Will presidential election be decided by hate campaign?... by Dapo Fafowora

For nearly three months now, the two main contending parties in the presidential election, the All Progressives Congress (APC), the main opposition party, and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), the ruling party at the centre, have been seriously engaged in vigorous electoral campaigns for support in the forthcoming presidential election. There is a lot at stake for both parties and a hard fought and robust election campaign is an essential part of the democratic process. The electoral situation is more fluid today than ever before. Marginal votes are likely to be significant and these can swing the election one way or the other between the two main contending parties. Despite this, the public still expects that the election campaign should be conducted in a civilised and civil manner, with the main focus being placed on the critical political and economic issues of the day.

Sadly, this is not the case now as this is increasingly looking more like a rancorous, hateful and divisive campaign, instead of one with the real focus on the critical issues of the day. It is perfectly understandable that the two main contending parties, the PDP and the APC, should engage themselves in a robust manner in the election campaign. But this is no justification for the resort to the kind of foul language the public is being treated to in the course of this electoral campaign. All decent persons must find this development reprehensible. We have been having elections in Nigeria long before independence in 1960 and after. But I cannot recall previous election campaigns in Nigeria that have generated such hateful and indecorous language as this one. Nigeria’s four pre-independence leaders, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Sardauna, and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, refrained during election campaigns from calling one another names, or heaping insults and vile attacks on their political opponents. The political rivalry among them was very intense, but they deliberately refrained from personal attacks on one another. Whatever their political differences, they were decent men and conducted themselves decorously. Only during the disgraceful era of Akintola/Fani-Kayode’s dirty politics were the electorate and the Nigerian public treated to such scurrilous and foul attacks on their political opponents as we now have it.

In this current campaign climate of hate, and resort to ethnic and religious divides, the PDP, the ruling party, has been guiltier than any of its political opponents. Shopworn lies are constantly being concocted, fabricated and peddled by some of the party’s roughnecks, veterans of street fighting and, beerhouse brawls.  Femi Fani-Kayode, head of the PDP publicity in the elections who like his deceased father, Remi Fani-Kayode, is a Cambridge educated lawyer, has constantly hauled personal attacks and insults on General Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential candidate. He is certainly not a proud product of Cambridge, that genteel and sedate university. President Goodluck Jonathan has not yet disassociated himself from this hateful campaign. In fact, he seems to encourage it.

Femi Fani-Kayode claimed falsely that Buhari did not have the school certificate, the basic requirement for contesting the elections. When he was proved wrong, he came up with other incredible lies regarding Buhari’s Chatham House lecture, which were equally debunked. More recently, he claimed that the fuel crisis in the country was the handiwork of the APC, the main opposition party. Again, his allegation proved to be false as the crisis was due to the refusal of the oil marketers, who were being owed money by the PDP Federal Government to import refined oil. Femi Fani-Kayode has neither admitted his mistake in this regard, nor apologised to the nation for his misleading remarks. Governor Ayo Fayose has been equally totally unrestrained in his verbal attacks on General Buhari, going as far as to warn that if he won Buhari would die in office. This is most uncharitable and has been roundly condemned in the country. It is a real pity that Jonathan has chosen these indecorous propagandists to lead his campaign. They have done his campaign more harm than good. But what else should we expect when President Jonathan himself irreverently dismissed former President Olusegun Obasanjo as ‘a motor park tout’. How can he then call his men to order?

In contrast to the desperate campaign of the PDP, the opposition party, the APC, has been more restrained in its approach to the electoral campaign. It has conducted a brilliant, skilful and impressive electoral campaign that has fully exploited the weakness of the PDP Federal Government. It has refused to be drawn into personal attacks on President Jonathan, Buhari’s opponent in the election. Instead, it has identified the main issues on which the elections should really be fought, namely massive corruption in the PDP Federal Government, colossal mismanagement of the national economy, Nigeria’s woeful infrastructure, the increasingly violent Boko Haram insurgency that has led to thousands of death in Nigeria, the vast number of the internally-displaced refuges in our country and Jonathan’s Abuja land grab.

To some extent, ensuing economic and political events have also been broadly favourable to the APC. The falling oil prices, the 30 per cent devaluation of the naira, the continuing dispute over how much money exactly is missing from the national accounts, and the inability of the PDP Federal Government to maintain security, law and order in the country have all contributed to the growing unpopularity of the PDP in the country. The APC has wisely anchored its campaign on the inherent incompetence and inability of the PDP to run a clean, honest, transparent and effective government in the country. Its poor record on employment, creation of jobs, reduction of poverty level in the country has been its Achilles heel. The Nigerian economy may be the largest in Africa. But Nigeria, under this PDP government, has one of the lowest par capita incomes in Africa. Evidently, the man in the street is mystified that the country is so rich but that its people are so poor, and that there is still such mass poverty in the middle of such opulence in the country.

The resort to vile language and personal insults by agents of the PDP shows quite clearly that its campaign has no real merit and that the party cannot defend its appalling record in office. Vast sums of money, most of it public funds, illicitly acquired, are being expended by the party to bribe the churches, the mosques, and the traditional rulers. But it is doubtful, given the structure of Nigerian politics, that this will have any effect on the electoral fortunes of the party in the March elections. In the case of Afenifere that has so shamelessly and so strangely declared its support for President Jonathan, its support is worth little or nothing to the PDP. Afenifereis no longer the formidable political organisation or movement that it once was. None of its present leaders can win elections in the Southwest. They have become irrelevant in the politics of the Southwest where their political influence has fallen considerably. Equally, the traditional rulers in the Southwest that President Jonathan has been trying desperately to woo have little or no influence on the electorate in the region. Even in Ife, the Ooni, the leader of the pack, has little or no political influence now. So trying to bribe the Obas is a waste of money, time and effort. They cannot deliver the votes Jonathan needs to win the elections, if they are free and fair.

Instead of focusing its attention on the real issues of the elections and defending its record in office, the PDP has been trying desperately to scuttle it. First, it fraudulently procured a shift in the date of the elections. Then it rejected the use of the voters’ card reader for which the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was provided by the PDP Federal Government with the necessary funds. Then its leading spokesmen, particularly Chief Edwin Clark, the self-acclaimed ‘god father’ of President Jonathan, attacked Professor  Attahiru Jega, the fair-minded chairman of INEC, demanding his premature suspension from office. Altogether, the PDP has run a negative electoral campaign, which is counterproductive. It has alienated quite a lot of the few uncommitted voters and will not secure for Jonathan the marginal votes he needs to win the election.

It must be said to the credit of Buhari that he has stood above the petty electioneering of the PDP propagandists. He has looked more confident, charismatic and presidential than Jonathan, his main opponent. He has refused to be drawn into any negative campaign, preferring instead to focus on the main issues of the day. He has his own faults too, but on the basis of his campaign strategy and his steady and unwavering commitment to defining the real issues of the elections, many consider him to be a far better candidate than Jonathan. He deserves to win the presidential election.