Finally, 2015 is here and Nigerians are ready to make their most important decision as a collective. Will it be for change or for the status quo? And candidates, canvassing for votes, also have a choice of campaign strategies. They may choose the moral high ground, be positive, and persuade the voters that they have viable programmes to solve the problems facing the nation. Or they may choose the path of infamy, personalise issues, and resort to negative attack that demonises their opponent.
A strategy of negative campaign can be understood in various ways. First, it works if you try to define your opponent negatively and he or his campaign is always put in the defensive position. Second, as a result, the candidate who is so effectively baited spends an undue amount of time correcting his rival’s definition of him with little or no time to put out his programmes and agenda. Third, to the extent that the attack is effective and the negative portrayal sticks with the opponent, voters may come to wonder if he is up to the task.
But all is not positive for the negative campaigner. Voters are neither ignorant nor naïve and there is a limit to how anyone can take them for a ride. On the flip side of negative campaign is that a candidate who indulges in it exposes himself to the charge that it is the last resort for him because he has nothing else to run on. After all, it is well known that candidates turn negative when the issues are hostile to their campaign.
Thus, if a candidate cannot run on his record and he or his campaign chooses to demonise his opponent, voters are capable of seeing through the ploy. If a candidate has no clue as to the yearnings and aspirations of voters, he may try to scare his opponent by making a monster of him and confusing voters as to the qualities and qualification of his opponent.
Negativism has emerged as the main campaign strategy of the ruling party as soon as General Muhammadu Buhari emerged as the standard-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Professor Yemi Osinbajo as his running mate. But it is quite capable of harming instead of helping President Goodluck Jonathan’s reelection bid. The reason is simple. The tactic of the campaign is to exploit the fault lines of religion and ethnicity. It was done successfully in previous elections, especially in the first and second republics. In 1983, especially, the National Party of (NPN) made religion and ethnicity the joker of its campaign. It appealed to raw emotions of its supporters, among other infamous calculations, referring to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Christian candidate of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) and his supporters as the Kaffir even when the chairman of the NPN was a practising Christian.
The tactic was immoral then and its architects were shameless. We cannot be sure how effective it was then because though the NPN was declared the winner; there was an undeniable massive rigging across the land, the fallout of which ended the Second Republic. Now the descendants of the tacticians of that era are the new negativists of this and they are no less unethical. Surely the offspring of the cobra cannot be anything but poison. And true to their nature, they can only poison the well of democratic elections. That is, if they are allowed to.
Thankfully, there is a big difference between 1983 and 2015. In 1983, the political party system was pathetically ethnicised with the NPN controlling most of the North, the UPN the West, and the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) the East. Thanks to the formation of the APC, we now have two major political parties with a national spread. And though, the negativists will try because it is the only game they know, they cannot truthfully and fairly categorise the parties in ethnic or religious language.
And try they have! What, I ask, has the metaphor of light and darkness to do with the election of a president? Is it that one party is the party of light and the other is the party of darkness? Or that one of the candidates belongs to the light while the other belongs to darkness? The imagery cannot be starker. But what does it connote? And how does it come to this? When you start dichotomising so arbitrarily and characterising so pejoratively, without any basis in fact, you invariably expose your own dark instincts. And people are intelligent enough to see through.
We are told that one candidate is a semi-literate “jack-boot” and the other is a super-literate with a Ph.D. Assume for the purpose of argument that the facts are not in conflict with the demeaning characterisation. The question that follows is not original with me. It was nicely stated by online commentators with different styles: “And so what?” they asked. How has the “super-literate” Ph.D. performed in office? And how has his paper qualification impacted the lives of Nigerians? We are told that Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa. How has this “fact” transformed the lives of citizens?
The question does not escape the analysts of the World Bank Nigeria Economic Report who raised the question why a country the size and wealth of Nigeria can have such a huge poverty rate. An answer is not far-fetched. The wealth is not distributed equitably. PDP claimed that it has made many millionaires and billionaires and it is true as was seen in the in-your-face display at the recent fundraiser for its presidential campaign. Has it percolated down to the masses? If it did, the rate of poverty would be considerably lower.
We have depended on the sale of crude oil and importation of refined oil for the better part of the new civilian dispensation. Now that the United States has abandoned our crude oil, and the world price of crude has plummeted to less than $60 a barrel, there is no doubt that our poor are going to become even poorer and the rich is going to get richer on the back of the poor. What has a Ph.D. got to do with it if a leader is bereft of ideas?
True to their nature, negativists are not perturbed when they are caught in obvious contradictions and inconsistencies. They are proud of their academic qualifications but unashamed when they make a mockery of the same. Thus one who bellyached at the prospect of a Muslim/Muslim ticket (after once suggesting an El-Rufai/Fashola ticket), and claimed credit for nudging the APC against such “insensitivity” cannot now see why there should be a Muslim/Christian ticket when the APC has opted for it. How do you even start reasoning with a person when consistency, which is the very presupposition of reasoning, is compromised?
We are now asked to dismiss Yemi Osinbajo as a pseudo Christian because, after careful and prayerful reflection, he has chosen to share with Muhammadu Buhari a promising ticket to salvage the country. And once again, we are reminded of the metaphor of light and darkness, which now appears to be a talking point of the campaign. We have entered again that dangerous realm where serious issues of national importance are deliberately shunned aside while peripheral issues are amplified with sentiments and emotions. If the opposition spends time responding to negative attacks, it has little or no time to present its well-thought agenda to the people.
It is certainly legitimate to ask questions about the performance of a candidate in previous office(s), and it is incumbent and respectful to voters for him to come clean. But if a simple courtesy is not extended to a candidate to address those issues and critics start making pronouncements and judgments concerning who and what he is, and proclaiming him guilty in lieu of trial, then we would have been unfair not only to the candidate but to the electorate who deserve to have an open mind to make their voting decisions. In the final analysis, the voters will decide if they prefer the status quo or they desire change in their circumstances.
Happy New Year!
