By Olu Fasan
This weekend, on December 25, Christians worldwide will celebrate Christmas to mark the birth of Jesus Christ. In every country with a predominant or substantial Christian population, the president or vice-president, the head of state or prime minister, will be a Christian.
However, in Nigeria, where Christians account for nearly half of the population, this year’s Christmas may be the last, for probably the next eight years, that Christianity would be represented politically at Nigeria’s seat of sovereign, the Presidency; that someone professing the Christian faith would be either president or vice-president!
Surely, if Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presidential candidate of All Progressives Congress, APC, wins next year’s election, Nigeria would have a Muslim president and a Muslim vice-president, Alhaji Kashim Shettima. Well, probably for eight years if they win a second term! In storytelling, the plot is what happens; the theme is what it means. A successful story must answer both questions: “what happens?” and “what does it mean?”
However, answering the question “what does Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket mean?” is beclouded by partisanship and deception. Hence, some mendaciously dismiss concerns about the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket by saying that, a) the vice-president is “powerless”, and b) a Christian vice-president can’t protect Christians. So, what’s all the fuss about?
I tackled those specious arguments in a column titled “Muslim-Muslim ticket: Christianity would suffer at Nigeria’s seat of sovereignty” (Vanguard, September 1, 2022). My aim here is different: to urge Christians and Christian leaders to beware of Tinubu’s attempts to schmooze and beguile them with utter falsity about his Muslim-Muslim ticket. Karl Marx famously said: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” My Christmas message is similar: Christians of Nigeria, unite! You have nothing to lose but the political affront on your faith, the denigration of your religion!
Truth is, Tinubu and his party, APC, have, for political expediency, set out to belittle the Christian faith. They have set out to deny Christianity equality of status with Islam in the Nigerian political firmament. Instead, they’re condemning Christianity to a second-class status, suggesting it lacks parity of political influence with Islam.
Provocatively, Tinubu continues to double down on his Muslim-Muslim ticket, insulting the collective intelligence of Christians. Recently, he told leaders of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, in Abuja, that he picked Shettima as his running mate because he’s an “exceptionally gifted human being” with “superior intellectual capacity”. This suggests that Tinubu searched far and wide but found no Northern Christian in APC with those attributes. But he’s dissembling! Leaders of his party are more forthright with the truth.
In an interview with BBC Hausa in August, the APC national chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, put it this way: “In our understanding of the politics in Nigeria at the moment, the Muslim-Muslim ticket is the best decision for us because we want to win the election,” adding: “Everyone has his own strategy for winning elections.”
Dr. Kayode Fayemi, then Ekiti State governor, put it more bluntly. Speaking to the new executives of CAN, Ekiti State chapter, in July, he said: “The decision (Muslim-Muslim ticket) was not on grounds of competence because we have competent Christians all over Nigeria, but on grounds of strategic political moves”. He added: “We have to look at scenarios and calculate where the votes would come from; it’s a game of numbers!”
Of course, anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket wasn’t based on “competence” but pure electoral calculations. But that makes the decision unbearably disturbing because Tinubu puts his “lifelong ambition” above the national interest – internal cohesion and religious harmony. He assumes he can take Christians for granted, ride roughshod over their sensitivities, and still become president.
Really? Well, Tinubu’s calculation rests on two myths. One is that the South-West or the Yorubas put ethnicity above religion; so, despite the Muslim-Muslim ticket, Yoruba Christians would vote for him simply because he’s Yoruba. The other myth is that Northern Muslims put religion above ethnicity; so, they would vote for Tinubu, a Yoruba, provided his running mate is a Northern Muslim, not a Northern Christian. Thus, Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket is predicated on two factors: ethnicity in the South-West; religion in the North!