What Rasheed Adebiyi, PCI Nigeria’s Team Lead, tells Infoprations about Processes that Produce Leaders, Osun 2018 Election Campaign Environment

Nigerian politics seems difficult to predict in terms of having good leaders every election year. How would you describe the country's 2019 election, especially choice of President?

Well, the choice of leaders in the Nigerian democratic space needs to be reviewed. A review is necessary because leadership recruitment is key in any set up. How refined or crude the leadership recruitment process is will determine the kind of leaders a country will eventually get. That aside, and looking at the 2019 election, I think there are a number of things we have to take into consideration. First, 2019 election would show how much improvement the electoral management body in Nigeria has made on the electoral process in terms of improved technology to add credibility value to the process. Now, rigging as was done before would become an impossibility.  This implies that the people’s votes would count and that politicians would take the people more seriously.  However, an ugly trend seems to be emanating from this recent gain. Politicians are now deploying more money to induce voters to vote for them.  This was witnessed in Anambra, Ondo and then substantially in Ekiti which had a spiral effect on the just concluded Osun election. In a way, we have to watch out for this new evil in the 2019 election. If we are ready to ensure our democracy works, we should have an improved election and elect for ourselves a president which the majority believes has the capacity to run the country in the next four years. 

Rasheed Ademola Adebiyi

You recently initiated an NGO for monitoring and evaluating campaign activities in the just concluded Osun 2018 governorship election. What are the rationales behind this and how challenging was it?

Thank you very much for this question. The Positive Campaign Initiative, Nigeria was initiated to monitor and gatekeep the campaign atmosphere in Nigeria using the just concluded 2018 Governorship election in Osun State as a pilot study. We intended to monitor campaign activities and public engagements of the contending parties and their candidates to determine the extent to which issues are focused in those engagements. We therefore started following the campaign messages of the parties. These comprised of radio jingles, television commercials, bill boards, posters, fliers, rallies, manifestoes and social media messages. We wanted to analyse these messages to see how core issues that concern the citizenry are engaged. We believe that democracy is like a market place where office seekers sell their ideas, policies and programmes to the electorate who in turn buy into these ideas and make their choice based on the array of options before them. We assume a proper engagement of these issues would enable the voters to make informed choices and promote a spirit of healthy competition between the contestants. This would minimize the tendency for violence that we witnessed in the past in our campaign atmosphere and also give the people the opportunity to take up whoever emerges winner on their campaign promises. This was the rationale behind the Positive Campaign Initiative. It was a very challenging venture. We followed major political parties from the time their primaries were concluded towards the end of July till the end of campaign period in September. It was difficult tracking campaign messages across the platforms earlier mentioned. Then, when we add transcribing, coding, and analysing data to it, it was very difficult for us. Especially because we also generated articles that were disseminated in certain media outlets both online and offline for the duration of the campaign period, then we can say it was not easy for us at all. This is compounded by absence of funding for the research. We undertook the study using personal resources, so it was very challenging.  The Osun state election was not easy as there were 48 candidates contesting on the platforms of different political parties. And people in certain quarters were of the opinion that we should have followed all of the candidates. But, we did not have the funds to follow that number in the face of constraints of time, hands and other resources.       

Party-Politician Induced Facebook Users in a Village and Consequences of their Interactions

What are the significant results and contributions made to the campaign environment during the period?

There were very significant results and contributions from the research venture. We generated close to 20 articles where we disseminated the findings. We had series of interviews on local radio and television stations. We equally shared our research outcomes on our various social media handles with some followership. If we are to rely on the feedback we got in the course of disseminating the outcomes of the research, our study was significant and assisted to deepen the discourse around the election. We even predicted who the likely winner would be and our prediction quite close.

 We found out that the campaign atmosphere could be typified into two – physical and virtual environment. The physical environment covers all those physical channels through which people could receive the campaign messages. The virtual environment relates with campaign messages online on websites and social media handles of the contenders. The first phase of the physical was generally peaceful and calm with the parties trying to frame their candidates as the best for the job.  Emphasis was laid on qualification, competence and experience of the candidates. The messages on the billboards and posters were portraying candidates as the best hands for the job ahead. So, in the initial analysis, the physical environment was used in a very responsible manner. However, as the campaign hot up and the day of the election approached, campaigns especially on radio and television became somewhat aggressive with the 5 major parties making references to their different candidates in certain language and tone. We felt the campaign discourse should have been dominated by statistics driven policies and ideas of the parties and major issues such as the rising debt profile of the state, backlog of salaries owed civil servants and pensioners as well as sustaining the infrastructural development strides of the outgoing government.

The virtual campaign environment was brutal. Party-Politician induced Facebook users were deployed online to engage in name calling, cyber bullying, narratives and counter narratives especially between the APC, PDP and ADP supporters. So the virtual environment was very volatile. We believed that the virtual environment could have been utilized to propagate positive and issue-based campaigns. Rather, it was used to spread falsehood and generate negative emotions about the candidates. This trend should be discouraged as democracy only thrives on adequate exchange of ideas, policies and programmes. The virtual environment provides resources for parties and their candidates to enrich their campaigns through real time visualization of programmes and ideas which the parties failed to make extensive use of in their campaign activities. Moving forward, we at the PCI, Nigeria aim to train political parties and their campaign teams on deploying online resources to add value to their campaign activities.           

Do you still intend to monitor and evaluate the forthcoming general elections' campaign period despite the shortcomings?

Posts from Party-Politician Induced Facebook User and Emotions from followers  during Osun 2018 Election Campaign

Yes, we do. We believe that a positive campaign environment is good for our democracy. It strengthens the democratic culture and discourages violence. The language, tone and emotions deployed in negative campaigns breed a tensed atmosphere which in turn scares away people from performing their civic responsibility. The 2019 General Election is important for the country looking at what happened in 2015 when the campaign atmosphere was characterized by hate speech and negative campaign. We need to check that in 2019. We should not leave the aspect of monitoring to the regulatory bodies alone. As responsible and responsive citizens, it is our duty to assist those bodies in ensuring that our democracy is strengthened. Though, there were no funds for the Osun election, we will do our best in monitoring, evaluating and disseminating our outcomes on the campaign atmosphere in the 2019 elections across the six geo-political zones in the country.  

How do you intend to address the challenges?

We will find creative ways of raising funds which is our major obstacle. With funds, we would be able to outsource some of the core tasks. We are already raising proposals for grants. We will also explore other funding opportunities online. We will as well leverage on collaborations and partnerships. We enjoyed a lot of that during the Osun election, and it our belief that we will get more partnership and collaborations as we move forward.