By
Noel Ihebuzor
This link line takes you to an article in TheCable that claims to examine “a million other things that damaged President Jonathan” in his re-election bid. It is wriiten by one Chidi Chima and was uploaded on Twitter via @thecableng #2015Elections . Chidi invites his readers to also come up with and contribute their views on what they think “damaged President Jonathan”.
Chidi Chima skipped Region & Religion! The reader is invited to visit INEC’s results compilation for the 2015 presidential elections and to look closely at the votings in NE, NW & SS zones. Skewed Demography, Religion & Region were at play and were the real “damagers”. This is the harsh truth and we need to tell ourselves some of these hard truths, but Chima prefers to flee from them. If, for example, the SE zone had come out and voted and given Jonathan 750,000 votes each and kept Buhari below 10% of votes cast, as was the case in most of the NE/NW zones, the results would have been otherwise. So, the game changer and decider in these elections were once again Ethnicity and Religion, not any of these fancy reasons that Chidi Chima throws up! Finally, Chidi Chima will do well to study the results for the presidential elections for the FCT and Lagos where populations and religions are more heterogeneous – the results here could be taken to reflect a more balanced representation as to how a cross section of Nigerians inhabiting a common geographical space evaluated the Jonathan presidency.
Reflections 
Interesting. But will a Buhari win ensure a clean sweep of the Boko Haram menace? My fears are founding, Noel. But hei I could be wrong.
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Quite true. Of course, by his actions and inactions, the president directly contributed to the widening of this natural fault line. He never openly denounced Oritsejeafor’s many unsavoury and inflammatory comments about Northerners and Muslims. Given Ayo’s closeness to the president, northerners, rightly or wrongly, saw Mr president’s silence as a tacit endorsement of the comments and took their cues from there. We haven’t even talked about the sacred cows of the ND (eg Dokubo) whom he allowed get away with crude expressions of ethnic bigotry. He further alienated himself from even Northern Christian votes by the way he unhandled and then mishandled the Chibok disaster. His wife’s tantrum on national TV didn’t exactly help either. She basically called a press conference in order to accuse northerners of using the Chibok incident as an image tarnishing ploy against her husband! That was never the way to treat and talk to people that were hurting and mourning. Did you notice how even strong NC states that are naturally suspicious of the Fulani voted against him this time?
In 2011, he had the same main opponent but the president won the national elections in spite of these religious and regional fault lines; and he had a massive national spread too irrespective of the states he lost. So while you may be right about regional and religious sentiments playing a role, I daresay the blame lies squarely at the presidents doorstep for accentuating the fault lines in our fragile union. That method of governance was never going to favour him, and it played out exactly how the president had engineered it to.
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Great points. But the good points you raise touch on what could be described as accentuators and not underlying reasons. Changes in NC resulted from key defections within the political class and their drag effects. Notice also that Buhari’s vote in the NW/NE remained about the same as in 2011. If the Ayo and Dame Peace factors were as strong as you suggest, the numbers should have grown. But Thanks for your well argued inputs.
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