- By Bayo Onanuga
It is now crystal clear that Muhammadu Buhari of the
All Progressives Congress is heading for a crushing defeat of Alhaji Atiku
Abubakar, candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party.
There had been surprises and upsets in many states as
the results were announced, but not predicted was that the APC candidate,
vilified on social media by PDP warriors, on the pulpits by bigoted hate
preachers, would return a resounding victory against PDP.
Here are some of the lessons learnt in the February 23
election:
1. Social media power overrated: If elections are won
on Twitter and Facebook, President Buhari would by now be writing his handover
notes and be preparing to tend his cows on his farm in Daura. But the
limitations of the social media platforms especially Twitter have just been
exposed by the results of the election.
The candidate of the PDP got more
retweets, more likes for tweets by supporters on Twitter, but such preferences
count for nothing in the real voting. For information, although there are over
92 million Nigerians using the internet, not all of them are connected to the
social media platforms.
According to some verified statistics, about 25 million
Nigerians use Facebook, with 16 million being active users.
Twitter users are in several millions, representing
just 8.83% of social media users. At 8.29 %, users of Pinterest are
surprisingly close to users of Twitter. Instagram commands just 2.0 per cent
and Facebook 78.47 per cent as at 2018.
This may explain why the orchestrated campaigns of
falsehood and calumny against the APC candidate did not get much traction going
into the election. As past elections had shown in Nigeria, the people who vote
are the ordinary people, the peasants, petty traders, artisans who are not
wired to the social media platforms. And they have spoken in favour of the
candidate they believe is the greatest friend of the ‘Talakawa’.
2. Elite power, pulpit power has been smashed by the
results of the election. Those hate preachers who abused the pulpit to command
their congregation to vote for the PDP have been put to shame. Elite in the
north and south who believe Buhari has been ‘bad business’ and worked
vigorously to dethrone him, now also know their powers are limited. The
ordinary masses hold the master key to ‘people power’. Buhari, like in 2015,
has overcome elite gang up and conspiracy of the churches. In Abuja, the votes
recorded in Kubwa, Garki, Mbappe and some other places with a wide Christian
population and civil servants against Buhari were to some extent offset by
farmers living in the villages around the capital.
3. Politicians who put a lot of score on endorsement
now should know better. The Afenifere in Yorubaland and the various political
groups largely failed to mobilise the votes for Buhari in the region, despite
their endorsement. The results in Lagos, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, Oyo were too
close to show that the people did not heed the instructions of the groups.
Ohanaeze was also rebuffed to some extent in the south east states. The
Northern Elders Forum of Ango Abdullahi, the Middle Belt Forum, the Arewa
Consultative Forum need some reality checks about their power as opinion
moulders.
4. The fourth lesson is that Igbo appeared to have
learnt some lessons from their one-basket political disposition in 2015. In
2019, they did not put all their eggs in one basket, as they gave Buhari more
than 25 per cent in Ebonyi, Abia, Anambra and Imo. Only Enugu gave Buhari the
snub as the opposition recorded a thumping victory here, 355,553 votes to
Buhari’s 54,423. In Lagos, however, Igbo voting pattern like suspected in 2015,
unsettled their Yoruba hosts, leading to threatening inter-ethnic hostility.
Yoruba believe that Igbo should always support their interests, afterall ‘When
in Rome, one is expected to behave like the Romans’.
5.All politics is truly local. Kwarans demonstrated
this in the way they humiliated the PDP and its chief strategist, Bukola
Saraki, rejecting the campaign of ‘better Nigeria’, ‘making Nigeria work
again’, for home grown wild fire campaign of ‘O To ge’, which translates to
“Enough is Enough’. The campaign dethroned Saraki from Kwara central senate
seat and smashed the PDP into political irrelevance, with the APC recording
308,984 votes, two and a half times more than the 138,184 votes recorded by the
PDP.
In Daura, Katsina, voters showed the APC senatorial candidate that he
needed to settle with them as they clobbered him, by voting for the Accord
Party candidate, in the same polling unit, where Buhari recorded over 700 votes
to three for Atiku. In Kogi state, Dino Melaye won a return ticket to the
Senate despite all the controversies he generated. He will need to thank
fumbling ex-police chief, Ibrahim Idris for making him popular with his people.
And in Bauchi, speaker Yakubu Dogara survived his expected political demise and
won fourth term ticket in his Bogoro/Dass/Tafawa Balewa Federal constituency.
6. Buhari is the only politician in Nigeria today with
a solid home base. President Buhari has proven once again that he is the
Awolowo, Aminu Kano of our time, posting overwhelming victory in his home state
of Katsina and other states, such asd Kano, Zamfara, Kebbi, Kaduna, Jigawa in
the North West that he had consistently won since 2003, when he made the first
bid for Nigeria’s presidency. Buhari also showed commanding presence in the
North east. Atiku failed to show such political force in his state of Adamawa
that he won with a few thousand votes. Then to show how Buhari has gathered
much political traction since elected in 2015, he had a strong showing in
states, such as Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa, with high Christian
population, that Atiku thought he would have won convincingly, based on the
propaganda that Buhari is anti-Christian. Buhari similarly cut inroads into
South South and South East states, denying Atiku any Tsunami effect from the
zones.
7. Finally, lies, falsehood do get their comeuppances
in the fullness of time. This election has proven this. Buhari in the run-up to
the poll was the target of so many vicious lies and propaganda. The most
reprehensible lie was that he was a clone from Sudan planted in Aso Rock. He
was also painted as a hater of Christians, who allowed Boko Haram to seize a
Christian girl Leah Sharibu. They accused him of promoting an Islamisation
agenda and of being an ethnic bigot who favoured his region in appointments.
Some even said he had finished Nigeria with foreign debts, a claim that was not
supported by available facts. The opposition will need to invent new lies now
as the President has posted a most crushing defeat of their candidate.
Culled: NAN
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