It’s a few days to the polls. Soon, days will become hours and hours will become minutes. By next Sunday, barring last minute change of plan, collation of results of the presidential election would have started.
I’m already imagining mind-blowing headlines in several newspapers: Jonathan in early lead or Buhari floors Jonathan or APC panel-beats PDP, or PDP rigs to victory, or It’s a landslide for Jonathan, depending on which of the papers you patronise.
As I write this piece, it is still believed that elections will hold as scheduled. I really do not see the need to postpone the polls. As a non-politician, I do not understand how postponement of elections will ensure victory for President Goodluck Jonathan.
What advantage will it bring to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)? And what advantage will non-postponement give to the All Progressives Congress (APC)? Please pardon my political naivety. I need help.
Let the elections hold as scheduled. The country is so politically charged that prolonging the evil day is not to anybody’s advantage. Tension is mounting everywhere. Let the polls roll so that we can have a breathing space.
Anywhere you go today, discussion on politics is strictly on ethnic lines. For instance, in a gathering of Yoruba-speaking people, you could be lynched if you dare suggest that General Muhammadu Buhari will not win the presidency.
Among the Hausa-speaking voters and non-voters, you may not have a unanimous reaction depending on who you speak with; either the core Hausa-Fulani or the northern minorities whose loyalty lies with a Christian president.
But when you will likely get punched in the nose would be if you mention the issue of the school certificate scandal that is hanging like a dark cloud over Buhari’s eligibility. Ba turanchi!
I walked into a salon in Abuja last Saturday just as an APC advert on Channels Television came on. It was about Jonathan having promised to stay in office for only four years. It showed Obasanjo reading a script.
The reaction of the Igbos in the salon almost sent me scampering into cover. While some of them shouted for a change to another station, others abused Obasanjo outright as if the old man was hearing them.
One of them screamed: “Okay, we have heard you. Go away! When we vote him back as president, you can come and remove him. Didn’t you arm-twist him to say it?”
Another added: “Can you imagine this man? Okay, who was there when Jonathan made the promise? So, he only said it to Obasanjo? Didn’t Obasanjo swear to obey and uphold the constitution and still went looking for third term?”
You need to listen to political analysis in salons, buses and at pepper-soup joints. That’s when it would be clear to you that most Nigerians are not likely to be misled in the coming elections. Their only problem would be INEC and the voters’ card.
Even in the formal media, since the political campaigns started, it has become increasingly difficult to believe some of the things published in the newspapers. Sometimes the headlines and the main stories are miles apart.
Most regrettably, some of the stories are sourced from the fertile imaginations of political jobbers masquerading as journalists. Whatever the spin-doctors want published is news depending on how much they pay for space or who the owners of the paper are.
There is no doubt that the APC has assembled some of the best hands in political propaganda for this election. And they are really good in what they do. Every statement they issue in soaked in emotional stampede.
Opposition political parties worldwide have always employed propaganda tactics while dealing with a stubborn party in power. What they propagate may not attract success at the polls. The aim is to generate hatred against the other group. If it doesn’t work this time, it may work another.
In this election, insult has suddenly gained the enviable status of respectability. Truth has been relegated to the background as arrogance takes over. APC has lifted propaganda from the ground level to the rooftop.
I am not sure PDP, as the party in power, actually prepared for this election. That is why it is breathlessly trying to catch up with the APC propaganda machine. It’s so unfortunate.
Why should an incumbent president be battling to tell the people what he has achieved in the last six years? Nigerians did not have to wait till election year to be told about new roads built, functional revived rail system and improved farming approach.
Even during the campaign, Jonathan’s media team only exists as arm-chair responders to APC. Can somebody tell me why, with all the resources and information at their disposal, Jonathan’s men have not been able to leave the APC gasping for breath?
Truly, anybody who doubts APC’s popularity which has perhaps translated into massive acceptability of its candidates in this election would be deceiving himself.
The party pulls huge crowds anyway it goes. What we see at campaign grounds may not translate into the required votes when “the come comes to become” but it has certainly rattled the PDP.
If the PDP loses the presidential election, it will not be because Buhari is more acceptable to Nigerians than Jonathan. Rather, it would be because its campaign team did not develop a positive marketing strategy based on unquestionable Unique Selling Points of its candidate, Jonathan.
