Buhari&Jonathan: Saturday’s hard choice

IN just a matter of three days the long anticipated 2015 elections would have been under way. What took several years of arduous planning and billions of tax payers’ money that both the government and the election planners may never be able to account for would have come. Six weeks ago Nigerians felt ready for the elections before top members of the Jonathan administration engineered a shift in the electoral date.


That shift has afforded the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) time to put its house in order and better prepare for the task before it. The delay allowed for wider distribution of the Permanent Voters’ Cards and test running of the contentious card readers.
President Goodluck Jonathan and Gen. Muhammadu Buhari

President Goodluck Jonathan and Gen. Muhammadu Buhari

But more than all of this, the shift in date was a convenient excuse for the Peoples Democratic Party to catch its breath and make desperate plans to forestall a defeat for which it seemed headed had the election gone ahead as planned on February 14. The PDP must by now be congratulating itself for pulling off such a masterstroke decision that has brought it back into electoral reckoning. But whether this is sufficient to ensure victory is something we must all wait to see until the last ballot is cast on Saturday, 28 March.

The decision Nigerians are called upon to make on Saturday is certainly a hard one. It is, however, a decision most probably made many weeks if not months ago. While the six weeks delay may have worked eminently in favour of the PDP, far more than anything the All Progressives Party could hope to gain from it, it is doubtful if it is enough to chip off the substantial part of the apparent lead enjoyed by the APC.

For most of what the PDP has done in the last six weeks amounted to no more than a practical demonstration of the huge war chest it controls by way of hundreds of billions of Naira at its disposal, slush funds it deployed to win the support of already impoverished citizens reduced to subjects by their poverty. Otherwise, not much damage could have been done by the documentaries made on Muhammadu Buhari or, more notably, Bola Tinubu.

While the Buhari documentary was in many instances a poor attempt at working to an answer, manipulating facts to suit premeditated objectives, the Tinubu documentary, although far more on point, was directed at a well-heeled financier/king maker that is not standing in the election. Either way, such attempt at speaking to the intellectual side of the Nigerian voter would have been very effective among a more sophisticated electorate- highly literate, educated and mobilised.