Anatomy of a failed campaign (part 2/4)
I refuse to be a part of the bad press and pile-on the youth are getting. I won’t join those who ask:
“If Mozambican kids can troop out on the streets of Maputo to protest a rigged election, what stops the Nigerian youth in the face of far greater outrages and impunity by the Senator Tinubu regime?”
Let’s back it up a bit.
37 million young men and women were emotionally invested in this campaign. For 18 months, they rallied intensely, canvassed creatively, and marketed seriously their candidate — Obi-Datti — to the four winds. They dominated the ground space as they did the social media space; they wrote slogans and flyers, and generated merchandising ideas and T-shirts; and they set up stations to audit the INEC voters register and report irregularities.
Finally, on February 25, 2023, they showed up at polling units to cast their ballot in numbers in spite of INEC’s best efforts to depress the franchise. With a million smartphones, they recorded INEC’s criminal breach of the BVAS protocol. They uploaded pictorial evidence in real time so that the courts wouldn’t find any excuse.
I have nothing but respect for these citizen patriots in the 18–34 demographic. It is remarkable that they did all these without any kind of direct resource support from the party. In a piece last year where I celebrated the Democratic Party’s electoral gains in Georgia, I wrote:
“In contrast, the Labour Party is running an autonomous but amorphous, freestyle presidential campaign for Peter Obi reliant on a highly motivated electorate running their own operational centres in what, essentially, is a network marketing organogram!” — It’s Purple Rain in Georgia; Medium
https://medium.com/@vickynwugo/its-purple-rain-in-georgia-f893299d30cb
It’s Better Safe Than Sorry
In the end, the campaign played it safe and settled for the Avon or Forever Living Products’ marketing model, which creates centres of personal wealth empowerment. The problem is that the Avon or the Forever Living Products’ model can’t be scaled up to deliver a united political vision made up of the ambitions of many.
Ross Perot, Barack Obama, or Brad Parscale could have told the Peter Obi Campaign that for free. The energies, ideas, and motivation the youth brought to this campaign could have been effectively multipled and harvested by central command and control.
Sufferhead No Dey Tia Una?
“Nigerians are too docile. It’s tiring!” — @TheSerahIbrahim
“When people live too long in poverty, they become docile, timid, and slavish … Majority of Nigerians have been mentally and psychologically degraded by poverty!” — @Shehusky
Fair point. I can’t argue with that. But again, there’s context. When the INEC chairman, Alhaji Mahmood Yakubu, announced a return without due process, three days after the election, the gasket was about to blow. Then, Peter Obi proceeded to file his petition and asked the nation to allow the legal process to play out. The nation listened. The youth hoped that this time it was gonna be different.
Three years earlier, the October 2020 EndSARS peaceful rally at Lekki Tollgate had been brutally suppressed by the soldiers of the Nigerian Army on the orders of Maj. General Muhammadu Buhari. Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu had reached out to him for help.
Over 20 young men and women died under a hail of bullets at Lekki Tollgate. Many were shot in their backs as they waved and draped the Nigerian flags. Those who survived or witnessed the massacre, and the leaders of this peaceful exercise of civic rights were hunted down by the police and secret police. Godwin Emefiele’s CBN ordered banks to seize their accounts. Their finances were appropriated. Some influencers were lucky to proceed on exile. Many were tried without representation and sent to jail.
Whatever was achieved during this campaign was by self-help: Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the social conscience of the nation, had died in 2009 and was not there to give moral support; the last time Prof. Wole Soyinka led protests against fuel subsidy removal was under President Goodluck Jonathan. Today, he creates smoke to confuse the issues; and the NLC, which Comrade Adams Oshiomhole used to mobilize unions during the military era, has not called a successful national protest in the last 20 years.
The civic space is in retreat. Many of those who voted this February were not even born at that time.
