Nigeria’s electoral politics has degenerated into a ruthless marketplace of identity where power is bartered not on ideas, competence, or national vision, but on crude arithmetic of faith and ethnicity. The Muslim Muslim ticket of 2023 was not merely a political experiment; it was a seismic rupture that reordered the unspoken hierarchies of power. What followed is even more telling. As the road to 2027–2030 opens, the political class is already rehearsing its next script a loud and unapologetic clamour for a Hausa – Fulani ticket. Yet amid this deafening noise, one absence screams with brutal clarity there is no serious agitation, no elite consensus, no national conversation about a Christian Christian ticket.
This is not coincidence. It is design. Nigeria’s power architecture now operates on selective permissibility. Some identity configurations are normalized, rationalized, even sanctified as “strategic necessity.” Others are treated as radioactive, dismissed before they are spoken, delegitimized by an elite that pretends neutrality while enforcing exclusion. The message is unmistakable power consolidation is acceptable for some blocs, but threatening when imagined by others.
The justifications are predictable and hollow. Demography is invoked as destiny. Stability is weaponized as an excuse. Rotation is cited selectively, applied when convenient and abandoned when inconvenient. Yet these arguments collapse under scrutiny. If pragmatism justified a Muslim Muslim ticket, and inevitability now underwrites the push for a Hausa Fulani presidency, then what moral or constitutional principle forbids a Christian Christian ticket. None exists. What exists instead is an unspoken veto rooted in fear of recalibrating the existing power order.
Christianity in Nigeria is not marginal, peripheral, or numerically insignificant. It is a civilizational force spanning regions, ethnicities, and social strata. Yet politically, it is perpetually infantilized expected to accept balance when others demand dominance, urged toward restraint when others pursue consolidation. This asymmetry corrodes the very foundation of citizenship. A democracy that permits open advocacy for some identities while stigmatizing others is not pluralistic; it is stratified.
Worse still, this selective silence is politically incendiary. It breeds alienation, fuels grievance, and entrenches the belief that the Nigerian state is not an impartial arbiter but a captured project. History offers a stark warning polities do not fracture because people talk too much about injustice; they fracture because injustice is denied, normalized, and institutionalized.
Meanwhile, Nigeria bleeds. Insecurity metastasizes. Inflation crushes livelihoods. Institutions decay into caricatures of governance. Yet the political elite remains fixated on tickets, not transformation. Still, symbolism matters. Leadership is not only about policy; it is about who belongs, who decides, and who must perpetually defer. When entire segments of the population see certain political outcomes foreclosed by elite consensus, faith in the democratic process withers.
Nigeria now stands at an inflection point. It can persist in managing diversity through elite cartels and selective appeasement, or it can confront the hypocrisy at the heart of its identity politics. The question before the nation is not whether Nigeria should produce a Christian Christian ticket. The deeper and more unsettling question is why, in a republic that claims equal citizenship, some political possibilities are loudly normalized while others are silently prohibited. Until that contradiction is confronted, Nigeria’s democracy will remain not a covenant of equals, but a negotiated truce among unequal stakeholders.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
08152094428 (SMS Only)
