₦airaland Forum

Voter engagements through formal channels end this Thursday for Saturday’s Presidential and National Assembly elections. If the surfeit of rallies, town hall meetings, door-to-door campaigns and media exposures have been bereft of issues that bug the electorate, they have been spiced up by the parties’ show of strength. “My-crowd-is-bigger-than-yours”, the parties have demonstrated through their rallies.

Now, do “big” crowds at election campaign grounds translate to “big” votes?

Apart the number lured to political campaigns by handouts, which come in form of cash equivalent of a pot of soup for a low-income home, there are other reasons responsible for the numbers at the campaign grounds.

There was contagious excitement at Park Lane either when Papa set out or returned from those tasking tours across the country. The highlights were the crowd he pulled in the “enemy” territories. The crowd in Sokoto, the locality of his main rival Shehu Shagari, was described in superlatives. Tumultuous. Massive. Huge.

Kano, Kaduna, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Jos etc brought good news to the campaign team back in Lagos and the supporters across the country.

But the election results did not reflect the “tumultuous” turnout at the rallies. Sokoto State, for instance, gave Awolowo 2.52 percent as against Shagari’s 66.58 percent and Waziri Ibrahim’s 26.61 percent. Beyond the five states of Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo and Bendel, where UPN won the governorship as well as the presidential poll, the only other state where Awolowo had appreciable performance was in Kwara State (37.48 percent).

The conclusion of the UPN camp was that the poll was rigged. Awolowo’s Tribune and other friendly media outfits regaled us with stories of how the party agents were arrested and not allowed to do their job of policing the process and the results. Logically however, you can only rig where you’re strong.

Clearly, if the “supporters” who thronged his rallies in Enugu and Onitsha, for instance, had translated their “enthusiasm” into votes, Papa would have fared better than the 0.75 percent he received in the old Anambra State where incidentally he had chosen his running mate, Philip Umeadi SAN, a politically incorrect decision given the North-South dichotomy we are bogged down with.

Awolowo must have realised his political naivety of choosing a fellow southerner in 1979 as running mate. In 1983, he responded by opting for Mallam Muhammad Kura from Bauchi State for the 1983 presidential election. Still that did not cut much ice in the catchment area of his political half. In one of the most disputed elections in the country, Awolowo’s UPN could not muster up to 20 percent in Bauchi state as he garnered only about 30 per cent votes nationwide to finish second in a five-party field.

Again, the crowds didn’t deliver the votes.

A few days after the June 12, 1993 presidential election, I was dispatched to Kano by Newswatch magazine to interview Bashir Tofa, the candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC). It took several efforts and three or four Okada riders to locate Tofa’s residence in that city. Tofa was not that popular in Kano.

Whereas his Kano campaigns had pulled massive crowd that gave the camp of Moshood Abiola of the rival Social Democratic Party (SDP) jitters, it was Abiola that would win Kano by 52.28 percent, going by the partially announced result of that famous election.

Tofa’s running mate, Dr Sylvester Ugoh made up for his principal’s shortcoming in his own neck-of-the-wood. Imo State gave the Tofa ticket 55.14 percent.

Did Olusegun Obasanjo not have the crowd at his rallies in his home state of Ogun for the 1999 presidential election? But Ogun State voters, including the ones at the polling unit near his Ita-Eko residence in Abeokuta, preferred his rival, Olu Falae of the Alliance for Democracy (AD). Obasanjo’s “people” voted 69.8 percent for his rival Falae, while his opponent’s home state of Ondo handed the AD candidate 85 percent score. In those two states, as it was in other states during the campaign, both candidates, polled “massive” crowds at their rallies.

In his re-election campaign four years ago, President Goodluck Jonathan recorded “massive” crowds in the states that he would later lose heavily in the presidential election. These include Muhammadu Buhari’s Katsina and Kano States, the latter being a reason to belief for the incumbent president’s supporters that victory was assured. Obviously, the votes did not follow the crowds.

For the 2019 elections, the “big parties” particularly have flaunted their “crowds.” It amounts to “serubawon”! No, I’m not referring to Late Senator Isiaka Adeleke who earned that sobriquet for the daredevil tactics he adopted in stopping the Osun State parliament from impeaching him while he was Governor in the early 90s. “Serubawon”, in this instance, is in its ordinary form where you pulled all imaginable – and particularly unimaginable – strengths, tactics and hypnotism to intimidate and overwhelm the opposition.

Was that what the parties did for the 2019 national elections? The verdict lies with the voters. As they say on the street, we shall know the score sooner than later.

Akintunde is a public relations consultant based in Lagos

https://www.thecable.ng/the-crowds-and-votes/amp

Personally for me I won't attend Peter Obi's rally in Lagos, because I don't want to be in the crowd and I have some other engagements that are more of priority. Even if I am free, I won't still want to be within such crowd but I will vote for him on election day, that's simply what I owe him.
Election campaign crowds doesn't reflect who wins. Do a poll on does with voters card this morning in Kano, Tinubu will lose that poll irrespective of the crowd that came to his rally yesterday.

Crowd polling is a psychological game and it doesn't in any way reflects who Wil win that state.

I've never and won't attend any campaign rally even if it's happening on my doorstep, but on the election day I'll go out to vote obi even if it means waiting for 24hrs just to cast my vote for obi I'll gladly wait..

Crowd that only came out to see if they would go home with atleast something for the stomach...

StrongandMighty:
I've never and won't attend any campaign rally even if it's happening on my doorstep, but on the election day I'll go out to vote obi even if it means waiting for 24hrs just to cast my vote for obi I'll gladly wait..

Seriously, I don't think I want such stress.
I am only doing this because the psychological game APC is playing is already working on some people.
Do a physical poll today in kano, Tinubu cannot win Kano. It doesn't matter how much crowd came to his rally yesterday

Workch:
Seriously, I don't think I want such stress.
I am only doing this because the psychological game APC is playing is already working on some people.
Do a physical poll today in kano, Tinubu cannot win Kano. It doesn't matter how much crowd came to his rally yesterday

In reality most people that attend campaign rallies apart from party members are mostly peasants who have no jobs and can be lured with 1k or 2k just to attend rally.. These peasants don't even have pvc so relying on campaign rallies as a yardstick to measure election victory is foolishness

Whenever any of LP or Pandora's spokesmen or supporters come on air or TV to sell that disaster of a candidate, the only things they boast of are these;

1. He doesn't receive pension as an ex governor
2. He didn't allocate plots of lands to himself during his tenure as governor
3. He left N75B for his successor

I mean, are all these things achievements? Is this the best he could achieve in eight years?

Lets even assume he left that amount truly (which I know is a lie), are there no projects to execute with those funds?

Chris Ngige once said Obi doesn't believe in infrastructure, reason why he left most Anambra roads in terrible conditions.
Prof. Soludo said Pandora's investments are worth next to nothing.

Pandora is a disaster waiting to happen.
Sadly, the average youth thinks that Pandora is the next best thing after a Virgin Kpekus.

I'm a youth and I stand with Waziri Adamawa.


PDP to the rescue

Lol. Zombidient digging up 2019 articles of 4years back to give them hope.

lhordspy:
Lol. Zombidient digging up 2019 articles of 4years back to give them hope.

I can bet my last card that Tinubu cannot Winn Kano irrespective

Workch:
I can bet my last card that Tinubu cannot Winn Kano irrespective

K.
Are you satisfied now?

lhordspy:
K.
Are you satisfied now?

I can't wait for this election to come. All these you gragra will stop