Are There Any Lessons In The 2015 Election Cycle? Here Are Some Useful Takeaways

In the last couple of days, I have been reading and watching a lot of commentaries on the 2015 election campaign. Some have been useful and intellectually stimulating, some others are just hogwash. I have also been reading Owelle Rochas Okorocha, the Imo State Governor's take and his supposed letter to the Igbos.

Perhaps, some of his summations are right but I strongly disagreed with his belief that the Igbos pathologically hates the Hausas and Yorubas; nothing could be further from the truth, besides, one cannot truly hate a people, and still be able to live and trade with them successfully over the years. I have related a great deal with the Igbos wherever they chose to live across the nation, whether be it in the North or South, and I do not believe that the Igbos hate anybody much less the Hausas and Yoruba, with whom most of them live and do business.

Regardless of whatever happened during the Civil War and its aftermath, and regardless of what has happened in the past, and in the face of today's harsh realities, the Igbos had been able to show in this election cycle that they can no longer be taken for granted. They know how to be fiercely united around a common cause they believed in, and therefore constitutes a formidable voting and power bloc. In future, they can be the deciding vote in any election, especially where the North and Southwest can't agree as they agreed in this particular election.

Their love and support for Jonathan therefore is legendary, and even trumped that of GEJ's own in the South-south, but that doesn't in anyway deviate from the incontrovertible fact that the Igbos in the APC in the Southeast made it easy for the APC to win effectively as they made it difficult for the election results to be manipulated; just contrast the almost 5million vote numbers GEJ got in 2011 in that region to the about 2.5million vote numbers he got this time around in that same region; then compare the difference to the 2.57million vote margin that the APC used in winning the 2015 Presidential election; do the math yourself, and you will see that Governor Shettima of Borno State was right in his take. But make no mistake: this love and support shouldn't been seen as stupid or blind support.

I also want to say here that no Igbo man should regret this so-called perceived loss in this election because of their staunch support for Jonathan for it is not really the Igbos that lost but GEJ and his people. That GEJ lost was not the making of some of the permutations that have been flying around. Granted, he failed on many fronts, but he failed mainly because he could not gauge the mood of the people his Administration has been overseeing for over five years. But more importantly, he failed due to poor political strategy and the stubborn refusal to reach across the aisles…More @ http://bit.ly/1GRO3SU