Nigeria’s Gubernatorial Elections and the Northern Voter

This month, Alex Thurston provides his analysis on the voting patterns of northern Nigerians in the last elections.

Observers have rated Nigeria’s elections this year as a major improvement over the 2007 elections. But many analysts – myself included – are still puzzling over what the results mean. For me, the differences in the outcome of the presidential election (held April 16) and the gubernatorial elections (held April 25 and 27) were surprising, especially when it came to the largely Muslim North. This region, with its large population and strong cultural unity, produced most of Nigeria’s heads of state from independence in 1960 until the democratic transition of 1999, but since then it has only briefly controlled the presidency. This year, watching Northerners vote largely along regional lines – and against the ruling party – in the presidential elections, and then vote for the ruling party in most state elections, has led me to revisit some of my assumptions about how voters in Northern Nigeria think.

Making predictions is a fool’s game, but with Nigeria’s elections I got the big calls right. When Goodluck Jonathan (a Southern Christian) became president, I predicted that he would run for re-election, that he would win, and that many Northern Nigerian voters would be angered by his victory, which would disrupt the informal regional power-sharing agreement that has obtained since 1999. All that came to pass. But as far as crystal ball gazing went, that was the easy part.

At the state level, my predictions were wrong. If Northern Nigerians voted massively for General Muhammadu Buhari in the presidential race, I reasoned in mid-April, surely they would send candidates from Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) to the governor’s mansions in several states. At the very least, given the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s losses in the legislative elections in early April, I figured Northerners would vote against the PDP, and would do so in large enough numbers to take several governors’ seats away from the PDP column.

Gubernatorial election results

Instead, the PDP basically held its ground in the North, losing two of the gubernatorial elections but winning the opposition stronghold of Kano. The All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP), a major Northern party, held its position in the North East but suffered a blow with the loss of Kano. The CPC scored just one governor’s seat (in Nasarawa State in Nigeria’s Middle Belt). The state elections in the North, far from rolling back PDP dominance, seemed to confirm it.

How did the North, which was gripped by devastating riots in the days after Jonathan’s re-election, just a short time later return numerous PDP governors to office? How did Rabiu Kwankwaso, Kano’s PDP governor from 1999 to 2003 who was driven from his post by an ANPP populist, win his old seat back under the banner of a party that seemed to receive little welcome in Kano?

If we look at politics in terms of the overall political landscape in the North, we can try to explain the difference between the presidential results and the gubernatorial results as a function of various factors, including the CPC’s lack of institutional history and the fragmentation of the opposition in some areas. For example, opposition divisions contributed to the PDP victory in Kano, where the combined votes of the ANPP and the CPC could have defeated – although just barely – the PDP.

But these sorts of explanations don’t necessarily help me understand how voters make decisions, and what those decisions mean to them. That became clearer to me when I asked a Nigerian friend why he thought some voters had cast ballots for Buhari on April 16 but then cast votes for the PDP less than ten days later. My friend replied that while regional loyalties – perhaps combined with personal respect for Buhari – had motivated much of Northerners’ voting in the presidential election, other concerns came into play at the state level. For one thing, he said, voters suspect that PDP governors stand to receive more help from a PDP-dominated federal government than opposition governors do. For another thing, loyalties to Buhari do not necessarily transfer to his upstart CPC, and resentment toward a Southern president does not necessitate wholesale rejection of the PDP. This suggests that young supporters of Buhari rioted the week of April 18 because they were angry at what they saw as an illegitimate Southern victory, and not because they were expressing support for the CPC as an institution.

Voters, in other words, are more strategic, and less wedded to individual parties, than I had realized. That helps explain why the maps of the presidential and gubernatorial elections look so different. It also helps explain why 1.6 million residents of Kano voted CPC in the presidential election, but less than 200,000 voted CPC in the gubernatorial race. Or why over 900,000 voters in Borno State backed Buhari for president, but only around 51,000 chose CPC in the state elections. Or why turnout was lower in the gubernatorial elections than in the presidential vote. Or, finally, why there were few riots following the gubernatorial elections.

If “all politics is local,” then the challenge for outsiders analyzing local politics is to understand the different frames of reference that people shift between, and to consider the different priorities people try to balance. The Nigerian elections, which featured national- and state-level contests in quick succession, make a good case study for examining this process. The outcome of the state elections has reminded me that Northern Nigerians make different calculations regarding their interests at the national level than they do at the state and local levels. Fight as they may to end perceived Southern dominance at the federal level, many of Buhari’s Northern supporters have little reason to develop strong party loyalties and apply them at every level of government. The challenge for someone like me, then, is to recognize that each political decision has its own context, and that in Nigeria different contexts can come to the fore at different moments, sometimes making for big differences in national and state politics.

Alex Thurston blogs at Sahel Blog. Follow him on Twitter.