With President Goodluck Jonathan’s endorsement for a second term by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria is shaping up to be a marketing contest. It promises to be a time when creative framing of the contest will be decisive. And with barely five months to the February 14, 2015 presidential election, it is apt to do a comparative analysis of how sellable are the two front runners, in the race – incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress ( APC).
President Jonathan has two major advantages over any other opponent – name recognition and the power of incumbency which affords him the leverage to create dramatic events and make policy decisions which can advance his chances at the polls. If, for instance, he musters the courage to further reduce fuel price, induce accelerated trial and eventual jailing of fuel subsidy scammers, sack police commissioners in states where kidnapping has become thriving business, and get the army to take the fight to the Boko Haram insurgents, he can fairly blunt his perception as a fumbling, ‘clueless’ anti-people leader who gives no damn about the suffering of the masses. It can also begin to indicate that he has not been in consort with, or a patron saint of, the corrupt oligarchy. The poser is: Can he?
Of course, no leader at the level of the Presidency will not have ‘achievements’ to celebrate. The task for Jonathan’s marketing agents – and we have a plethora of them with the rambunctious Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) taking the cake – is itemizing those populist programmes and projects which have transformed the peoples’ lives. Statistics don’t sell with the masses; what are those Jonathan policy measures which touch lives of citizens, directly. What are the tangibles?
However, one achievement President Jonathan can rightly boast of is being a democrat, allowing the people’s will to prevail in elections, by citing the governorship elections in Edo, Ondo, Anambra, Ekiti states and most recently Osun, the so-called militarisation of the process in the last two states notwithstanding. Also, there is, to some extent, the perception of President Jonathan as being tolerant of criticisms going by the stridency of some of his critics, which occasionally degenerate to name calling, with some columnists tagging him as ‘clueless’ and a serpent.
Our president says he is not a Pharaoh or a General and projects as your regular, unpretentious village boy. Let no one be deceived. It is becoming obvious that behind his manufactured humble mien lurk a strong willed streak and a cunning which neutralize opposition without being seen as a demolishing Leviathan, a bulldozer. You remember that General turned-farmer, who became a two-term president and brashly showed us he was a Power Hurricane? The Otueke village boy has quietly humbled him without a fuss. Just as he has neutralized those vociferous Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) grandstanders most of whom are yesterday’s men seeking relevance in today’s politics. The saturation campaign of Jonathan’s foot soldiers, nationwide, has had the effect of intimidating potential challengers in his party, the PDP, thus leading to his unanimous adoption as party presidential candidate. The continuing saturation awareness campaign strategy is also intended to numb the people to feel there is no effective, alternative choice in the opposition to his candidacy. Those not sold on Candidate Jonathan may choose not to vote, but then even a 30 percent voter turnout does not invalidate the election. It is a situation where voter apathy may work to Jonathan’s advantage. After all, is democracy not turning into a rule of the minority?
Now to General Muhammadu Buhari. How do we place this General in terms of electoral permutation and marketing?
Buhari, in terms of name recognition, personal integrity and consistency is the most sellable candidate for the APC. But a Buhari presidential bid suffers two major setbacks – that of limited time to project him as well as frame the campaign issues and an apparent funding limitation. The procrastination of his party, the APC, in projecting him as the putative candidate, has not helped matters, thus allowing all kinds of political opportunists to jostle for the party’s presidential ticket under a nebulous internal democracy mantra. It is turning out a chaotic terrain, especially with some party leaders and APC sympathetic columnists articulating weird presidential ticket permutations, including that of a Speaker Aminu Tambuwal, a PDP stalwart, as the party’s presidential candidate, if he defects. It does not get more desperate and befuddled!
There is also an unexplainable lethargy in APC awareness campaign nationwide. As noted by Tatalo Alamu in his Snooper column in The Nation of Sunday of August 31, “like an overweight sprinter, the APC has been slow to get off the starting block”. It is rather ludicrous seeing APC’s spokesmen whining that Jonathan’s foot soldiers shouldn’t be on the campaign trail. Who is stopping APC following suit? It would appear the Buhari strategists suffer the same lethargy, like the party, in getting a Buhari saturation awareness campaign off the block. It ignores two realities – that a presidential election is a marathon, not a 100 meters dash and that at presidential election level, the candidate, not the party, is the focal point. That is why it is now more of selling the candidate, his persona, his credibility.
The main advantage and attraction of a Buhari candidacy, and putative Presidency, is his perception as an incorruptible person who can be trusted to confront the cancer of corruption that is ravaging the country, head on. It is the one issue which, properly articulated, and coupled with that of insecurity, can determine the presidential election outcome in Buhari’s favour. This is where framing the election issue becomes crucial. Two American presidential elections were determined, basically, on just one issue each – weak leadership in the Carter- Reagan 1980 election, and insecurity/crime in the Bush versus Dukakis election in 1988. I covered both election campaigns, live. The Chibok girls’ abduction by Boko Haram insurgents is a scene reminiscent of Iranian militants holding Americans hostage at the U.S Embassy in Teheran in 1979 for several months up to Election Day in November 1980 which projected President Jimmy Carter to the American people as a weak leader who cannot assert American power to free the hostages. Then Governor Ronald Reagan, who had vowed to confront the Iranians with the American might, whatever it takes, won the election in a landslide, Carter winning only in two of the 50 states – his native Georgia and Minnesota, the state of his running mate, Walter Mondale.
In the 1988 electoral battle between Vice President George H.W. Bush (Republican) and the Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis (Democrat), the Bush campaign turned the table on front runner Dukakis by projecting him as soft on crime and liberal with criminals, exemplifying this with Dukakis’ granting of parole to a jailed rapist, Willie Horton, in Massachusetts only for the convict to go to Maryland state to commit another rape. Although Dukakis engineered economic renewal of Massachusetts state, and promised similar economic miracle nationwide, the Bush campaign framed the election as a security/crime issue and vigorously projected a crime-ridden America under a Dukakis Presidency which persuaded the American people to vote for security, thus ending the presidential hopes of Dukakis. It was a classic example of campaign issue framing.
Both candidates Jonathan and Buhari carry some baggage. Given Nigeria’s state of insecurity and rampant corruption, which are generally seen to have worsened under Jonathan’s watch, President Jonathan’s re-election becomes a hard sell to the Nigerian electorate, while the perception of Buhari, in some quarters, as a religious fanatic and northern irredentist are burdens he would need to discharge. Buhari also suffers the additional disadvantage of limited campaign penetration, which can, however, be mitigated if creative campaigning is applied in the time available. Ultimately, two factors will be decisive in the 2015 presidential election– voter turnout and perception management. In the 2011 presidential election, 38.2 million people voted as against 66.8 million registered voters, representing about 55 percent voter turnout. The party that can mobilise more of its supporters to cast their ballots will be at an advantage. On perception management, a projection of President Jonathan as a seemingly ‘harmless’ person who flows with the tide may attract a ‘let him be’ vote for a second term from an indulgent electorate while a vigorous marketing of Buhari as a selfless patriot, the liberator from the bondage of corruption and insecurity could persuade the voters to cast their ballots for the ascetic General. It is a potential cliff hanger. However, given the imponderables of politics, anything can happen, between now and the February 14, 2015 vote, to change the calculations.
• Dr. Olawunmi, teaches Mass Communication at Bowen University, Iwo, Osun State.
