2015 campaigns and glorification of mediocrity

In my experience of Nigerian presidential politics, the ongoing presidential campaigns involving two major candidates, President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party and Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress, may stand out as the worst in the country’s history in at least three respects. First, they are short on substance as they fail to educate voters adequately about what the candidates hope to accomplish in office, how, and when. Unlike the Awolowo era, when candidates struggled to outclass one another in reeling out policies and programmes from their manifestoes, the 2015 presidential campaigns are virtually blank on policy issues. In fact, most party members today have no copy of their party’s manifesto, whereas, over five decades ago, my illiterate parents had copies of the Action Group’s manifesto.

This is not to say that the ongoing campaigns are short on campaign slogans. On the one hand, the PDP brandishes “transformation”, and gets its supporters to respond with “Power to the people” to its leaders’ shout of “P-D-P!” On the other hand, the APC hinges its campaign on “change”, and gets its supporters to respond with “Change” to its leaders’ shout of “A-P-C!”

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Beyond the slogans, however, all we get on the campaign trail are occasional promissory one-liners on infrastructure, education, health care, and so on, without clear indications as to how and when the promissory notes will be honoured. Jonathan, of course, has the advantage of incumbency, which allows him to tout his achievements during his first term.

Curiously, the idea of transformation being brandished by the PDP does not resonate well with voters because it is based on President Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda, which the people do not believe in, partly because they have not experienced transformation in their own lives and partly because there are major areas of national life yearning for improvement, namely, security, education, health care, power supply, and the economy. The belief that corruption is widespread and unchecked further weakens the credibility of the transformation agenda. These deficits in national life and the negative perception of Jonathan combine to make his candidacy a hard sell. It is in this respect that incumbency may be regarded as a drawback for him. However, he still has other incumbency factors to fall on, including the control over the treasury and the security forces.

It is equally curious that the idea of change being brandished by the APC is resonating well with voters because it is being interpreted in terms of change from the status quo, that is, from the “reign” of the PDP and from the national deficits discussed earlier. It is also understood as a code for a referendum on Jonathan and the PDP. Here, for example, is how Governor Chibuike Amaechi, the Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Organsation, put it in a recent letter to the International Criminal Court, accusing Mrs Patience Jonathan of inciting supporters of the PDP to stone anyone asking for change: “Change, as the entire country knows by now, is the slogan of the APC – the rallying cry of a political party that wishes to bring hope of greater and better things to come for Nigeria and Nigerians”. This is what change means to the voters, not the kind of change you get from a bus conductor.

In the voters’ interpretation of change, it does not matter what negative baggage is being associated with Buhari and the National Leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu. As one voter puts it, “Let Buhari submit a NEPA bill for a certificate and let Tinubu buy up all of Bourdillon Street, we will still vote the APC”. Another one added, “My father told me that Buhari was once a Head of State, who fought corruption and instilled discipline. We need him now”. Yet another voter said: “Tinubu was a saint when he delivered the South-West to Jonathan in 2011. Now that he has taken over most of the South-West, he has become a criminal”.

Notice that none of these voters raised any serious issue about policy or programmes, because the presidential campaigns have failed to provide sufficient bases for such discussion. Intellectually based discussions on the report of the National Conference, spearheaded by the Ondo State Governor, Dr Olusegun Mimiko, have been limited in scope to particular participants in particular localities. Rather, the campaigns have resorted to the worst kinds of accusations and counter-accusations in which spurious allegations and even character assassinations are dished out as campaign materials. Rather than glorify such allegations here, I refer the reader to “Politicians and raging propaganda war” by Niran Adedokun (The PUNCH, March 5, 2015).

Nevertheless, it is instructive to note how much mud has been thrown at Buhari alone by the PDP presidential campaign. The allegations range from no or forged School Certificate to murder and imminent mortality. At one point, the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital categorically denied ever issuing a medical report, purportedly indicating that Buhari was terminally ill from prostate cancer. Yet, the noise about Buhari’s illness was still orchestrated loud enough to drown the outcome of his meeting with former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his Chatham House lecture, while he visited the United Kingdom recently.

As if spurious allegations were not bad enough, the campaigns have been engaging in the worst forms of physical, verbal, and advertorial thuggery. The National Human Rights Commission indicated in its pre-election report (when it was thought that the presidential election would hold in February) that 58 persons had died in pre-election violence across the country between December 3, 2014 and January 31, 2015. Many more have since died in election campaign violence. Deaths apart, campaign vehicles, party secretariats, billboards, and even some private property have been damaged. Opponents’ campaign convoys and rallies have been shot at, stoned, or otherwise disrupted.

True, physical violence seems to have reduced owing to the intervention of the international community, which got the candidates to enter into a peace accord; the reduction has been met with a corresponding increase in verbal and advertorial thuggery, involving the use of words and images to harm opponents and incite voters against them. Even President Jonathan and his wife, Patience, have engaged in verbal thuggery. It will be recalled that early in the campaign, Jonathan labelled some “senior citizens” as no better than “motor park touts”. On another occasion, he referred to a political opponent as one with a “medieval” outlook, who cannot even remember his own phone number. More recently, his wife, Patience, directly incited supporters to stone anyone asking for change, an unfortunate rhetoric that led Amaechi to draw the attention of the ICC. There should be no place for such incendiary statements just as there should be no place for the APC’s persistent labelling of Jonathan as “clueless”.

Our cognitive and moral sensibilities have been equally violated by insensitive and disgusting campaign adverts on print and electronic media, all aimed at harming opponents and inciting voters against them. So vile were some of them that the party leaders had to dissociate themselves, but without necessarily denouncing the offensive ads and their sponsors.

The history of Nigerian elections has more than taught us that physical, verbal, and advertorial thuggery is counter-productive. For one, it often boomerangs on the perpetrators. Besides, its internalised cumulative effects might lead to post-election violence as happened in 2011, leading the Dr. Sheikh Ahmed Lemu Panel to note in its report that, “Hate and inflammatory speech is a major pre-disposing factor in violence”.