The End of APC's Fabricated Momentum.
By Femi Aribisala
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.
