Akanni Alaka
Campaign for this year’s general election, which is barely six weeks away, is in full bloom. This, a visitor to Nigeria can easily confirm with the different forms of beautifully designed posters, banners with pictures of contestants adorning road medians, junctions, walls, street corners as well as on various sizes of signboards across the country.
According to the timetable and schedule of activities for the elections released by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in accordance with the Constitution and the Electoral Act on January 9, 2018, political parties were expected to have commenced their campaigns for presidential and National Assembly elections from November 18.
Candidates for governorship, House of Assembly and Federal Capital Territory, FCT Council election were also expected to have kicked off the process of selling their plans and programmes to the electorate from the first day of last month.
In accordance with the timetable, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, had kicked off its campaign for the presidential election with a zonal rally in Sokoto State on December 3, 2018. The party and its presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar had also held similar zonal rallies in other parts of the country.
On his part, Yemi Osinbajo, the vice presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, has been visiting public places, markets, and homes of selected families in various parts of the country in what the campaign organisation of his party described as ‘house to house campaign.’
Other notable presidential candidates who have been going around the country trying to sell their programmes to the electorate include Omoyele Sowore of African Action Congress, AAC, Oby Ezekwesili of Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, ACPN, Kingsley Moghalu of Young Progressives Party, YPP, Tope Fasua of Abundant Renewal Party of Nigeria, ARPN, and Fela Durotoye of the Alliance for New Nigeria, ANN.
Candidates for the governorship, National Assembly as well as state Houses of Assembly elections have also embarked on campaign for election or re-election across the country. However, the campaign for the election is expected to enter a higher gear in the next coming days with the inauguration of the 47 member APC Presidential Campaign Council, APC (PCC), chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari with the national leader of the party, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as the co-chair.
While the ruling party’s main presidential council is getting set for takeoff, President Buhari last Thursday inaugurated the APC Women and Youths Presidential Campaign Team, PCT, chaired by Aisha, his wife. The PCT, with over 500 members, the wife of the president said, is a support team to the APC PCC.
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While some analysts said the huge membership of the support group may be indicative of the ‘noise’ Nigerians will be subjected to in the coming days in the guise of campaign, President Buhari, at the inauguration, however, urged members of PCT to embark on door-to-door campaign, selling the programmes, achievements and future plans of the party to Nigerians.
The PDP had also during the inauguration of its 154-member presidential campaign council, which has the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, as its director-general promised to make its campaign to regain the power it lost in 2015 issue based.
“I made it clear that our campaigns will be issues-based,” Uche Secondus, the national chairman of the opposition party said while inaugurating the campaign council on November. 29, 2018.
Indeed, to make the campaign issue-based, some of the political parties, especially at the national level have presented documents containing the programmes of actions they will implement if they are elected into office.
The APC plans to scale up what it described as its achievements since it was elected in 2015, which it encapsulated in its ‘Next Level’ document, while the PDP has also come up with its plans and programmes contained in its document on how to ‘get Nigeria Working Again.’
The candidates of AAC, ACPN, YPP, ARPN and ANN also have similar campaign documents available for download at various online platforms at the click of a button.
Former Vice-President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Monday Ubani, said in a recent interview that the production of the policy documents is indicative of the increasing maturity of the electioneering process in Nigeria.
He, however, admitted that as beautiful as the documents are “the integrity of the candidates is very key because that is what would make them fulfil all the promises they have made, else they would remain what they are – promises.”
But Ezenwa Nwagwu, an election observer, said the idea of producing policy documents has become a ritual Nigeria politicians go through every election year without any concrete plan of how to translate the documents into the development of the country.
Nwagwu said: “Politicians go through this ritual of policy document every four years and what you see is a nicely crafted manifesto prepared by consultants or whatever they call them. But what has that translated to over the years? In fact, I can assure you that in 2023, you would see better documents.”
He noted that the policy documents are mostly produced by consultants, adding that the politicians, who they are produced for, lacked the idea of how to implement them. He also noted that the documents most times did not capture the real needs of communities across Nigeria.
“Hope 1993, Green Revolution, Seven-Point Agenda, Transformation Agenda, Change, Next Level, Getting Nigeria to Work Again and all those things are mantras and clichés, crafted by jobbers who call themselves consultants. Nigeria needs a leader that can work with a charter drawn by communities and not a policy document,” Nwagwu said in a recent newspaper interview.
Regardless of the merits and demerits of the documents, the irony is that the promises contained in them are not even put on sale to the electorates in the ongoing campaign across the country. For example, perusals of posters and banners of politicians now being used to deface walls and other public places across the country will reveal that they are merely avenues for displaying over edited pictures of candidates.
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The posters are absolutely lacking in indications of either the manifesto of the party the candidates belonged to or any indication of the programmes he or she intended to pursue when elected. Therefore, the news across Nigeria on political posters as the country headed towards the polls have not been about their contents, but allegations and counter allegations of tearing off of the papers by supporters of the ruling and opposition parties in different areas.
Also, most of the of the candidates have failed to use the rallies they have been holding in nooks and crannies of the country to sell the programmes contained in their policy documents to the masses. Rather than dwell on the ‘Next Level’ or ‘Get Nigeria Working Again Document,’ the two leading parties have in the past few days being engaged in accusations and counter accusation of ownership of some companies in Nigeria.
In the same vein, the PDP and APC, the two main parties that have been organising rallies at national, states and local levels have turned the ‘soapbox’ into avenue for propaganda on which of them is most corrupt. They also leveled allegations that have no basis against each other like the claim by Governor Nasir El-Rufai that PDP rented crowd from neighbouring countries for its Northwest rally because Sokoto people refused to come out for the rally. This has been complemented by the nearly takeover of the social media by political parties, with hundreds of troll accounts designed to spread fake news against each other.
Dr Kari Umar of the Sociology Department of the University of Abuja told The Nigerian Xpress that the campaign for 2019 election is following a pattern that has been set in the past in which few issues are on the table for discussion in spite of expectations to the contrary.
“What they called campaign in Nigeria since the first republic are just some rallies where people come and dance and sing, they make merry and very little is said. The whole thing is about singing and dancing. You see like Adams, El-Rufai dancing and on the other side, you will see the likes of Adeleke, Secondus and all of them dancing, very little is said. So, at the end of the day, if you think about what happened at any of the state or zonal rally, you can hardly get any fundamental takeaway apart from merry making and needless razzmatazz,” he said.
He added that the Nigerian political elite usually ensured that electioneering is “centred on personalities and needless controversies and inanities – issues that are not fundamental to the needs of the masses.”
The lecturer noted that while the PDP recently came out and made a lot of noise that they have evidence that Buhari’s family has bought Keystone Bank, Nigerians were excited, expecting them to bring the evidence out as a “smoking gun” for their campaign. But up till now, he noted, the opposition party to the disappointment of many, has been unable to present any evidence to back up its claims.
In the same vein, he noted that APC members have been shouting that ‘Atiku is corrupt’ without bringing forward any tangible evidence to back up the claim. “And sometimes, they even damaged themselves without knowing it – like the APC has been engaging in blame games all through. For instance, PDP said Shagari built steel mills in Osogbo, everywhere, but some people now pointed out that they (PDP) sold everything. So, you can see that there is very little creativity”
Still, Kari said the direction that the campaign for the 2019 elections has taken is surprising because with the two major candidates for the presidential election share similar demographic profiles like region of origin, ethnic and religious background among others. It was believed that they will concentrate on issues and how they will tackle the problems facing the country: “So, it is surprising that their campaign had degenerated to persons, attacking each other and leaving fundamental issues of development – the major problems and challenges facing the country,” the Sociology lecturer said.
He added that the parties have also perfected the art of using crowds for propaganda. “Sometimes the crowd is rented and it is the same people who came to fill the stadium, square, the open field or whatever for APC or PDP. So, the success of these rallies is graded in terms of the size of the crowd.”
The don lamented that the smaller parties seemed to have been drowned in the din of the two major parties while many Nigerians, including political commentators have taken it for granted that the race for the 2019 presidency is a two-horse battle between the PDP and the APC, even when over 45 candidates will be on the presidential election ballot.
He also noted that some of the political parties are mere cash cows set up by their owners to make money from the main parties. “Some of the smaller parties and their presidential candidates especially are trying to make noise like Oby Ezekwesili, Fela Durotoye, Sowore, Tope Fasua, but they can hardly be heard amidst the cacophony of noise of the two major parties. So, there is really nothing exceptional or different that is going on now from what we have always known about campaign for elections in Nigeria,” Kari said.
Speaking in the same vein, Chido Onumah, Coordinator of the African Centre for Media and Information Literacy, AFRICMIL, and an author said unlike in 2015, the political parties, including the opposition PDP are not engaging Nigerians enough ahead of thegeneral election.
He noted that this may be partly due to financial incapacity and the general situation in the country. “It is strange that election is just about six weeks away and you can’t see that election fever that is normally associated with elections in the country. But a lot of it has to do with our existential situation- the economic crisis, political crisis, the insecurity in the country whether you are looking at the Northeast – in Zamfara now, it spreads to the president’s home state of Katsina and so on,” Onumah told The Nigerian Xpress.
The civil society activist also said he believed that the time frame allocated by INEC for campaign is too short, especially for the newer and smaller parties. While noting that the smaller political parties like the YPP, AA and so on have been holding town hall events to sell their policies and programmes to Nigerians, he doubted how far they can go before the election. He argued that INEC should have given the candidates enough time to traverse the length and breadth of the country to meet people, talk to them and even have time for more debates and town hall meetings to conscientisize the electorate and give them opportunity to do proper assessment of those asking for their mandates.
“But the time is too short; even get to know these parties and their candidates. In a country as big as Nigeria, how many places can you afford to go to in three, four months, how many people can you afford to meet? So, you can say your issues on Channels TV in Abuja, but the outreach is limited. So, it is good that some of the political parties are bringing up these issues, but their campaigns are not likely to permeate the nooks and crannies of this country because the time is not available,” he noted.
However, Onumah noted that initiatives like the proposed series of televised town hall meeting being organised by a journalist, Kadaria Ahmed in partnership with Nigerian Television Authority for the presidential candidates and their deputies, coming up on January 19 and a similar initiative by the Covenant Christian Centre are opportunities which politicians should take advantage of to talk to Nigerians.
In the same vein, YIAGA AFRICA last Thursday launched an independent television program designed to provide strategic media support and visibility to youth (women and men) candidates seeking elective offices in the 2019 general elections. YIAGA AFRICA’s Executive Director, Samson Itodo, said in a statement that every week, youth candidates running for legislative and executive positions would be featured to engage voters on their manifestos and agenda.
On his part, Kari said politicians should know that Nigerians are more interested in what they want to do, what they have done and why they have done those things or why they have failed to do them and why they should be trusted.
“The campaign should have provided an opportunity for them to offer tangible explanations and an avenue for trying to persuade us to vote for them. But little persuasion is being done. Rather, what we have is propaganda and sometimes, cajoling – like the Miyyeti Allah coming out to say all Fulani must compulsorily vote for Atiku or somebody will say ‘any Igbo man that vote for Buhari is a bastard.’
“That’s why I said the nature of the campaign sometimes borders on inanities. The candidates are not talking and when the people who are talking for them speak, they hardly say anything serious,” he said.
