Nigerian of humble background, another attempt at differentiation but a bogus claim for the first son of Basorun M.K.O. Abiola to make.

But substantially, both Dr. Okowa and Mr. Abiola were right. If there is indeed a terrible old order that needs to be overthrown, none of the candidates of the four leading parties can fully deny a relationship with it or claim to be completely new. The best they can do is to try to differentiate themselves in comparative, and not absolute, terms.

Clearly, both Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of APC and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of PDP cannot distance themselves from the demonised old order. Tinubu has been in politics since the early 1990s, has been in leadership roles in three political parties since 1999, and is now flying the flag of APC, the party which has been in power since 2015 and whose stewardship will be under interrogation in 2023. On his part, Atiku has been a presidential aspirant since the early 1990s, was vice president for eight years, and has made a round a few parties, including APC and PDP, and he is flying the presidential flag of the latter for the second time. Both Tinubu and Atiku are in their seventies and are both masters of patronage-oiled machine politics that is sometimes implicated as a major driver of political and economic underdevelopment in the country.

Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) has also been around. He was deputy speaker of the House of Representatives in 1992 and later served as governor, minister and senator in the current republic. He was a presidential aspirant in APC in 2014/2015 and in PDP in 2019. Of the four, Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) is the youngest and the one with least political baggage. But he has also been around, and has equally hopped around parties. He was elected governor of Anambra State twice on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) but he was also the South East coordinator of the PDP presidential campaign in 2015, Atiku’s running mate in PDP in 2019 and a presidential aspirant under PDP until May this year.

Obi is still the best positioned of the four to play the differentiation game, and it is not surprising that he is enjoying some bounce. His source of wealth is not in contention. His simplicity as a person and his frugality as a manager of public resources are a rebuke of the grandiosity and profligacy of the political establishment. Also, he is just 62, which is not exactly like mid 40s or early 50s but is a young age relative to the other leading contestants. But he cannot distance himself from the PDP, a party on whose platform he aspired to be president just six months ago, and a party that most of his supporters and others now like to demonise. Many of his supporters who are now screaming death to PDP voted for the party in the past, including most recently in 2019.  

What is thus available to even Obi is personal, not party, differentiation. To be sure, LP has never been in power; the same as Kwankwaso’s NNPP. But that also means the parties have not been tested. Along with the possibility that they are unlikely to secure needed parliamentary majority even if their presidential candidates win, the newness that these parties offer cannot be touted as political virtue.

The appeal of differentiation in this election cycle is enhanced by a few reasons. One is that Nigerians have, over the time, grown distrustful of politicians. They see all members of the political class as self-serving. They want a different breed, one that will privilege the needs of the collective over the entitlements of the politicians and those proximate to them. The second is that successive administrations have not significantly improved the material condition of the majority of the people. Poverty, unemployment, costs of goods and services, insecurity etc., are on the rise. Nigerians want competent administrators who can improve their lots in life across different social economic statuses. The third is that there is a growing desire, especially among the youths, to leverage their number and reach to shape electoral outcome. Not all factors are available to all the leading candidates, but they will all try to position themselves as new and different.

Ordinarily, the presidential candidates of some of the 14 other parties should be the beneficiaries of the desire for a new political order. Some of them are young, have also paid their dues in other important areas of national life and have not been tainted by association with the derided political establishment. But they do not seem to be gaining traction because it seems most of Nigerian voters, including the new ones, are still risk-averse. The voters want to pitch their tents with only those they think stand a chance.  

It is important to underline the fact that the appeal of differentiation to politicians and their supporters is not as new as it now appears. In the 2011 presidential election, President Goodluck Jonathan was projected as ‘a breath of fresh air’ and as someone who had no shoes while growing up. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people say that they were voting for Jonathan and not PDP. In 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari was sold as the ascetic former head of state and a military commander who once gave the insurgent Maitatsine sect a good chase across international border lines.

As many commentators have rightly observed, Nigeria is a society in constant search of messiahs. And in pursuit of this constant search, most Nigerians buy the simple binaries constructed by the politicians, the masters of differentiation: old versus new; corrupt versus clean; competent versus incompetent etc. Sometimes, these differentiations work magic, as in 2011 and 2015 when they contributed to what made the difference for Jonathan and Buhari respectively. But sometimes they don’t move the needle because all the elements are yet to align. The breath-of-fresh-air differentiation had become stale for Jonathan in 2015. The ascetic-former-head-of-state image didn’t serve Buhari in three election cycles until 2015. Will the differentiation game work in 2023 and if so which of the framings will make the difference? We won’t know until the votes are cast and counted.

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