Let’s tread with caution
On Wednesday night, I was checking updates on my phone when I stumbled on a video on Facebook. The video is a compilation of some mistakes MADE BY Muhammadu Buhari, APC presidential candidate, at one of his rallies and during his interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN. It is unbelievable that Buhari would call his party ‘All People’s Confidence’ party instead of All Progressives Congress.
Trust supporters of PDP, they were quick to share the video on social media, poking fun at the General whom they said is going senile.
Anyone who has been following the campaign trends before and after the elections were postponed will agree with me that the campaigners for both APC and PDP have stepped up their games. Supporters of these two main political parties have been arguing fervently online on why their candidate is the best.
However, what I find uninteresting is the way they seek to run down one candidate at the expense of the other. As I pen this piece, Buhari is giving his speech at the Chatam House in London.
Earlier, Facebook had been awash with pictures of him arriving Chatam House accompanied by Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, who is also the head of his campaign organisation. In another picture, Bola Tinubu, APC leader and Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State were with him. In some other pictures were APC and PDP protesters staging demonstrations for and against Buhari’s the candidature.
The campaign trail has been very interesting but some campaigns have left a sour taste in my mouth. There are some I found very unpopular. One of such is the front page advert Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State placed in one of the leading newspapers in the country, wishing General Buhari dead.
Perhaps as retaliation, a staunch Buhari supporter, picked up a picture of emergency aid workers helping an accident victim on a stretcher and captioned it: “Gov. A. Fayose spotted leaving Ekiti State house after watching GMB speak live for 1hr without drinking water or dying.”
This brings to mind a discussion my dear big friend, Sola Young, a lawyer and I had on Facebook some days ago. We had both argued that there is no intelligence in the way the supporters of both PDP and APC are going about the campaign. I told Sola how shocking it has been for me to see the way both parties are fighting to keep their candidates on people’s minds.
“I think they end up doing the opposite because many undecided voters are getting turned off by these obvious lies. And truth be told, the lies are more against Buhari especially as regards his health. I mean how can a whole Governor says he knows where Buhari is being treated in London when in fact he was lying,” Sola wrote on my wall.
“That is it. It is really annoying how the whole campaign thing is turning out. They are not showing any intelligence at all. Perhaps they need to borrow ideas from the last US election and the big one that made Obama the first black president some six years ago,” I replied.
Like Sola said that day, I am actually turned off just like many other Nigerians and we “can’t wait for the election to hold so that many people can regain their brains.”
I think it is important for us to begin to do things intelligently. We should stop casting aspersions on people’s personality and begin to tackle the issues. Politics should be beyond seeking to cast another man down because you want the man you support to look like the saint, the untouched, anointed one. We must praise an opposition when he does right even when we do not belong to the same political party or do not share the same political ideology.
If you ask me, GEJ has been the more criticised of the two. On social media he has been abused severally with very strong words used to describe him.
In all, we the electorate must tread cautiously so that we won’t vote for the wrong person. Let us remember that a wrong choice today means another four years wasted. We cannot afford that at this time.
I will like to end this piece by quoting from an article titled: ‘The end of APC’s fabricated momentum’ written by Femi Aribisala in the Vanguard:
“…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 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….”
FUNKE OSAE-BROWN