What Would It Mean for Nigeria to Elect an Igbo President?

In the past few weeks, as Nigeria’s Feb. 25 elections approached, the country seemed to be in the middle of an economic and infrastructural meltdown. The Central Bank of Nigeria had recently recalled the three largest-denomination naira notes, requiring that more than 200 million people deposit all their old notes within a span of three months, in a country where people mainly use cash and where millions do not have bank accounts at all.

When the Jan. 31 deadline arrived, the central bank bowed to pressure and set a new date of Feb. 10, a capitulation that failed to bring any noticeable reprieve. By Feb. 1, it was nearly impossible to get cash from ATMs or point-of-sale vendors who could give you cash for a small commission. So acute was the cash crunch that people paid 1,000 naira (about $1.50 at current unofficial street exchange rates) to get 10,000 ($14) and days later 4,000 ($6) for 20,000 ($28)—and this was in Lagos, where access to banks is notably higher than in every other Nigerian city. Add to this a monthslong fuel scarcity that has defied its usual seasonal character to outlast the holiday period.

The fact that these twin miseries will be consequential in this weekend’s election was made clear in a speech by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential nominee for the All Progressives Congress, the ruling party. Speaking in Yoruba during a January campaign event in Abeokuta, Tinubu referred to a “they” attempting to sabotage his election by introducing new currency notes so close to the election and creating an artificial fuel scarcity. It was an allusion arguably directed at the current Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, whose support for his own party’s nominee has been called into question.

Yet the underlying sentiment expressed by Tinubu might represent his uncertainty about his chances of victory. A threat to what was once considered an easy ride to power has come from the unexpected rise in popularity of Peter Obi, a former two-term governor of Anambra, the most populous of Nigeria’s southeastern states.

Obi has been aided by his reputation as a politician without a penchant for, or a history of, corruption—in contrast to his rivals.

Obi is as enmeshed in Nigerian politics as Tinubu, who was also a two-term governor of a large state. But he has been aided by his reputation as a politician without a penchant for, or a history of, corruption in contrast to his rivals. This commitment to transparency—and frugality in government spending—has earned him the support, for the most part, of the generation born after Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999. But there’s another twist to the importance of his candidacy.

Anambra, Obi’s home state, has the largest concentration of Igbos, who make up the third-largest ethnic group in Nigeria, after the Hausa and Yoruba. If Obi wins, it would be the first time after the 1967-70 civil war that an Igbo is the civilian president of Nigeria.

In the immediate aftermath of Nigeria’s independence, when the country’s government was styled after Britain’s parliamentary system, the president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, was Igbo, with a largely ceremonial role.

The only other time an Igbo helmed the country was during a six-month spell in 1966, after a coup backfired and the highest-ranking military officer, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, took charge of a mutinous army and hence the country. Aguiyi-Ironsi’s tenure ended in catastrophe: He was killed during a countercoup led mainly by Hausa army officers, and the bloodletting culminated in a declaration of independence by an Igbo majority in the Eastern region and then a 30-month war. The new country was known as Biafra.

For Biafrans and their leaders, the general feeling was that, after a series of pogroms in the Northern region, their former country had become unlivable. The ensuing war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Igbos—up to 1 million according to some estimates. The scale of devastation resulted in part from mass starvation, owing to Nigeria’s blockade of Biafra, and the direct or tacit support from world powers such as Britain and the United States. On Jan. 15, 1970, Biafra surrendered, unable to continually defend its territory, which had shrunk to a third of its original size.

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In a video likely from the 1980s, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the army officer who led the Biafran secession, says to an audience: “The Igbos, as I saw them … would seem to suffer some disabilities still. In fact, those disabilities they see as … continued punishment for participating in the war. … They would like to feel that they could be appreciated fully in Nigeria. They would like to feel that they could be honored in Nigeria for their contribution. In short, the Igbo would like to feel that one day, an Igbo could become president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

Ojukwu’s position has been affirmed by Igbo politicians over the last four decades; for instance, it was the main reasoning behind the endorsement of Obi by Ohanaeze Ndigbo, an influential pan-Igbo organization. The feeling of marginalization at the federal level was arguably a trigger for the current wave of pro-Biafran agitations in the southeast: In 1999, when the Igbo politician Alex Ekwueme failed to win the presidential nomination for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)—the party that eventually won the elections and ruled for the next 16 years—one of his most vocal supporters, Ralph Uwazuruike, left the PDP to form the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB).

A line can be traced from MASSOB to today’s Indigenous People of Biafra, which favors a second secession attempt—its founder, Nnamdi Kanu, was once an associate of Uwazuruike—and has perhaps emboldened a group seeking a Yoruba nation.

The question is whether a potential Obi presidency would represent more than his ethnicity. His ascendancy has less to do with the fact that he is Igbo than the propitiousness of the moment. His supporters are mainly young and urbane, and their political radicalization is seen, partly, as a consequence of the widespread protests against police brutality in October 2020. In fact, Obi seems to reject any analysis of his chances—or the importance of his candidacy—based squarely on his ethnicity or geographic zone.

Implicit in his ascendancy, is the possibility that his win would defuse, or at least temper, separatist sentiments.

Yet, if only for its historical significance, it is justifiable to consider the potential of an Obi presidency as a highlight of Nigeria’s reckoning with its multiethnic character. Implicit in his ascendancy, and a groundswell of support in the Igbo-speaking region, is the possibility that his win would defuse, or at least temper, separatist sentiments, providing the long-wished-for sense of representation.

Obi’s chances are said to be stifled by the absence of a political machinery; he doesn’t have the deep pockets of other key contenders, nor does he belong to a party with experience of either winning elections or governing at the center. Hence, it is incorrect to suggest that his success or failure rests on whether he can galvanize voters sympathetic to the idea that Nigeria is due for an Igbo president.

If Obi fails in his bid and either of the two other front-runners win, the Nigerian president will emerge from the southwest (Tinubu) or the northeast (Atiku Abubakar of the PDP). These geopolitical zones have produced either the president or vice president since 1999—a statement that cannot be made about the southeast, home to the Igbos. As such, it is quite likely that an Obi loss would deepen the disillusionment in his home region.

The extent to which Nigeria might face a combustion of sorts in the post-election season is worth considering by the eventual winner. In a region with record levels of insecurity and infrastructural collapse, the clamor for a Biafran state—by violent conflict or referendum—could reach a fever pitch if the most successful Igbo politician in nearly 50 years (one with good preelection poll numbers) fails in his bid to become president.