ANALYSIS: Peter Obi: A president without majority in National Assembly?

If elections are won and lost on the excitement and animated anticipations of supporters, no candidate would ose. But we do not get to know the outcome until the election has come and gone, a winner has emerged and the losers have melted into the air like the morning dew to count their losses.

To many supporters, it does not matter whether their candidates are running against the tide with insurmountable hurdles on their way, they always see victory before Election Day. Sometimes, their optimism is even higher than that of the contestants themselves – a case of those at the ringside being more confident and optimistic than the gladiators in the coliseum!

The foregoing describes the jubilant expectation and expansive anticipation of the supporters of the candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, in the 25 February presidential election.

The expectation is pervasive and boisterous, especially among the core of Mr Obi’s supporters in the self-styled ‘Obidient Movement’, an amorphous movement of mostly young, energetic, boisterous and upwardly mobile
Nigerians who believe it is time to do away with the ‘ancient regime’ of the Nigerian political class. Strangely though, Mr Obi was until recently a senior member of the old order that the Obidient movement wants to sweep away in one fell swoop.

However, if not for the massive support of the Obidient movement that has made his candidature gain traction in the last few months, Mr Obi’s campaign would have lost energy and momentum and he would possibly have been written off in the race. But that is not the case. He is firmly in the race.

One principal campaign strategy of the movement is weaponising the anger of Nigerians over the comatose economy, unemployment, insecurity, corruption and divisiveness as tools of mass destruction against the APC and its federal government led by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The major opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which was Mr Obi’s immediate past abode, is also not spared of their ballistic missiles as the ‘Obidient’ foot soldiers consider the party on whose ticket their hero ran for vice president in 2019 a Siamese twin of the APC.

The expectation of the Obidient Movement, however, is not unique. It is normal. The supporters of Bola Tinubu of the APC, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP, and the other candidates are also nursing their own expectations of victory. Omoyele Sowore of the AAC, the only self-styled revolutionary in the election, has said he is not to be written off. He is in the race to ‘take back’ the country.

*Expectation buoyed by opinion polls*It has to be stated that the optimism of Mr Obi’s supporters is also buoyed by the prediction of some polls conducted on voters’ preferences in the election.

Some of the polls, such as those conducted by ANAP Foundation and Bloomberg, a subsidiary of the Bloomberg News, put the former Anambra helmsman in the lead.

Another poll conducted for ANAP Foundation in the last quarter of 2022 by NOI Polls had similarly predicted victory for the man with an effeminate voice. So also did the one by Nextier, though all the polls have a caveat: They projected that the election will most likely end in a run-off since they see no candidate winning on the first ballot.

To win on the first ballot, a candidate needs to poll the highest number of votes and 25 per cent of the votes in two-thirds of the country’s 36 states, including the FCT.

The polls have amplified the optimism of the Obi camp but critics have dismissed them as not credible and falling short of international standards in terms of the methodology and sample sizes of the data they relied upon to produce their results.

Obi’s presidency will be an unusual scenarioShould the projections come true at the election on Saturday, Mr Obi’s presidency will throw up another scenario not witnessed in this Fourth Republic, since 1999.

Nigeria will have a president whose party is not in control of the National Assembly. This is because the Labour Party has not got enough grassroots penetration to win the majority of seats in the next National Assembly come Saturday unlike the PDP and APC.

More importantly, the major promoters of the Obi presidency – the Obidient movement- hardly give a hoot about the National Assembly. One immediate interpretation of their indifference in this regard is that once they cast their ballot for Mr Obi, they will bother less with the rest candidates contesting in the National Assembly elections. Instead, the APC and PDP best stand to remain dominant, leaving the fringe parties to produce minimal representation.

According to INEC’s final list of candidates for the National Assembly elections, LP has 80 candidates for the 109 statutory seats in the Senate while it has 208 for the statutory 360 in the House of Representatives. Therefore, even if half of LP’s candidates win their federal legislative elections, which is very unlikely, the party could still be a minority in parliament.

To have a simple majority in the Senate, a party must have at least 55 seats. And for the House of Representatives, the majority party will have at least 181 seats. Except a never- before-seen political miracle happens, there is no way the Labour Party will produce up to 50 senators or even 100 representatives in the Saturday polls.

The party of every elected Nigerian president, except Shehu Shagari in 1979, has had a majority in the National Assembly: from Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan to President Muhammadu Buhari.

When that privilege eluded President Shagari in 1979, his National Party of Nigeria entered into an accord to share power with the Nigerian People’s Party.

Had the 12 June 1993 election not been annulled by Ibrahim Babangida, the late Moshood Abiola’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) would also have enjoyed firm control of the National Assembly. Mr Obi’s Labour Party has no chance of enjoying that privilege.

While the Nigerian constitution does not say the president’s party must be the majority in the National Assembly, it is practically the convention here and abroad that it will control at least one of the chambers.

This is to facilitate a smooth, working relationship between the legislative and executive arms of the government. It is feared that a hostile parliament will pose a critical impediment to the president’s policies and programmes that need legislative approvals. They may be stalled in the chambers mostly for petty reasons as rival politicians and political parties are wont to do.

To avoid a potential landmine that hostile parliaments are wired to lay, political parties and their candidates often campaign vigorously to win control in the National Assembly.

In all his campaign stops so far, Mr Obi hardly canvasses for the candidates of the Labour Party for the National Assembly elections with the same energy he has been campaigning for himself. It is all about him being elected the president. Yet, he cannot fix the country, in a democratic environment, without the cooperation of the National Assembly.

The recent midterm congressional elections in the United States underscore the preceding point. President Joe Biden campaigned vigorously for the candidates of the Democratic Party as much as the Republicans did, including former President Donald Trump. In the end, the Republicans retook control of Congress while the Democrats retained the Senate. Whatever hostility Mr Biden may suffer from the Republican’s takeover of Congress, he will get a buffer in the Senate.

Some commentators have suggested that Mr Obi may solve the problem by defecting to the party with the majority in the National Assembly if he wins the election. A clever move one may say but such a move will further accentuate the position of Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat musician, who described Mr Obi as a political opportunist.

In any case, Mr Obi has not maintained fidelity to one political party since he debuted his political career in 2003. He started with APGA, a party he vowed never to abandon, but left the party shortly after his tenure as governor in 2014 and moved into the PDP. He is now the new face of the Labour Party.

In fact, some critics have been pondering what will happen to the Labour Party and the ‘Obidient’ movement if he does not win the election. Will he undertake to build it into a formidable national third force or pack his baggage and disappear into the shadows? Well, no one can foretell his next moves for now, if he does not win on Saturday.

The question then remains: Can Nigeria with its present myriad of woes that need urgent fixing survive a possible turbulent relationship occasioned by party differences between the president and the National Assembly? The
answer is in the air!

Possible implications of opposition-controlled NASS to President ObiInterestingly, Mr Obi is not a stranger to that scenario. As governor of Anambra State on the platform of APGA, his state House of Assembly was dominated by the PDP. The relationship was a cat and rat one, with Mr Obi
being impeached controversially on 2 November 2006, seven months after he was sworn into office.

The Supreme Court later quashed the impeachment and restored him to office in February 2007. The hostility of his lawmakers also hampered his administration in many ways.

Although he was able to survive the landmines and missiles thrown his way by the truculent state lawmakers, essentially through judicial intervention, Anambra is a small canvas compared to Nigeria. The country, for all intents and purposes, may not so easily withstand such impediments to governance at the national level.

To get what they want, federal lawmakers too may dangle the sword of Damocles: threaten the impeachment of the president. And as it is, it does not look as if Mr Obi has the necessary political charisma and dexterity to disarm petulant lawmakers without firing his own bullets. The country may find itself in a cul-de-sac if that happens.

Even as politically foxy as former President Obasanjo was, and despite his PDP being in firm control of the National Assembly, the House of Representatives with Ghali Na’aba as Speaker peppered him and even attempted to impeach him until behind-the-scene interventions removed the threat.

Presidents often have to lobby for legislative support for their policies and programmes even when they belong to the same parties with the majority in the National Assembly. But that requires special political skills and connections, more so when the parliament is in opposition control.

Nigerians did not see much of Mr Obi’s lobbying capacity when he was Anambra State governor. He only relied on the courts to serve his two terms. But no one can say for sure these days how a court judgement will go, no matter how clear-cut the issues appear. It remains to be seen, therefore, if a President Obi has the skill and temperament to have a working relationship with a parliament under opposition control. Some political observers and commentators believe he does not have such political know-how to manoeuvre opposition
lawmakers to do his bidding.

That the country is in dire straits and needs urgent redirecting to avoid a further slip into the abyss is not debatable. The country also needs some sort of political stability for the next administration to get things done.

The next president will need the buy-in of the relevant institutions to walk his talk.

As he has obviously not planned to get his party the majority in the National Assembly, an Obi presidency will have the tricky assignment of forging durable cooperation with the next assembly of federal lawmakers, even though he has said his agenda is to destroy the political structures that they and their parties represent.