Tinubu: Once the north moves, it moves as a bloc

By: Prof. Moses Ochonu

One thing about the Muslim north or what some people call the core north in Nigerian politics is that you’ll always know exactly where they stand in relation to the incumbent government/leader. If they like you, you’ll know. If they don’t, you’ll also know. There’s hardly a middle ground, an in-between.

If they move on from you, they’ve moved on from you. It is not that they’re politically fickle. No. Rather, they’re incapable of the chameleonic duplicity that’s the currency of politics elsewhere.

There is something cultural and religious about it. In the Muslim North, there is a binding religious script of fearing only God and not revering any man to the point of suppressing your true feeling about them.

In other political environments, there is a hidden script and a public script. The first is the truth, the second the façade that lubricates politics and maintains political politeness.

That political performance is largely absent from the Muslim north partly because the culture in that region forbids self-censorship in service of power and those who wield it. Therein lies the cultural element.

Truth-telling, especially in the political realm where unequal power can deter truthful expression, is a cultural imperative, a value to be consistently operationalized. This cultural commitment to speaking truth to and about power is encapsulated in a popular Hausa proverb that was immortalized in a famous Hausa poem written by the Leftist intellectual, nationalist, and literary figure, Sa’adu Zungur. The saying “In zaka fadi, fadi gaskiya” translates as “if you are going to speak, speak the truth.”

The political significance of this Hausaphone proverb is that it dictates that power be held accountable through the ethos of truth-telling and honest critique. Political prevarication is discouraged.

There is also another element that makes the north more inclined to tell those in power what it is truly feeling about their failures. The north, being the least economically developed part of the country and the region with the highest concentration of poverty, tends to feel the visceral pain of harmful government economic policy more than other regions.

So, to reiterate, the political, cultural, and religious alchemy of the north underpins the political ideal of communicating clearly and unequivocally about one’s political grievances, feelings, and frustrations regarding a political incumbent.

This culture of clarity and courageous truth-telling in politics means that the north will rarely leave a president and his ruling party guessing about where its political allegiance lies.

It means that, although there may be exceptions and outliers, the prevailing consensus will be known and the direction of politics at any given time will be discernible. There’s neither waffling nor fence-sitting with the Muslim north. And there’s no pretentious political platitudes with them either.

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Once the northerners sour on a political leader, they’re loud, clear, and fearless in declaring it. And they don’t mind if other regions stay or move in a different direction.

And once the north moves, it usually moves as a bloc.

Even their traditional rulers and political elites have little choice but to align with or at least allow the new sentiment and preference to be fully expressed. They may not like it, but for their own political self-preservation, they get out of the way.

Tell me, in which other part of Nigeria would a prominent traditional ruler in the category of the Emir of Katsina look the ruling party’s presidential campaign delegation in the face and tell them to stop lying to Nigerians about hardship and insecurity?

In other parts of the country, the rulers would be thinking it, but they would not say it so directly and clearly. Platitudes would instead fill the air.

Some people may say that the bloc voting and related political tendencies of the north are a mark of unsophisticated political decision making or herd political mentality.

I say they’re a mark of political courage and the highest democratic instinct of speaking truth to power and letting your leaders know exactly what you think of their actions and inactions as they come to you seeking your support to stay in power.

Of course, there is a legitimate counterargument about how the north not only failed to loudly and unambiguously challenge former President Muhammadu Buhari but voted for him again in 2019 despite an abundance of evidence of his incompetence, chronic provincialism, poor economic management, and the rampant corruption in his administration.

The problem with this pushback, however, is that it ignores one countervailing fact: Buhari enjoyed a mysterious, uncritical, and cult-like devotion among the northern masses. This affinity defies rational explanation, has no precedence or parallel, and should thus be seen as an outlier, an atypical political relationship that does not reflect the way northerners typically relate and engage with power.

Buhari enjoyed such unprecedented and uncritical adulation that the political elites and traditional rulers of the north had to thread carefully if they didn’t want to be consumed by the passionate political emotions of the masses that Buhari had undeservedly but totally cornered for himself. That kept the elites relatively quiet about Buhari’s failures.

That political devotion frayed in the last years of Buhari’s presidency, and northerners began to openly and vehemently speak out against his administration and its many failures, but the truth is that even the prior political love affair was not entirely based on primordial factors and, in fact, ran contrary to the familiar political behavior of the region as no other politician had been able to command that level of support without earning or cultivating it.

Therefore, northerners’ eight-year fidelity to Buhari’s disastrous administration does not mitigate my simple point: that northerners’ willingness to take a clear political stance, even if it means swimming against the political tide, is unique in our country, exceptions aside. In no other region is this trait as fully realized as it is in the north, even if some examples abound in other parts of courageously clear collective and individual political stances.

My overarching point, to be clear is simple: the north has soured on Tinubu, and true to their character and cultural inclination, they have made it powerfully clear. I am not saying that this will result in any electoral outcome next year. Sometimes, the collective northern rejection or acceptance of a candidate translates or correlates to a particular electoral outcome and sometimes it doesn’t.

Besides, a lot goes into determining electoral outcomes in Nigeria, other than the votes, feelings, and preferences of voters. This is particularly true of the Buhari administration, which is marked by an unprecedentedly total state capture, including a brazen executive control of INEC. 

Regardless of what happens in the 2027 presidential election, the feeling in the north towards President Bola Tinubu at this moment is unmistakable: they have rejected the man they supported in 2023.

•Moses Ochonu is a professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States.