I have news for APC stalwarts.
You don’t win an election in Nigeria by being the champion of social
media. You don’t win by renting crowds to fill up your rallies. You
don’t win by putting up your billboards everywhere while tearing down those of
your opponents. You don’t win by master-minding in the media a false
sense of the inevitability of your victory. When you do all this
successfully, you simply end up by deceiving yourself.
You win elections by mounting an
effective ground-game at the grassroots level; designed to bring out the people
on Election Day to vote for you. Instead, APC strategy was to stampede
the electorate into victory. The design was to proclaim victory even
before the election, laying grounds for protests and acrimony in event of
defeat.
Attempted coup d’état
The APC blueprint is
see-through. Present a new refurbished, suit-wearing and church-visiting
Buhari to the electorate chanting a mantra of “change.” Give him a
Teflon-coated Redeemed pastor as vice-presidential running-mate. Shield
him from public scrutiny and debates to hide his ignorance and
absent-mindedness. Gloss over his objectionable past and pedigree.
Mount an aggressive image-laundering social media campaign.
So doing, before the PDP and the
public would be up to your game, the election would be over. Nigerians
would wake up on February 15th to discover to our cost that we had
been hoodwinked into handing over power to Buhari and the Tinubu cabal.
The APC mechanism for perfecting
this plan entailed bullying the PDP into defeat. In the North, PDP
supporters were threatened and harassed. Some quickly packed their bag
and baggage and left town. Even Goodluck Jonathan’s convoy was stoned by
APC “democrats.” In Gombe, a suicide bomber paid a courtesy call on the
president’s campaign rally.
But the killer-punch was to be the
disenfranchisement of literally millions of PDP voters. With the
complicity of Jega’s INEC, APC strongholds were supplied with PVCs: while PDP
strongholds were denied them. Ghost-voters came out of the woodwork by
their hundreds of thousands in unlikely places like the war-torn North-east to
collect their PVCs. However, in peaceful higher-population places like
Lagos and Kano, non-indigenes were denied their PVCs, suspected of being likely
PDP supporters.
It is telling that, in all the ensuing brouhaha over 23 million people not yet receiving their PVCs seven days to D-Day, APC remained resolute that the election should go ahead nevertheless. This indicates that it knew the missing PVCs belonged disproportionately to PDP supporters.
The denouement
However, the entire strategy of the
APC met its Waterloo with the postponement of the election. With the
postponement, the Buhari election-train came to a screeching halt. Some
have argued that the postponement was a military coup by Jonathan and the
PDP. However, a more truthful assessment is that the postponement scuttled
the APC plan to win the election by subterfuge.
APC blundered because it refused to
entertain the possibility that the election could actually be postponed.
As a result, it did not plan for that eventuality. In this gaffe, it was
carried away by its own hyperbole. APC big-guns shouted themselves hoarse
warning all and sundry that the election must not be postponed, or else.
Worse still, they believed their own rhetoric.
APC is used to making threatening
noises. It is all stuff and bluster. If it loses, the dogs and the
baboons would be soaked in blood. If it loses it would form a parallel
government. If the election is postponed, Nigerians would not stand for
it. Therefore, it expended all its political and financial capital on a
14th February election. When it finally dawned on it that the
election might be postponed, Buhari made an unusual visit to the Council of
State to mount a pathetic eleventh-hour resistance.
But alas, the APC was completely
outplayed. INEC succumbed to the inevitable and the election was
postponed, and for six weeks no less. As a result, the APC stampede came
to an end. The orchestrated Buhari momentum came to a screeching
halt. Since then, APC pundits have been in shock; scratching their heads
because, in all their impetuosity, they had no Plan B.
The APC was banking on the element
of surprise. That is now gone with the postponement. It was hoping
to win the election by disenfranchising PDP voters. That is no longer
possible. It is now confronted with fighting an election it always knew
it cannot win because it does not have the appropriate structure on the ground
at the grassroots level.
PDP fight back
Sixteen years in power had made the
PDP over-confident. It seemed to have been caught unawares by the scripted
APC nomination of Buhari and the gimmickry of choosing a Redeemed pastor as his
running-mate. As a result, an election that should have been a cake-walk
for it suddenly turned into a tight race. Part of this was
self-inflicted. PDP had a bad set of primaries; creating considerable
dissension within its ranks. Moreover, the PDP was bested in the public
relations department; allowing the APC to define the narrative of the election
on social media.
Had the election gone on as
scheduled on 14th February, it would have been close but Jonathan
would still have won. But with six weeks delay, the election will not
even be close. Even though it was ebbing discernibly, APC had momentum
for the 14th February election. By 28th March, that
momentum would have dissipated and disappeared. Even now, the momentum is
no longer there. Buhari is in London on a dubious visit. APC has
run out of breath.
Make no mistake about it; the six
week postponement of the election has effectively crippled the APC. It is
no wonder then that the party has been grumbling non-stop. In the
meantime, PDP has been able to get a full measure of the APC. Putting all
its eggs in the 14th February date, which it insisted cannot and
must not be changed; the APC played all its cards. It put all its eggs in
one basket. However, PDP held some in reserve, banking on the
postponement of the election.
APC confusion
What happens now? APC is
confused. It is stretched for funds. It has lost its mojo,
scrambling in panic mode to raise additional 50 billion naira from
donors. Speaking to APC stakeholders at the party secretariat in Lagos,
Bola Tinubu said: “We have to re-strategise; all of you should go back to your
various constituencies starting from tomorrow.” This is a belated
acknowledgment that the party now likely to win the election is the one best
able to mount an aggressive and effective nationwide grassroots campaign.
In that department, the APC is
clearly second-best. The party best positioned to mount an effective
ground-game and mobilize votes at the grassroots level is the PDP. It has
been around for 16 years. PDP local government councilors account for
nearly 70 per cent of all councilors in Nigeria, comprising 6,521 members,
making it a truly grassroots-based political party. The APC, on the other
hand, does not have the nationwide political structure to win the coming
election. To date, it is a newspaper and television political
party. It has yet to build a formidable grassroots support. It is a
JJC party, a little over a year old.
With all the noise about Buhari, it
should not be forgotten that the man is chronically inept at building political
party structures. In the APC presidential primaries, Northern delegates
did not even vote for him; preferring instead Kwankwaso and Atiku. He was
elected primarily on the strength of ACN votes. PDP strength on the
ground everywhere in Nigeria explains why Jonathan was able to win 37% of the
vote even in Buhari’s home-state of Katsina in the 2011 election.
While APC was busy stoking up the
press to create its air of inevitable victory, PDP was busy mobilizing its
local government councilors. Its Presidential Campaign Organisation
brought all its elected and appointed councilors from all over Nigeria to Abuja
to mobilize them to secure victory for the party at the grassroots level.
In what was captioned “Operation Deliver Your Ward,” Professor Jerry Gana
re-fashioned them as political foot-soldiers and grassroots mobilisers for the
PDP, split into six groups according to their geopolitical zones.
Resurgent PDP
Since the postponement, Jonathan is
no longer the issue. It is once again Buhari; the coup-plotting former
dictator and alleged ethnic and religious jingoist. Thanks to the
postponement, Nigerians can no longer be panicked into voting for Buhari.
We now have enough time to appreciate that he is old, inarticulate and
completely bereft of ideas as to what to do when in power. It is not
enough to shout “change, change.” The question is: change to what?
To this question, Buhari provides a deafening silence.
In the meantime, the true message of
Jonathan’s considerable achievements in office is now resonating. With
the commissioning of new power-plants, we are now generating 5,500 megawatts of
electricity: a new Nigerian record. We now know from
PricewaterhouseCoopers that the allegation that $20 billion is missing from
NNPC accounts is one big fat APC lie. The army is now fully-equipped for
battle. For the first time in a long time, the Nigerian air force has
come into the fray. The Boko Haram is being bombed to smithereens up
North. There is even talk of capturing Abubakar Shekau alive.
Within the next six weeks, all that
is left is for the PDP to put its house in order and APC will be toast.
Since Buhari has whipped up himself and his supporters into an unrealistic
psychological frenzy in this election cycle, it is certain he will end up at
the tribunal, when it finally dawns on him that, in spite of all the bluster,
he has lost again. The fate awaiting Buhari brings to mind that of Mitt
Romney who was so deceived into believing he would be elected America’s next
president in 2012, he had only a victory speech on election night when he was
roundly defeated.
When the history of the 2015 presidential
election is finally written, it will be recalled that the postponement of the
election for six weeks was the final nail in the coffin of the APC.
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