WHAT THE APC’S MUSLIM–MUSLIM ARRANGEMENT HAS TOLD HALF OF NIGERIA, TWICE
By Dr. PEDRO OBASEKI
Hunger has entered millions of Nigerian homes. Communities that once farmed and traded now count it fortune to sleep undisturbed. Fuel has risen beyond the reach of the working man, the naira has been diminished, and the public debt expands without any matching expansion in roads, hospitals or productive capacity.
These are not theoretical afflictions. But a nation may be impoverished in more than one way. Materially, by hunger and debt; and politically, by arranging power so that tens of millions of citizens cannot find themselves in the two highest elected offices of their own Republic. The first impoverishment is loudly discussed. The second is being quietly normalised.
Let us concede what is legally correct. The Tinubu–Shettima ticket is not unconstitutional. Neither Section 10, which forbids a state religion, nor Section 14, which speaks to federal character and the prevention of sectional predominance, legislates a mixed-faith ticket into existence. The question was never judicial validity. It is political legitimacy. Constitutional permission and political wisdom are not the same commodity.
From 1979, that wisdom held without interruption. Shagari with Ekwueme. Obasanjo with Atiku. Yar’Adua with Jonathan. Jonathan with Sambo. Buhari with Osinbajo. Northern Muslim and southern Christian, in one order or the other, five times, never otherwise. This was not theological decoration. It was the architecture through which a fragile federation reassured itself that no single region and no single faith would hold both of its national offices at once. A ticket was expected to do more than win. It was expected to bridge.
The APC overturned that in 2023 and defended the decision as arithmetic: the party required northern mobilisation, and balance had to yield to necessity. Its repetition is decisive. In July 2026 the same two names were lodged with INEC, after a year in which alternatives were openly weighed — a Chief of Defence Staff, a former Speaker of the House, a bishop of national moral standing — and every one set down again.
An exception repeated becomes a rule. A rule defended becomes a doctrine.
The grievance cannot be more inflated. Nigeria is four constituencies, not two: northern Muslim, northern Christian, southern Muslim, southern Christian. No pair of names can seat all four, but the historic formula crossed both fault lines at once. This one cross geography and terminates at religion. The northern Christian is left outside at either end of the ticket, in the very region where his farmland is contested by rifle. A presidential ticket is the mould from which every subsequent appointment is cast: service chiefs, intelligence, defence. It declares whose instincts shape the security architecture, and that architecture determines who is defended first.
None of this was left to inference. When the ticket was first announced in 2022, Pastor Samson Supo Ayokunle, then president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, asked whether a country holding a hundred million Christians could not produce one fit to stand as a partner. Four years on, Rev. Joseph Hayab of the Northern Christian Association put the request at its plainest: Christians had wanted only understanding and togetherness, as enshrined in the Constitution. That was the whole of the demand. It has now been refused twice. And Christians voted for the ticket regardless — which is the most damning fact in this case, not a defence of it. They gave their votes to men who would not give them a seat at the presidential table, and they are asked to do so again.
Till date, almost four years thence, Pastor Ayokunle’s question has never once been answered. Religion cannot be pronounced irrelevant when Christians request representation, and then treated as decisive when the party calculates which identity best mobilises the North.
I claim no neutrality. I am a member of the African Democratic Congress and an adviser and strategist to Atiku Abubakar, whose ticket with Rotimi Amaechi pairs a northern Muslim with a southern Christian. I disclose it because honesty requires it; partisanship does not falsify history.
So let me put the hardest question against myself. If balance is sacred, why does my party field a northerner after a single southern term?
Because zoning and balance are not the same order of rule. Zoning is a party’s internal housekeeping, honoured or abandoned as convenience dictates; in 2023 the PDP ran a northerner while the APC ran a southerner, and no one suggested the nation had been wounded. Ticket balance was observed by every party, in every republic, in every contest that produced a government. And a zoning grievance carries its own remedy, which is time. Your turn returns. Exclusion carries no remedy, because exclusion is not a queue. A man in a queue is a man kept waiting. A man at a wall is a man kept out.
The APC has built a wall and called it a ticket, and on the far side of it stands every Nigerian Christian, northern and southern alike.
The ledger, measured by who exercised power rather than who held the title, does not describe a South denied. Between 1999 and 2027 the North will have held this presidency ten years and six months; the South, seventeen years and three months. A northern turn that opened in 2007 closed after two years and five months, when President Yar’Adua left for Riyadh and never governed again. Goodluck Jonathan afterwards won a mandate of his own, and won it cleanly; I do not dispute it. But a term interrupted is not a term served.
It will be objected that 1999 is an arbitrary gate, and that the South’s surplus is restitution for the military years of Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar. It is not. Those were not turns. They were seizures. No Nigerian conferred them, and the average Nigerian played no part in them. Their gateway was the barrel of a gun and their winning ballot was a bullet. A region cannot be credited with years the people never gave, nor billed for them.
Nor should my own party mistake balance for a manifesto. A balanced ticket will not feed the hungry, secure a village or steady the naira. And this argument must never be allowed to become a campaign against Islam. Atiku Abubakar is himself a Muslim, as are millions of patriots within the ADC. The choice before Nigerians is not Christianity against Islam. It is inclusion against avoidable exclusion.
Arithmetic can win an election. But no nation can ever be held together by a wall. It can only be held together by a sense of belonging. The APC Muslim-Muslim ticket denies the Nigerian nation that.
- Dr. Pedro Obaseki is a scholar, broadcaster, and political strategist. He serves on the ADC Presidential Campaign Council, and as an adviser & chief strategist to Atiku Abubakar.
