Every nation is built twice. The first construction is the one we can see. Roads are laid, airports are commissioned, constitutions are written, courts are established, and governments come and go. This is the architecture of the state, the visible framework through which power is exercised and public life is organized. Read Also: 25 children from Kebbi, Kwara, Niger died in terrorists’ captivity — Lawmaker The second construction is less tangible but infinitely more important. It takes place in the minds of citizens. It is built from trust, recognition, and the quiet conviction that despite differences of ethnicity, religion, language, and region, the country belongs equally to all who call it home. A nation survives not because it possesses institutions but because enough people believe those institutions belong to them. That belief is easy to overlook when it is healthy. Like the foundations beneath a building, it attracts little attention precisely because it is doing its job. Citizens go about their lives, elections are held, governments change, and the republic appears secure. Yet history repeatedly shows that the emotional foundations of a country can weaken long before any visible cracks appear in the structure above them. It is against this backdrop that the decision by the All Progressives Congress to retain President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima on a second consecutive Muslim Muslim ticket has generated a reaction that extends far beyond routine political disagreement. To many of its defenders, the controversy appears difficult to understand. They see a political party making a calculation about how best to retain power. They see incumbency, electoral arithmetic, regional alignments, and the practical realities of democratic competition. What many of them fail to appreciate is that political decisions are rarely interpreted solely through the intentions of those who make them. They are interpreted through the experiences of those who receive them. Politics is not merely a struggle over power. It is also a language through which societies communicate recognition, belonging, and status. Every appointment, alliance, nomination, and electoral ticket sends a signal about who is visible within the national imagination and who is expected to accept a more peripheral role. Human beings do not simply want to be governed competently. They want to know that they count. The Constitution, of course, does not require religious balancing. A political party is free to nominate candidates of its choosing, and supporters of the present arrangement argue that competence and electability should matter more than identity. There is merit in the desire to move beyond religious considerations in public life. The difficulty is that Nigeria is not a society in which questions of identity can be wished away by declaration. It is a federation of extraordinary diversity whose stability has long depended on a mixture of formal safeguards and informal understandings designed to reassure competing communities that the republic belongs to all of them. The federal character principle did not emerge by accident. Neither did the unwritten habits of regional and religious balancing that have shaped political life for decades. These arrangements were not necessarily perfect, but they reflected a recognition that in a country as plural as Nigeria, inclusion is not a sentimental aspiration. It is part of the mechanism through which trust is maintained. People rarely admire the beams that hold up a roof. They notice them only when somebody begins to remove them. The anxiety surrounding the current ticket becomes easier to understand when viewed within a broader historical context. For eight years under Muhammadu Buhari, many Nigerians observed a concentration of political authority in the hands of Muslim officeholders. A Muslim President and a Muslim Vice President governed alongside a Muslim Senate President, a Muslim Deputy Senate President, a Muslim Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a Muslim Deputy Speaker. Each office may have emerged through its own political process, yet citizens do not experience power as a series of isolated appointments. They experience it as a pattern. Politics is interpreted cumulatively, and cumulative patterns acquire symbolic meaning regardless of the intentions behind them. This helps explain why comparisons with the Abiola Kingibe ticket of 1993 often generate more heat than understanding. The comparison is superficially appealing because both men were Muslims. Yet politics is not experienced through demographics alone. It is experienced through context. Nigerians certainly knew the religious identities of Moshood Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, but religion did not occupy the same place in the political imagination that it does today. The election was widely understood as part of a
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