The recent election in Nigeria was supposed to be about change. For months, millions of youth who had long been apathetic to politics enthusiastically flocked, both in social media and in person, to the banner of third-party candidate Peter Obi, who also garnered wide and positive coverage from international media outlets. After more than a decade of careening from one crisis to another under incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari and his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan, the conventional wisdom was that the most populous country and largest economy in Africa was ready to put its economic malaise and chronic insecurity behind it.

Then, after some foreseeable delays and even more embarrassing snafus with its information technology systems, the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) delivered the results: the seventy-year-old former governor of Lagos, Bola Tinubu—the longtime kingmaker of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) who actually campaigned with the Yoruba-language slogan Emi l’okan (“It’s my turn”)—won the presidency with approximately 37 percent of the vote, beating both Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who received 29 percent of the vote, and Obi of the Labour Party (LP), who got 25 percent.

And yet, a closer examination of what transpired shows that, despite the dejection—to say nothing of anger—on the part of many of those wishing for more immediate change, a shift is indeed underway in Nigeria, one that its neighbors on the African continent, as well as its global partners, would do well to be attentive to.

What Happened?

Quite simply, as Phillip van Niekerk noted in one of the most cogent analyses to appear immediately after the results were announced, “the opposition parties committed a strategic blunder by splitting their forces.” A former vice president, the seventy-six-year-old Abubakar is a perennial aspirant for Nigeria’s top job; this was his sixth presidential campaign. In the previous race in 2019, Abubakar, with Obi as his vice-presidential running mate, won seventeen of the country’s thirty-five states plus the Federal Capital Territory. Had the duo not broken up, it is very likely they might have won this year’s contest in a landslide.

Despite the social media-fueled devotion of his youthful following—self-styled “Obidients”—the sixty-one-year-old Obi was handicapped by the limits of the vehicle he adopted for his presidential ambitions: the practically irrelevant LP which, in the current National Assembly, has just one member in the 109-seat Senate and eight in the 360-seat House of Representatives. Had Obi, by some extraordinary feat, managed to win the presidency, he would have struggled mightily to get anything through a legislature dominated by the APC-PDP duopoly since, while the party did better (winning six Senate seats and thirty-six House seats at the time of writing), it still is far from being a major legislative force. However, that scenario was never likely given the mundane realities of political dynamics in the Nigerian federal system: effective national campaigns are built upon having organization (and candidates) at the level of the states and the country’s 774 local government areas (governors in twenty-eight states and state legislators in all thirty-six states and the federal district were to have been chosen in a March 11 vote—now postponed until March 18—that has received very little outside attention; another three states hold gubernatorial votes later this year). The LP did not even field candidates in all the down-ballot races across the country. The hitherto marginal party’s organizational woes were compounded by a money-laundering conviction by a federal high court and the subsequent resignation of the head of its presidential campaign committee, Doyin Okupe, just two months before the vote. This was followed by a subsequent defection of other influential members of the committee, especially a bloc from northeastern states who feuded with Obi’s inner circle.

While there is not denying the energy that the Obidients injected into the campaign, this predominantly urban demographic may represent Nigeria’s aspirations but is itself not representative of a nation where half of the population is still classified as rural. This bias was readily apparent in skewed polling, conducted for the most part via mobile phones or online, that showed Obi with more support than ultimately manifested on the day of the election. Also telling was the story of one self-professed Obidient, profiled by Ruth Maclean, West Africa bureau chief of the New York Times. This particular Obidient who waxed eloquent about her candidate, retweeted his posts, blocked supporters of his rivals, and hectored her friends to register to vote, only to never collect her own Permanent Voter Card (PVC) because, upon encountering long lines, decided that she did not “really like stress.”

The Obidients may have been siloed from many other Nigerians in the same manner that is often inaccurately ascribed to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (“I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him”), but both INEC and the international community contributed to the narrative, however unwittingly. The electoral commission did itself no favors in the leadup to the vote by overhyping the untested Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) it introduced to authenticate the new biometric PVCs issued to electors as well as failing to collate and publish results in a timely manner. Some of the machines only arrived in Nigeria just days before the vote. Not surprisingly, they did not perform as promised. The problem, however, is that in the climate of mistrust and suspicion then prevalent, INEC was not given any benefit of the doubt when polls were delayed in opening or results failed to upload for whatever reason. As the preliminary assessment of the joint National Democratic Institute-International Republican Institute election observation mission led by former Malawian President Joyce Banda put it succinctly: “Challenges with the electronic transfer of results and their upload to a public portal in a timely manner, undermined citizen confidence at a crucial moment of the process. Moreover, inadequate communication and lack of transparency by [INEC] about their cause and extent created confusion and eroded voters’ trust in the process.”

Van Niekerk pointed out that while INEC may have been inept, charges of systemic fraud favoring the incumbent APC would require an almost dogmatic faith in an elaborate conspiracy: “If the APC were clever enough to pull off a vote-switching operation, they surprisingly denied themselves victory in Katsina, Lagos, Osun, Edo, much of the Northwest and Kano, and rewarded Obi with more than 90 percent of the vote in the Southeast.”

Almost without exception, the international media coverage leading up to the vote was focused on Obi’s candidacy and the Obidients’ rallying around it, inadvertently feeding what proved to be a myopic worldview. The Economist—and it was hardly the only publication to fall into the trap—even published a feature article with a headline describing Obi as “the surprise front-runner in Nigeria’s presidential race.” Zainab Usman, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Africa Program who is originally from Nigeria, has lamented that “Twitter became so toxic to many level-headed analysts who just chose to go silent online. Therefore, the prevailing narratives here are incredibly misaligned with on-the-ground realities…But bullying those who don’t align with preferred narratives will make the echo chamber more hollow, loud [and] detached from reality.”

What Next?

Both the PDP and the LP have denounced the results proclaimed by INEC and, in fact, demanded a rerun of the polls even before the official announcement of those results. The LP has filed a legal challenge and the PDP is expected to follow. Abubakar filed suit to contest his losses in the 2007 and 2019 elections, but his appeals were rejected by Nigeria’s Supreme Court in both cases. Obi is likewise no stranger to the process, albeit with slightly better success than his former running mate: in 2003, he contested the results of the race for the governorship of southeastern Anambra State, which was declared for the candidate of the then-ruling PDP; in 2006, after an epic legal battle, the courts ruled in his favor and he was sworn in. Such a reversal, however, has never occurred in a national race.

In the meantime, Tinubu is expected to take over the presidency on May 29. With several races still to be called, the APC will retain a slightly diminished, but still solid, majority in the Nigerian Senate and will likely have a slim majority in the House of Representatives. Significantly, the new National Assembly is considerably different in terms of parties represented and individual members than the outgoing legislature. At least eight parties will be seated in the new body. While the PDP remains the leading opposition party, Nigeria’s first-past-the-post electoral system has meant that many of the gains by the LP and smaller parties came at its expense: so far, it has lost at least fifteen Senate seats. And while the yearning for change was not enough to totally overturn the Nigerian political system, it created sufficient churn that Senate President Ahmed Lawan will be the only one of the 469 legislators who has served since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999 (in comparison, currently ten of America’s 100 senators and thirty-seven of its 435 representatives have been in Congress since before 2000).

Alas, the number of women among parliamentarians will likely diminish. Of the six women in the outgoing Senate, three lost their reelection bids amidst the anti-incumbent mood, while three others—including the new First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu, who represents Central Lagos—did not seek another term. From the results so far, only two women have won seats in the upper chamber.

At an even more basic level, the entire national political establishment faces a challenge of legitimacy in that barely 25 million voters, out of more than 93 million registered, cast ballots in the February 25 poll for the presidency and other federal-level offices. Whether the result of apathy, cynicism, or disenfranchisement, intentional or not, that level of participation is one of the lowest among democratic countries. Among all African countries since the end of the Cold War, according to the International IDEA elections database, only Algeria’s 2021 parliamentary election (23 percent voter turnout) and Tunisia’s December 2022-January 2023 parliamentary election (11 percent turnout) have had lower levels of participation than the recent Nigerian federal vote. Post-election media reports of disenchanted young first-time voters destroying their voter cards and vowing “to never engage again with the democratic process” hardly augur well for the future of Nigeria’s democracy if such tantrums become widespread.

The March 18 gubernatorial and state legislative assembly elections will also give INEC an opportunity to redeem itself if it can get its technology to work properly and better manage its communications. There are indications that the commission may have learned at least some lessons: the need to back up data stored on the BVAS machines due to the legal challenges from the federal elections and the complications of resetting over 176,000 devices for the state-level elections were cited in the communiqué announcing the postponement.

Back to the Future

Addressing the nation the day after he was declared the president-elect by INEC, Tinubu sounded a conciliatory note, saluting his opponents and declaring that “Political competition must now give way to political conciliation and inclusive governance.” He acknowledged that “many people are uncertain, angry, and hurt,” and called for healing and calm. The septuagenarian made a special appeal to Nigeria’s youth: “I hear you loud and clear. I understand your pains, your yearnings for good governance, a functional economy, and a safe nation that protects you and your future. I am aware that for many of you Nigeria has become a place of abiding challenges limiting your ability to see a bright future for yourselves.”

To turn those eloquent words into reality, Tinubu will need to draw upon some of the same playbooks that made his 1999–2007 tenure as governor of Lagos the success that he rightly highlighted during his campaign. According to UN Habitat, Lagos and its environs constitute the densest urban agglomeration on the African continent and come in just behind South America’s densest city, Medellin, for fourth place globally. Yet Tinubu not only managed to govern the sprawl, but it emerged as one of Africa’s key engines of economic growth during the period.

With about 10 percent of Nigeria’s total population, the state generates roughly 20 percent of the country’s GDP. Thanks to reforms put in place by Tinubu while governor, Lagos enjoys the highest internally generated revenue of any Nigerian state in absolute terms as well as in percentage of the state budget, making its government less dependent than other states on federal grants derived from oil revenues. Thus, although the loss of his hometown in the presidential election must sting, the ubiquity of Obidients there and the relative prosperity of many of them are testaments of a sort to the favorable entrepreneurial climate presided over by Tinubu and his successors—all of whom have been younger protégés he groomed after either recruiting them locally or convincing them to return from abroad.

One of the strangest twists during the recent campaign period was the decision in November 2022 by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to launch new naira banknotes and initially giving Nigerians only six weeks (subsequently extended by an additional ten days) to exchange their old notes for the newly issued bills. The resulting chaos—exacerbated by a shortage of the new notes and limits imposed on cash withdrawals from bank accounts—led to even well-off Nigerians being unable to pay for everyday expenses. Some prominent Tinubu allies even openly speculated that the exercise was some sort of payback from CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele, whose attempt to enter the APC presidential primary—notwithstanding the statutory nonpartisan nature of his position—was foiled. Since the election, the Nigerian Supreme Court has ruled that the government’s currency rollout unconstitutional, and ordered the old naira bills to be deemed valid through the end of year. This, however, means that completing the swap will be one of the first tasks for the incoming administration—and one the impact of which will affect every Nigerian.

Beyond the botched introduction of new banknotes—notionally not an unreasonable path to curb counterfeiting and other crimes—a number of macroeconomic reforms need to be undertaken. Tinubu has pledged to end the fuel subsidy that costs Nigeria some $15 billion annually—money he says he wants to have “more productively used in joint investments with the private sector to create jobs in infrastructure, health care, education and agriculture,” outlining plans for focused investments in industrialization, technological innovation, improved infrastructure, and agricultural development. None of this will be politically easy—vested interests, ranging from criminal organizations smuggling fuel to ordinary Nigerians, that are against changing the fuel subsidy have stymied every Nigerian president before him—but without drastic action, the stagnation will continue.

Restoring security will also need to be a top priority. Outgoing President Buhari, a one-time military ruler, lavished over twelve trillion naira ($26.5 billion) on the armed forces during his two terms, privileging the fight against Boko Haram and other jihadists groups in northeastern Nigeria. While the fight against the jihadists continues—just this past week, Islamist militants killed at least two dozen people in an attack on a fishing village in Borno State—insecurity continues to spread to other corners of the country, including banditry and criminal gangs in the northwest, separatists in the oil-rich southeast, herder-farmer conflicts in the Middle Belt (many evincing worrisome indications of increasing religious animosities), and growing violence in cities. The relatively conservative tally kept by the Council on Foreign Relations Nigeria Security Tracker puts the number of Nigerians killed last year in violence motivated by political, economic, or social grievance—including state actors as well as terrorist groups and sectarian—at an appalling 4,066. Unless the Tinubu administration can bring the violence under control and reform the security sector, the private investments it seeks for its ambitious economic agenda are unlikely to materialize.

Finally, Tinubu won in an election that also laid bare many of the fissures in Nigerian society, including ethnic and religious divides. The decision to defy the convention of balancing national tickets regionally and religiously by pairing up northerners with southerners, Muslims with Christians (the vice president-elect, Kashim Shettima, former governor of northeastern Borno State, is also, like Tinubu, a Muslim), may have been a smart political move to galvanize the APC’s northern base. But its downside is that the incoming administration will have to be especially attuned to the sensitivities of the plurality of the Nigerian population that does not share the religious commitments of the new president and vice president. Not only domestically, but in Nigeria’s foreign relations, especially with the United States and the United Kingdom, where the concerns of the country’s Christian communities—echoed by the large and well-positioned diaspora—resonate politically.

Why It Matters

While hydraulic fracturing and the resulting “Shale Revolution” mean that Nigerian oil and gas do not have the importance for the United States it once had—in fact, America hardly imports any Nigerian hydrocarbons—what happens in Nigeria still matters a great deal, perhaps even more so, from a geopolitical and geoeconomic perspective.

For the European Union, trying to wean itself from Russian gas in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, it is hard to overstate the importance of Nigeria, already the source of about 14 percent of EU imports of gas. The 4,000-kilometer Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline being built from Nigeria through Niger to the Mediterranean in Algeria will more than double that flow with an additional 30 billion cubic meters of gas annually from Nigeria. In the longer term, another pipeline, following the coast some 6,000 kilometers from Nigeria to Morocco, would send even more gas to the EU. In addition, today’s 216 million Nigerians will increase to 375 million by 2050, making the country the third most populous in the world after India and China. Its position will be unassailable as the clear economic and demographic regional heavyweight on an African continent that is increasingly significant in global strategic calculations.

Nigeria’s new president-elect won not only because of a divided opposition, but because the governing party and its core supporters agreed that, on account of his record for delivering politically in Lagos and nationally, it was “his turn.” However, the campaign and the vote tallies made clear that many Nigerians are more concerned that it finally be their turn. Much more than his personal political fortunes will be riding on how deftly Bola Tinubu balances both sets of expectations.

Ambassador J. Peter Pham, a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Senior Advisor at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy, is former U.S. Special Envoy for the Sahel and Great Lakes Regions of Africa.

Image: Tolu Owoeye/Shutterstock.