www.vanguardngr.com/2015/02/the-end-of-apcs-fabricated-momentum/



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
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 weaknesses
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’s 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 chronically lacks
skills 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, 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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