It has become almost a cliché that since President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari, the two leading contenders in next month’s presidential election, launched their campaigns in earnest last week, they’ve spent more time attacking each other than in talking about issues. Last week I said I agreed candidates should be discussing issues alright, but added in effect that I saw nothing wrong with discussing personalities as well. Character, I said, was for me indeed more important than issues because the problem of this country is less the right diagnosis than the fact that we seldom practiced what we preached.
In other words, we can analyse issues to death but it makes no difference if we lack the disposition to walk our talk. This was why I was sceptical when President Jonathan said in effect that his campaign will be without animosity during his New Year broadcast on January 1.
“Let us,” he said, “not promote sectionalism, disunity, intolerance, hate, falsehood or the malicious abuse of political opponents… Let us put the nation and the people first. Let us all conduct our electoral campaigns with the highest possible decorum and civility towards political opponents.”
Fine and noble words, no doubt. But no sooner did the president utter them than some of his men decided to practice exactly what he’d preached against. One of the first to fire the first shots was the National Secretary of the president’s party, Professor Adewale Oladipo. Buhari, he said, was a semi-literate jackboot.
The next election, he said, “is going to be between light and darkness. It is going to be between a cosmopolitan highly focussed PhD holder and a semi-illiterate (sic) jackboot.” These words clearly failed the president’s tests of tolerance, love, truth and absence of malice.
Since then the president has appointed Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode as the director of publicity for his campaign organization. That put paid to any hope that the president sincerely meant to heed his own call for a decent campaign. For, Fani-Kayode has never been one to shy away from using the foulest language against anyone he disagreed with, including, of course, the president himself who he once dismissed as clueless.
This would not be the first time the gentleman will use the most abusive language against someone only to turn around to be his spokesman. Pretty early in General Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term as president, he condemned the man as sell-out to the so-called Hausa-Fulani and the international capital. He even said the man will end in disgrace. Yet he eventually turned round to serve the man as probably his most virulent spin doctor once Obasanjo invited him to come and chop, to use the local lingo.
It then says more about the president’s character than about Fani-Kayode that he would employ him to publicize his campaign. Not surprisingly, the man has been doing his best to justify his boss’s new found confidence.
As if the uncivil language of such president’s men like Professor Oladipo was not bad enough, he himself descended into abuse. On January 7, while receiving in audience some members of the Northern Elders Council led by the octogenarian, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, famous for being a permanent fixture in the corridors of power since the Second Republic, the president must have entered the Guinness Book of Records in the use of foul language against an erstwhile benefactor, if such a category existed.
He did not name any name but even the blind could see through his mind’s eye that his attack that day on elders who have become highly critical of his performance was aimed at Obasanjo.
“You are,” he said, “not a senior citizen you can never be. You are ordinary motor park tout because if you are a senior citizen you will act like one.” Obasanjo is, of course, notorious for pulling no punches when it comes to criticising others. Even then I thought, and I am sure many people would agree with me, that to call a former leader of a country, and one old enough to be one’s father at that, a “motor park tout” was really the limit.
Of course, Jonathan is not in contest with his erstwhile benefactor for the presidency. But the way the former president has persistently attacked the incumbent since their simmering cold war came out in the open late last year, the president might as well have been.
Taking their cue from the president’s actions rather than his words, many of his supporters, especially conveniently anonymous ones like “CONCERNED NIGERIANS” have since been publishing adverts against Buhari which are anything but decent. These supporters of the president are so blinded by their dislike of Buhari that the irony that some of their adverts are indictments of many of the president’s men – and even of the president himself – seems lost on them.
Take, for example, the one published in several newspapers last Monday casting doubts on Buhari’s reputation as an honest man. Titled “HYPOCRISY” with a cartoon picture of the general behind another cartoon picture of the late military ruler, carrying a handbag with PTF (the Petroleum Trust Fund which he served as chairman), it asked how an honest man could serve, as Buhari did, in the administration of General Sani Abacha which the advertisers claimed was “globally acclaimed to be Nigeria’s most corrupt government.”
Obviously the irony was lost on the advertisers that if serving in Abacha’s administration was a failure of the test of one’s honesty then the PDP leadership must be full of many dishonest men. For, among those who were either part and parcel of Abacha’s administration or were his henchmen are such PDP chieftains like its erstwhile chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, Chief Ebenezer Babatope and, not least of all, the Senate President David Mark.
Of all the campaigns in support of the president which have observed his fine appeal for civility only in the breech, none is more disturbing than the words of the Prelate of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, Archbishop Samuel Uche, last Sunday during the Armed Forces Remembrance Day Interdenominational Service at the National Christian Centre, Abuja. The Archbishop spoke in the presence of the president himself, the Senate president, top officers of the military and of other security agencies and other VIPs.
“Let me,” he said, “reveal to you this evening and at this important service at this juncture that some of our soldiers, because you know we Bishops have impact in the society, we relate to soldiers and all manner of people. And some of the people in warfront have confided in us that apart from some mercenaries from Chad, Libya as well as Somalia, 95 percent of those fighting our country are (sic) of Fulani and Kanuri origin.
“They are aggrieved because they want power at all costs. They believe Nigeria belongs to them alone and that they are born to rule while others follow. It is a deceit. The second is that they want to Islamize Nigeria and build a parallel caliphate from the one in Sokoto.”
Because the president broke his own standard of the quality of debate that he said should precede next month’s election, one is not surprised that some people in the opposition camp have responded in kind.
The other day, for example, the All Progressive Congress leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu described those in power as “predators and scavengers.” Nigerians, he said, must utilize the power of their vote to take back their country “from the predators and scavengers in the corridors and bedrooms of power that currently hold her hostage.”
So far, however, the party’s presidential candidate and his running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, have admirably restrained themselves from using vile language even in their strongest attacks on the president.
If this is reassuring, the same can hardly be said of the kind of campaigns from the ruling party. Certainly if the words of Archbishop Uche last Sunday is a reflection of the mindset of the leading figures among his distinguished audience after all the president preached about conducting a decent campaign for next month’s elections, one can only say God help this country!
