By Femi Aribisala
FOR over eight years, Mitt Romney fought assiduously to be President
of white Americans. He put up a considerable amount of his personal
resources into this ambition. He also spent over one billion dollars of
other peoples’ money; far more than the annual budget of most Nigerian
states.
When the election results were finally tabulated on November 4, it
was immediately clear Romney had achieved his objective. Mitt Romney was
elected President of the United States of White Americans with 58% of
the votes. As a matter of fact, he won the largest percentage of white
votes of any Republican since 1988. Unfortunately, however, the election
was not merely for white Americans. It was for all Americans.
Mitt Romney’s faux pas in the U.S. is similar to that of Muhammadu
Buhari in Nigeria. Buhari was the Northern candidate in the 2011
presidential elections in Nigeria. He hardly bothered to campaign in the
South.
Convincing win in core northern states
When the results were announced, he won convincingly in the core
Northern States with over 12 million votes. However, the election was
not for the President of Northern Nigeria. It was for the President of
the Federal Republic of all Nigerians.
Nigeria’s system of government is modelled after that of the United
States, but neither Romney nor Buhari seem to understand the system. A
lot of noise was made by Yorubas in particular about the annulment of
the election of Moshood Abiola in the 1993 presidential elections in
Nigeria. But the truth of the matter is that Abiola did not win that
election because the Yorubas voted for him. The Yorubas cannot elect a
president of Nigeria. To do that, they have to form alliances with other
Nigerians.
File photo : Mitt Romney conceded defeat to Obama
The Nigerian Constitution requires a victorious presidential
candidate to obtain a minimum of one-third of the votes in a minimum of
two-thirds of the states. Indeed, most of the people who voted for
Abiola in 1993 were not Southerners but Northerners. In 1999, the
Yorubas, refused to vote for Olusegun Obasanjo, their kith and
kin. Nevertheless, he was elected president. He became president by
stringing together a coalition that stretched across the Niger into the
far reaches of Nigeria, uniting the South-South, the South-East, the
Middle Belt and the far North.
Romney’s debacle
In light of a similar requirement, Mitt Romney really bungled it. He
fought an election he could not lose. No sitting American president had
ever been elected with as many as eight per cent of the people out of
work. Romney drummed this into everyone that would listen: no less than
23 million able-bodied Americans are out of work. The parlous state of
the American economy, still reeling from the throes of recession,
ensured that the people would blame the incumbent for failing to redress
the situation after four years. Obama was toast. The pundits on the
Republican side were convinced Romney’s election was a foregone
conclusion.
However, Mitt Romney lost; and he lost woefully. Since American
elections are won or lost on the basis of the Electoral College, the
2012 presidential elections were not even close. Obama obtained 332
Electoral College votes to Romney’s 206. That is something of a
landslide. Romney lost in eight of the nine key “battleground-states” in
which American elections today are won or lost. When the final votes
were tallied, Romney lagged behind Obama by over two and a half million
votes.
According to exit polls, the electorate was 72 per cent white. Romney
prevailed here 58 per cent to Obama’s 40 per cent. 13 per cent of
electorate was African American. 93 per cent voted for Obama. 10 per
cent of electorate was Latino. Obama prevailed 71 per cent to 27 per
cent, along with 73 percent of Asians. When you add 55 per cent of
female voters, many of them young and single, Obama was
unstoppable. This makes Romney’s defeat something of an achievement in
itself. Romney succeeded in losing an election that could not be lost.
How did he manage to defeat himself so resoundingly?
I watched Romney’s Republican Party Convention in consternation from
the comfort of my Lagos home. I could not believe how antediluvian it
was. I marvelled at rows and rows of mostly white men. No blacks, no
Latinos, no Asians, no Indians. How in heaven’s name could this be
representative of the United States of today? Then I watched Obama’s
Democratic Party Convention and saw on display the new coalition ushered
in by Obama’s election as the first African-American President of the
United States. Whites and Blacks; Latinos and Asian-Americans; men and
women; young and old; they were all together on a soul train.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party refused to acknowledge this new
America to their disaster at the polls. As a matter of fact, they went
out of their way to antagonise every constituency that was not part of
their majoritarian white base. The Republican Party, the party of
Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in the United
States, disregarded the African-American voters as lost to the
Democrats. Romney antagonised Latinos, the fastest growing bloc of
voters in the United States, with his far-right stand on illegal
immigration during the primaries, as he tried to beef up his
conservative credentials. He really blew it by calling for
“self-deportation” of illegal Latinos.
Romney antagonised women voters by threatening reproductive freedom,
abortion rights and federal subsidy of contraceptives. Missouri
Republican candidate for the Senate, Todd Akin, added fuel to the fire
by declaring in a television interview that “legitimate rape” rarely
results in pregnancy. In Indiana, Republican Senate candidate Richard
Mourdock said pregnancy caused by rape is something “God intended” and
does not justify abortion. Women voters signified their disgust by
giving Obama a plurality of their votes; 13 per cent more than Romney.
Romney was unrelenting in courting defeat. He made no appeal to
Asian-Americans. He antagonised the gay and lesbian communities by
speaking against homosexuality and gay marriage. In short, he put all
his eggs in the white basket. When the election results were announced,
the white votes had shrunk by three per cent from the 2008 figure. The
Latino share had increased to 10 per cent for the very first time. The
African-Americans came out in larger numbers in favour of Obama, angry
at the failed attempts by Republicans to prevent them from voting by
changing the rules. Obama cruised to an easy victory. The election that
pundits predicted would be a long night was over only a few hours after
the polls closed. Romney and the Republicans went into shock, disbelief
and denial. There were calls for a recount in Ohio. But it soon sank in
that they had committed one big blunder.
New realpolitik
”We’ve lost the country,” concluded Rush Limbaugh, a conservative
talk-show host. He angrily described the United States as a “country of
children.” “There is no hope,” said Ann Coulter, another disgruntled
Republican commentator. Added Bill O’Reilly: “It’s not a traditional
America anymore.” O’Reilly is correct; Obama’s America is the new
America. If the Republican Party does not want to be consigned to the
sidelines for the foreseeable future, it has to re-fashion itself and
develop a genuine, creative passion for inclusion. This is what Reverend
Jesse Jackson has long-called the Rainbow Coalition. Republican Maine
Senator Susan Collins told the New York Times: “We have to recognize the
demographic changes in this country. Republicans cannot win with just
rural, white voters.”
People of colour
Felicia Davis of the Black Women’s Roundtable provided insight into
the alliance of groups that gave Obama four more years: “The Obama
campaign was able to put together a progressive coalition that included
people of colour and white women that then put white men in the
minority. This broader coalition now has broken up 200 years of white
male privilege to the advantage of everyone else.
Should Obama be successful in rebuilding the U.S. economy during a
second term, and once voters grasp that “Obamacare” has liberated them
from the fear of being driven into bankruptcy by medical emergencies,
the new Democratic coalition could prove to have a kind of staying power
not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Lessons for Nigeria
The lessons of the U.S. presidential elections should not be lost on
Nigerians. Many are dissatisfied with the Peoples Democratic Party,
which has been in power since 1999 to little avail. But the truth of the
matter is that the PDP is the only national party currently in Nigeria.
It is the only party that strings together a national coalition in the
elections. Its closest rival, the ACN is essentially a regional
party. It has no effective foothold in the North, the South-East or the
South-South.
The ACN has three years left to address this imbalance before the
2015 elections. Its leader, Bola Tinubu, should recognise that the
President of Nigeria must appeal to a broad coalition of
Nigerians. Presidential candidates cannot be elected by mere reliance on
South-West votes. Neither can they be elected by Northerners, who for
long had a lock on elections at the centre. In the new political
dispensation of democratic Nigeria, the president of Nigeria must be a
true representative of the people.
File photo; Tinubu and Buhari – leaders of ACN and CPC
In the primary season of the 2011 elections in Nigeria, a big song
and dance was made about choosing a Northern candidate for the PDP. Some
Northern electoral college was cobbled together and former
Vice-President Atiku Abubakar was proclaimed the Northern candidate.
That proved his undoing.
Disgruntled Americans
The Northern candidate had a problem transforming himself into a
national candidate. He lost to Goodluck Jonathan, a man from a minority
ethnic group, but with a majoritarian political calculus.
After Romney lost, some disgruntled Americans signed petitions
calling for the secession of their states from the American union. When
Buhari lost in 2011, some core Northerners went on the rampage, burning,
looting and killing. They were clearly fed up with the union. The Boko
Haram was revived, asking for the division of Nigeria into a Moslem
Northern state and a Christian Southern state. But that is hardly the
answer and that is just not going to happen. Nigeria will not be
divided. To be successful, the next Northern candidate must not be a
Northern candidate: he must be a national candidate.
The Igbos deserve to have their kith and kin elected as President of
Nigeria. The election of an Igbo as president is long overdue. More than
anything else, it will signal the effective end of the Civil War, and
the successful re-integration of the Igbos back into Nigeria. But that
is just not going to happen unless the Igbos learn from the failure of
Mitt Romney.
In the past several weeks, Igbos have been engaged in a war of words
with the Yorubas over culpability for the 1967-70 Civil War as a result
of Chinua Achebe’s provocative new book: There was a Country. That is
bad politics plain and simple. No Yoruba is likely to be president of
Nigeria for the next 20 years, given Obasanjo’s recent eight years in
power. That makes the Yorubas, the single largest ethnic group in the
country who have a tendency to vote en bloc, the kingmakers of Nigerian
presidential politics for the foreseeable future. Nigerian presidential
aspirants should be careful not to antagonise the Yorubas. They should
be courted.That is the new political calculus of democratic Nigeria.
Vanguard
