Celebration of ’Yar Kyadawa

On Monday afternoon, two days after the Saturday, July 28, 1979 governorship elections in Nigeria, FEDECO in Sokoto declared that NPN’s candidate Alhaji Shehu Kangiwa had won the election. Dozens of people quickly filled Kangiwa’s house at Alhassan Avenue to congratulate him. From nowhere, the female praise singer ’Yar Kyadawa, locally known as Bindin Zakara [rooster’s tail] for her unguarded antics, arrived at the house. As she darted through the crowd of men in the courtyard, she threw away her wrapper. She charged into the main house, found a large gathering of women, fell down in front of the Governor-elect’s wives, grabbed a kettle full of water, poured it on the ground and drank it. In Hausa culture, zuba ruwa kasa asha [pour water on the ground and drink it] is the ultimate display of happiness. I later heard that the generous Kangiwa gave ‘Yar Kyadawa a three-bedroom house.

The man in Bauchi who dived into a gutter full of stale water two weeks ago and drunk from it in order to celebrate President Buhari’s re-election was probably thinking of ‘Yar Kyadawa and her fast path to a house. Whether the austere Buhari, who is the opposite of Kangiwa, will give him a house at Bakin Kura Street, remains to be seen. The Bauchi man should have first asked Mai Talle Tara, the Kebbi woman who donated all her life’s savings to Buhari’s 2015 campaign. I remember that he sent an official delegation to condole with her family when she died.

Unique Nigerian modes of celebration will be on display this morning as results pour in from weekend’s governorship elections. In Nigeria, orchestrated celebration starts well before the real trend of results is known. The idea, probably, is to demoralize opponents. Motorcyclists speed through towns, standing on the seat, their arms spread, performing dangerous acrobatics. Cars will be hooting, children will be chanting, fire crackers will be ignited, while youths will march through areas that supported the losing candidate, taunting and insulting them.

The winner of a governorship election will receive many congratulatory messages, but not from the place that matters most. Forget about the 2015 Jonathan phone call. Very few, if any governorship election losers this year will congratulate the winners. Instead, you will hear a lot of “rejection” of the results, allegations of manipulation, charges that soldiers were used to harass opponents, Buba Galadimastyle “disappearances” and vows to go to the tribunal.

All that is normal here. A losing candidate’s supporters will be so angry at the official results that it is a huge risk for him to congratulate the winner. If he does so, no one will waste his time supporting him next time he enters the contest. Nigerians are well known for their love of football but their attitude to an election contest is very different from their attitude to a football match. Nigerians know that a football match is won, lost or drawn. When their team loses a match, they seldom blame the referee. Instead they blame their players for not attacking well, for not marking their opponents’ strikers, and they blame the coach for adopting the wrong match strategy. “He was not reading the match,” you often hear. In contrast, every election loss is blamed on opponents and INEC.

Nineteen governors were up for reelection in last Saturday’s election. The governor of Lagos, who was eligible to contest, did not do so having lost his party’s primaries. Most of these incumbents, belonging to APC and PDP, are likely to win re-elected. A few of them could however lose their re-election bids. For an incumbent governor to lose his re-election bid is the most traumatic thing that can happen in Nigerian politics, second only to President Jonathan’s failure to win re-election in 2015.

Next to this in traumatic political effect is the second term governor who is not eligible for re-election but who fails to get his anointed successor elected. The second-term governors of Borno, Yobe, Nasarawa, Kwara, Oyo, Ogun and Imo were known to have anointed successors at the weekend. While some of them were easily coasting home to victory, several were going down to defeat, a major blow for their sponsors.

Lame duck is not lame enough to describe a Nigerian governor who fails in his second term bid or a second term governor who tried but failed to install a successor. His power under the Constitution evaporates in real life. Party leaders, lawmakers, commissioners and traditional rulers stop coming to his house. They instead try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming governor, or at least they distance themselves from the defeated one in order not to attract the wrath of the governor-elect. A former press secretary once told me the story of what happened to his boss when he failed to get his anointed successor elected. He said ten days after the election, he found the governor sitting alone at home, where not too long before it was impossible to gain access.

On the other hand, a man who wins a governorship election in Nigeria has said goodbye to sleep. His house will be busy as a beehive. People will be jostling to see him. People all around burst into laughter at every joke he makes, however dry it is. Behind the scenes there is intense lobbying to become SSG, Head of Service, Chief of Staff, commissioner, permanent secretary, press secretary, special adviser, liaison officer etc. Contractors will be buzzing about like so many bees. Consultants have thick “proposals” tucked under their arms. Some contractors have already mobilized tailors to sew several dozen flowing new gowns for the governor-elect.

For the man who lost a governorship election, his house will also be full--of lawyers. Nigerian lawyers are disaster profiteers who read the newspapers avidly, looking for a story or advertisement that displeased someone. They rush to him with a suggestion to sue for damages. The election season is their juiciest; they rush to losing candidates and show them how they can “retrieve their stolen mandate” through the courts. In other lands a lawyer convinces a client to hire him by citing the number of cases he won but in Nigeria, a lawyer will tell a client that he was a Law School classmate of the election tribunal chairman.

A former governor of a Northern state once told me what transpired when his opponent mulled the idea of not going to the tribunal. He said he called him and said, “If you go to the tribunal, the lawyers will eat your money and they will eat my money. And you know most of the SANs are Yoruba so we are only enriching Yorubaland. But if you agree not to go to the tribunal, look at the money I have set aside for the case. I will give you half of it and we will both rest.”

The Chief Justice and Chief Judges have complained in the past that election tribunal duties grind down the judiciary and divert attention from their normal cases. In Nigeria, probably half of all election contests end up before the tribunals. A politician without the slightest hope of proving his case will still go to the tribunal in order to prolong the contest with his opponent. The lawyers will never advise a man not to go to tribunal because he has a weak case. As for the judges, despite their protestations to the contrary, they love it that way. Not for nothing did some governors say that they spent more money in the courts than in the election campaign.

Where does all that leave the wives and children? A Nigerian woman whose husband lost his bid to become governor or his bid to remain as governor, is severely traumatized. Women all around were already calling her “Your Excellency Ma” and she already had many dreams of grandeur, sirens, foreign trips, exclusive shopping and of launching an NGO. For all that to disappear in a puff of electoral smoke, is very traumatic.