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On Tuesday, July 21, a small crowd of protesters massed out of doors the secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja, Nigeria. Defying a heavy downpour, they carried placards tough that Bola Tinubu, the birthday party’s standard-bearer in subsequent 12 months’s presidential election, chorus from opting for a Muslim as his operating mate. It was once now not an outstanding crowd via any usual, and the truth, in line with media stories, that the protesters had arrived in 3 luxurious buses, suggesting that it should were a “rented” crowd, vitiates its declare to being taken severely.
But, the dimensions and pedigree of that crowd however, its ostensible complaint is one this is gaining some traction and, it might seem, some extent of sympathy as Nigeria shifts into marketing campaign mode following the realization of the presidential primaries of the 2 primary events, the ruling APC and the opposition Folks’s Democratic Birthday celebration (PDP).   
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For PDP standard-bearer Atiku Abubakar, the collection of the place to select a operating mate may now not be easier. Having gained his birthday party’s price ticket via making nonsense of the unwritten compact that the following president would come from the southern a part of the rustic, it was once transparent that Abubakar, a Muslim from the North East, would pick out a Christian operating mate from both the South East or the South South. The South West, his opponent Bola Tinubu’s area, was once out of the query. In spite of everything, Abubakar settled for Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa. Okowa hails from Ika, an Igbo-speaking a part of the South South state.   
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In contrast, the trail has been extra treacherous for Tinubu. Even if Tinubu has submitted the title of the APC’s former Nationwide Welfare Secretary Ibrahim Kabir Masari to the Impartial Nationwide Electoral Fee (INEC), many imagine this was once finished to satisfy INEC’s June 17 cut-off date for submission of candidate names, and that Masari would sooner or later make means for a substantive operating mate. The good cash is on Tinubu sooner or later substituting his placeholder, his insistence that the reasonably unknown Masari is his ultimate solution however.
Why does Tinubu appear to be hedging at the collection of a operating mate? The solution to this query cuts to the very middle of Nigeria’s refined ethnoreligious steadiness.
Being a southern Muslim, Tinubu, in concept, can be best possible served via a northern Christian operating mate. However many imagine this could be as excellent as throwing away no matter probability he has of turning into president since, it’s contended, he would stand much less probability of wooing the northern Muslim inhabitants, let on my own splitting the northern vote with Abubakar. In brief, having a Christian operating mate, even one from the north, can be one of these downside that his personal (southern) Muslim identification would now not be sufficient to conquer.     
To the contrary, so is going the research, selecting a northern Muslim operating mate would put Tinubu in a more potent place, given the penchant of the northern voters to position non secular identification above different issues.
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From all indications, Tinubu is aware of this, however seems to be stalling as a result of his realization {that a} Muslim-Muslim price ticket, whilst apparently crucial, is sure to be arguable given the political temper within the nation.
Whilst the combo has been a hit up to now—the overdue Moshood Abiola and Baba Gana Kingibe of the Social Democratic Birthday celebration (SDP) gained handily in 1993 ahead of the army stepped in—it is going with out announcing that the rustic has now not remained static since 1993. Considerably, the tenor of Muslim-Christian members of the family is, to position it mildly, not the similar. As an example, between 2009 and now, the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency has claimed an estimated thirty-five thousand lives. Now not most effective that, beneath President Buhari, members of the family between Christian and Muslims in Nigeria have deteriorated, with the president regularly accused of now not doing sufficient to offer protection to Christian communities within the heart and southern portions of the rustic from repeated assaults via Islamist insurgents and armed bandits.
Since 1999, neatly over twenty thousand other folks were killed as a result of hostilities between Muslim Fulani herdsmen and farmers, whilst loads of 1000’s extra were displaced.
If all this has inspired the belief around the in large part Christian south that Christians are being persecuted, the influence has most effective solidified in recent years with the larger killings of people accused of blaspheming Prophet Muhammad, and it seems that coordinated assaults on church buildings. Previously few weeks, mobs have set upon and killed folks accused of blasphemy in Sokoto, Abuja, and Lagos respectively. In 2020 and 2021, there have been eighteen and thirty-one assaults, respectively, on church buildings around the nation. There were greater than twenty-three separate assaults on church premises this 12 months, together with the June 5 assault at the St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, all through which a minimum of 40 other folks had been killed.
Nigerian officers imagine the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) masterminded the Owo assault.
On account of this, the collection of a Muslim operating mate for Tinubu has develop into a reason célèbre. Insisting {that a} Muslim-Muslim price ticket would quantity to “a declaration of battle,” the Christian Affiliation of Nigeria (CAN) has vowed to “mobilise politically in opposition to any political birthday party that sows the seed of spiritual war via presenting to Nigeria a presidential price ticket this is Muslim-Muslim or Christian-Christian.” In step with the Catholic Church in Nigeria, “a Muslim-Muslim price ticket can be maximum insensitive and a tacit endorsement of the destructive voices of many nonstate actors who’ve been threatening this country’s cohesion and non violent co-existence with out an arrest (sic).” For the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), a “Muslim-Muslim price ticket manner over 54 p.c of the inhabitants will likely be marginalized and close out;” threatening, “If the birthday party (APC) doesn’t concentrate to us, then they’re going to meet us on the polls.”
Around the south, Christian non secular leaders are urging their congregations to check in to vote in subsequent 12 months’s election, elevating the unbelievable specter of a mass defection to both Abubakar’s PDP or Peter Obi’s Labour Birthday celebration.
Tinubu’s supporters really feel that he can nonetheless recoup the make stronger of those teams even though he defies them and is going forward to appoint a Muslim operating mate. They level to the truth that his spouse, Remi Tinubu, is an ordained pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria’s essential Pentecostal church, and the truth that Tinubu himself is on the subject of the Normal Overseer of the church, Pastor Enoch Adeboye. In 2018, he, Tinubu, attended the RCCG’s 66^th Annual Conference at which his spouse was once ordained as Assistant Pastor. Tinubu just lately spoke about his function in nominating Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, any other RCCG pastor, for the placement.
Whether or not those connections would suffice to nonetheless the ferment inside the Nigerian Christian group continues to be observed.
Already hobbled via the execrable report of an incumbent whom he just lately boasted of getting helped to energy, Tinubu might discover a united Christian opposition too steep a climb.   
This e-newsletter is a part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Challenge at the Long term of Democracy.

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