A supporter of Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate, displays a banner during a global march in Abuja, Nigeria, on Feb. 18, ahead of the Nigerian presidential election scheduled for Feb. 25.KOLA SULAIMON/AFP/Getty Images
Until a couple of months ago, few of the world’s pundits thought Peter Obi had any chance in Nigeria’s presidential election.
There seemed nothing exceptional about him. A 61-year-old businessman and political veteran who had jumped from party to party, Mr. Obi was a former state governor and a defeated vice-presidential candidate. After faring poorly in a bid for the presidential nomination of the main opposition party last year, he quit and joined the obscure Labour Party, which holds only a tiny handful of seats in Parliament.
And then Mr. Obi began to tear into the political establishment, calling for a “democratic revolution” and pitching his campaign to the vast ranks of Nigeria’s disgruntled young voters. Big crowds began to flock to his rallies. Opinion polls suddenly found him leading the election race.
His unexpected rise has thrown Saturday’s vote into disarray, making it perhaps the most unpredictable in Nigeria’s history. The stunning poll results are a reflection of Nigeria’s difficult times: the desperation of many voters, their unhappiness at decades of corruption and squandered resources – and their anger at a political system that has left most Nigerians mired in worsening poverty and unemployment, despite the country’s oil wealth.
The polls are not completely reliable, since an unusually large number of voters say they are undecided or unwilling to disclose their preference. But at a minimum, there seems to be a strong chance that Mr. Obi could prevent either of his main rivals from winning outright on Saturday, forcing an unprecedented runoff between the two leading vote-getters. Analysts are beginning to suggest that he might even win.
His rivals are two candidates who are entrenched even deeper in the establishment than him. The candidate of the governing All Progressives Congress is the 70-year-old former Lagos governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose frequent slogan is, “It’s my turn.” The candidate of the main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party, is 76-year-old Atiku Abubakar, a former vice-president who is now in his sixth bid for the presidency. Both are vastly wealthy businessmen and long-time members of the political elite, and both have faced corruption allegations, which they deny.
Competing against those two, Mr. Obi has cast himself as the candidate of youth and change, voicing the anger and frustration that millions of Nigerians feel.
His appeal to the youth is his biggest weapon in this race. Of the 93.5 million registered voters in Africa’s most populous country, fully 40 per cent are between the ages of 18 and 34, a generation traditionally neglected by Nigeria’s political elite. Many of them now call themselves “Obidients” – the nickname for Obi supporters.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Obi denounces corruption, poverty, social trauma and the “political fraud” that has turned Nigeria into “a failing state” of despair and collapsing values.
“How did we plunge into such economic decline that we have overtaken India as home to the biggest pool of the absolute poor in the world?” he asked in one recent speech.
He charged that the Nigerian state was being held captive by a small elite who have “concentrated political power” in their own hands after gaining power “through their own contrivances.”
The country, he said, has reached a turning point. “The people, led by the youths brutalized by bad leadership, are awake and leading the movement to transform Nigerian politics.”
Mr. Obi still faces daunting obstacles. As a Christian from southern Nigeria, his support is weak in the largely Muslim north. His two rivals have formidable resources and election machinery, in a country where vote-buying is common and local power-brokers can deliver blocs of votes. Many of his young supporters were unable to register as voters because of long queues and delays in the registration process.
But his campaign has exposed the cracks in Nigeria’s political system. He has galvanized support from voters who had become cynical at the country’s rising poverty levels and economic stagnation.
Most Nigerians thought they were voting for change in 2015, when they rejected the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan, and elected instead a former military officer, Muhammadu Buhari. But in his two terms in office, the country saw little progress. The country’s chronic crises – from inequality and unemployment to widespread banditry and Islamist insurgencies – have remained largely the same.
More than 40 per cent of Nigerians today have incomes of less than US$1.90 per day. National shortages of fuel and currency during the election campaign have highlighted the economic problems that they face.
This, in turn, has heightened their pessimism about the entire system. A poll of 1,600 Nigerians last year by the respected Afrobarometer agency found that only 10 per cent felt the country was going in the right direction – and this number had dropped by two-thirds in the previous five years. Barely one-fifth were satisfied with how Nigeria’s democracy was working, a sharp decline from 42 per cent in 2017.
In a sign of this growing discontent, only 35 per cent of registered voters bothered to cast ballots in the last presidential election in 2019.
By mobilizing the enthusiasm of younger voters, Mr. Obi might be able to change this. A recent poll found that 82 per cent of younger voters – those under the age of 35 – said they would vote this time. If they do, they could overturn Nigeria’s political system.