The Muslim-Muslim Ticket is Good in Abuja but Bad in Kaduna—When You Have a PhD in Propaganda

by Mohammed Bello Doka 

30 July, 2026.

On July 10, 2026, the All Progressives Congress formally submitted the presidential nomination forms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima to the Independent National Electoral Commission. Tinubu, a Muslim from the South-West, had again chosen Shettima, a Muslim from the North-East, as his running mate for the 2027 presidential election. Muslim-Muslim ticket. At the highest level of the country's leadership, two men of the same faith would once again seek to govern a nation deeply divided along religious lines.

The APC faithfuls praised it as a masterstroke of political engineering. They called it national unity, bridge-building across the Niger, a progressive statement that competence transcends creed. They flooded the airwaves with sermons about how Nigeria had finally matured beyond religious sentiment. They argued that the Muslim-Muslim ticket remained a winning formula that would deliver victory in 2027. They said dropping Shettima would have been politically catastrophic for the APC. Tinubu's Muslim-Muslim ticket was good. It was visionary. It was the future.

Now turn your gaze to Kaduna State. Just eighteen days after the APC confirmed the Tinubu-Shettima Muslim-Muslim ticket for the presidency, Governor Uba Sani announced Jerry Adams, a Christian from Southern Kaduna, as his running mate for the 2027 governorship election. The governor described the decision as a reaffirmation of his administration's commitment to inclusion, justice, fairness, and equity. The same APC faithfuls are hyping this to high heaven as a return to balance, a bold demonstration of inclusiveness, and a commitment to peaceful coexistence in the state. They are applauding Uba Sani for ending the era of Muslim-Muslim ticket which he inherited from his predecessor. They are praising him for choosing a Christian running mate while conveniently ignoring that the party's presidential ticket remains Muslim-Muslim at the highest level.

The Lagos-Ibadan media machine has joined the chorus. From the newsrooms of Vanguard to the editorial desks of Punch, from The Nation to Tribune, they have all lined up to celebrate Uba Sani's "inclusiveness" while maintaining a conspicuous silence on the Tinubu-Shettima Muslim-Muslim ticket that towers above it all. The same newspapers that splash headlines about Kaduna's return to religious balance have nothing to say about the federal ticket that remains unapologetically Muslim-Muslim. The same columnists who pen passionate editorials about the virtues of Uba Sani's Christian pick have not written a single line questioning why the presidency itself cannot mirror this newfound commitment to balance. The Lagos-Ibadan corridor, which prides itself as the intellectual heartbeat of the nation, has become a willing accomplice in this theatre of selective outrage.

And what of Nasir El-Rufai? The same APC faithfuls who now praise Uba Sani's Christian pick are using it as a retroactive cudgel to beat El-Rufai. They frame El-Rufai's 2019 Muslim-Muslim ticket as extremist, insensitive, and provocative—conveniently forgetting that when El-Rufai did it, they praised him for his courage and vision. They have now rewritten history to cast El-Rufai as a religious bigot while celebrating Uba Sani as a statesman, all the while defending the Tinubu-Shettima Muslim-Muslim ticket that renders their entire argument absurd.

But the hypocrisy does not end there. The same APC faithfuls who defend Tinubu-Shettima and praise Uba Sani are the very same people who defend Benue and Plateau States. Since 1999, Benue State has been governed by a succession of Christians: George Akume, Gabriel Suswam, Samuel Ortom, and now Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Iormem Alia, a Catholic priest elected in 2023 on the APC platform. Every single deputy governor in Benue since 1999 has been a Christian. Muslim-Muslim? No. Christian-Christian? Yes. For twenty-five years. And the same APC faithfuls have never uttered a word. No outrage. No demands for balance. No sermons about inclusion. Radio silence.

Plateau State tells the same story. Since 1999, governors Joshua Dariye, Simon Lalong, and now Caleb Mutfwang have all been Christians. Every deputy governor has been a Christian. Josephine Piyo, the current deputy governor, is a Christian. Christian-Christian ticket. For twenty-five years. And the same APC faithfuls? Not a peep. They defend it. They justify it. They call it the will of the people. They call it tradition. They call it the reality of the Middle Belt. But when it comes to Kaduna, they suddenly discover the virtue of balance.

So let us perform the simple arithmetic that their minds refuse to compute. In Abuja, the same APC faithfuls defend a Muslim-Muslim ticket. In Kaduna, the same APC faithfuls praise a Muslim-Christian ticket while demonising the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the past. In Benue and Plateau, the same APC faithfuls defend Christian-Christian tickets for twenty-five years without a single demand for balance. The rule is brutally simple: balance is only required when Muslims hold power. When Christians hold power exclusively for decades, balance becomes irrelevant. That is not principle. That is not fairness. That is not inclusion. That is doublethink wearing a Nigerian accent.

George Orwell understood this phenomenon intimately. In his novel 1984, he coined the term "doublethink"—the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. He defined it as "to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them."

The APC faithfuls are masters of this art. When defending Tinubu's Muslim-Muslim ticket, they chant: "Competence over creed! Religion doesn't matter!" When praising Uba Sani's Christian-Muslim ticket, they chant: "Balance! Inclusion! Justice!" When demonising El-Rufai's Muslim-Muslim ticket, they chant: "Where was the balance? What about the Christians?" When defending Benue and Plateau's Christian-Christian tickets, they fall silent. They don't even see the contradiction because their minds have been trained to switch frameworks based on who benefits and who is being attacked. The belief is not the point. The power is the point.

This is not merely hypocrisy. This is cognitive dissonance weaponised. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who gave us the theory of cognitive dissonance, showed that when humans hold two conflicting beliefs, they experience psychological discomfort and will go to extraordinary lengths to resolve it—not by changing their beliefs, but by distorting reality to make the contradiction disappear. The APC faithfuls do not resolve the contradiction. They deny that it exists. They perform mental gymnastics that would make an Olympic judge weep.

And when their logic fails to convince, when the absurdity of their position becomes too glaring to ignore, they resort to the oldest weapons in the propagandist's arsenal: insults, name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and strawman arguments. They do not engage with the substance of the contradiction. They attack the character of the person pointing it out. They call you a troublemaker, a pessimist, an enemy of progress. They build a strawman version of your argument and knock it down with great fanfare, never once addressing the actual point you made.

This is the rotten thought pattern that characterises APC faithfuls across every stratum of society. The beer parlour gossip in Lagos who shouts down anyone questioning Tinubu's Muslim-Muslim ticket uses the same logical contortions as Bayo Onanuga in the Presidential Villa. The street-level supporter who dismisses El-Rufai's critics as "enemies of progress" employs the same rhetorical sleight of hand as the presidential spokesman who downplays economic hardship and dismisses valid criticism as exaggerated or politically motivated. The journalist in Ibadan who celebrates Uba Sani's Christian pick while ignoring the Muslim-Muslim ticket in Abuja is no different from the party loyalist in Kaduna who demonises El-Rufai while defending Tinubu. They are all the same. The educated class and the unlettered masses, the highbrow villa and the lowly beer parlour, the Lagos newsroom and the Ibadan editorial board—they share the same beclouded judgment, the same effortless capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs and impose them on others, the same reflexive resort to insults when their logic fails.

The tragedy is not that they believe these contradictions. The tragedy is that they genuinely do not see them. They have been trained to switch frameworks so seamlessly that they no longer perceive the switch. In Kaduna, they demand balance and praise Uba Sani. In Benue, they ignore its absence and defend the status quo. In Abuja, they celebrate the very thing they condemn in El-Rufai. And they do all of this without a flicker of shame, without a moment of self-reflection, without the slightest acknowledgment that they are holding two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously.

This is not politics. This is not governance. This is not even ideology. This is the pathology of power—the desperate, unending contortion of the human mind to justify whatever serves the interest of the moment. The APC faithfuls have earned their PhDs in propaganda not from any university, but from the school of cynical expediency. They have learned to say whatever needs to be said, believe whatever needs to be believed, and forget whatever needs to be forgotten. And they expect the rest of us to do the same.

But we see them. We see the doublethink. We see the cognitive dissonance. We see the absurdity of a mind that can praise a Muslim-Muslim ticket in Abuja, praise a Muslim-Christian ticket in Kaduna, demonise a Muslim-Muslim ticket from the past, and defend a Christian-Christian ticket in Benue and Plateau—all in the same breath, all without a trace of irony. We see them, and we are not fooled.

The Muslim-Muslim ticket is good in Abuja but bad in Kaduna—when you have a PhD in propaganda. But for those of us who have not yet enrolled in that school of convenient delusion, the mathematics is simple: a contradiction is a contradiction, no matter how many fancy theories you wrap around it. And no amount of name-calling, ad hominem attacks, or strawman arguments will make it disappear.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected] 

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