Saturday 25 February we vote to elect the new president and to renew the parliament of Nigeria, one of the most important countries in Africa and one of the most populous in the world, which has over 213 million inhabitants and dozens of different languages, religions and ethnic groups . The great diversity within the country is the basis of the so-called “zoning”, one of the cardinal principles, albeit informal, of Nigerian politics, which provides for the rotation of the main political offices between people of different religions and backgrounds. The principle also concerns the election of the president, but it is likely that this time it will be disregarded, which could cause considerable reactions.
Nigeria is a federal republic where the president is both the head of state and the government. Albeit with a certain margin of error, it is estimated that about half of its population is Muslim and the other half Christian: most of the former live in the north of the country, while the latter mainly in the south. The principle of zoning exists to ensure that neither the northern nor the southern part of the country feels excluded from power, and that no party can monopolize it.
Zoning was introduced after the end of the Biafran civil war in the early 1970s, when the Nigeria National Party (NPN) decided to use it to elect its own officials, with the aim of de-escalation of tensions between rival ethnic groups . With the annulment of the 1993 elections and the seizure of power by General Sanni Abacha, various political leaders proposed the rotation of the presidency among candidates from six geopolitical zones, which later became two, north and south, to simplify.
– Listen to Globe: Elections in Nigeria, with Giovanni Carbone
It has since become an unwritten custom, involving alternating presidents from the predominantly Muslim north and presidents from the predominantly Christian south, usually flanked by vice-presidential candidates of opposite origins.
Nigeria’s outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, comes from the north and is Muslim. According to the zoning principle, therefore, a Christian and southern president should be elected this year. In reality, however, both candidates of the main parties are Muslims: Bola Tinubu of the Congress of All Progressives (APC, Buhari’s party) comes from the south, but is Muslim, while Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is Muslim and is of the north, such as Buhari.
There is also a third candidate who stood out a lot during the electoral campaign: it is Peter Obi, who is expressed by the Labor Party, is Catholic and is originally from the state of Anambra, in the south-east of the country, of which he was governor between 2007 and 2014. According to some polls, Obi is ahead of both Tinubu and Abubakar by a few points. However, it is not certain that he will be able to be elected.
In Nigeria, winning first-round elections requires not only getting more votes than your challengers, but also having at least 25 percent of the votes in two-thirds of the country’s 36 states and in the Abuja capital territory. And Obi doesn’t seem to be very popular in a dozen northern states of the country that tend to vote for candidates who come from those same areas and are Muslims, such as Abubakar and Tinubu.
In short, a possible victory by Tinubu, and even more so by a success by Abubakar, would contrast sharply with the principle of zoning, risking provoking large protests such as those which followed the re-election of Goodluck Jonathan in 2011. Jonathan was a Christian, he came from southern Nigeria and had become president after the death of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, of whom he was deputy. Since Yar’Adua was a Muslim from the north of the country but his mandate was completed by Jonathan, a Christian from the south, the people of the north felt that he should not have run for compliance with the zoning principle. Jonathan, however, not only ran again, but won (with a deputy, Namadi Sambo, from the north and Muslim): his re-election provoked violent protests from the northern gangs who did not recognize his victory.
– Read also: In the elections in Nigeria, young people will decide
