Niyi Akinnaso: Why is Buhari rising in popularity?

They went after his school certificate. The proof he provided was dismissed as a forgery. They went after his age and categorised him with dead leaders from his zone. He survived. They said he was ill and even named a disease for him. Yet, he is able to go about his campaign without any sign of illness. Some journalists even wondered about his wife’s whereabouts. When a dazzling, articulate, and well educated Aisha showed up, they said she must be a foreigner. She was smart to quickly issue a disclaimer. She is not struggling to be a political First Lady, she said, but a traditional one, whose duties are well cut out. Go, Aisha! the crowd of women nodded.

Despite the verbal and advertorial thuggery directed at the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Maj.Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), it has been Sai Buhari! all over the place. His rising popularity is evident in the size of the crowd, compared to that of President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party, even in the same cities. That’s why it is generally believed that Buhari would win the presidential election, if it were held today.

The irony about Buhari’s rising popularity is in the Peoples Democratic Party’s contributions to it. The contributions derive from several related sources. The first is the perpetual factionalism within the PDP caused by the lack of internal democracy and the strangulation of the opportunities for members to realise their political ambition.

As a result, controversy and disaffection often attended the election or selection of party officials, while those who aspired to higher office were often criminalised, suspended, or pushed out of the party. These developments led to a major split within the party and were responsible for the ouster and replacement of the party’s chairman and national secretary. The split led to the formation of the New PDP, whose members eventually defected to the APC. Those defectors are now key players in the APC.

To complicate matters for the PDP, its policy of consensus candidacy during the primaries turned out for many party members to be nothing but candidate imposition, a shortcoming previously associated with the antecedents of the APC, particularly the Action Congress of Nigeria. Incidentally, this time round, the APC conducted primaries throughout the country and came off them with little or no rancour, while sharp disagreements rage on with the PDP primaries.

This continues to anger many PDP aspirants throughout the country, leading quite a number to sabotage the party’s efforts or to switch to the APC. It has been suggested by no less a person than a PDP state governor that the stoning of Jonathan’s convoy in his state was carried out by disaffected members of the party. The stoning of the President’s convoy has since taken place in at least three other states.

It is, of course, barbaric to haul stones and pure water sachets at the President’s convoy. It signals disrespect for the office of the President, not just for Jonathan, while also demonstrating the perpetrators’ backwardness. Nevertheless, the President and his handlers would be negligent to overlook the underlying message of such action.

A second major factor in Buhari’s favour is Jonathan’s failure to keep Boko Haram’s insurgents in check and reclaim the territory lost to them. Similarly he has failed to vigorously curb corruption or at least bring many highly publicised corruption cases to a close. The pardon he granted to a convicted money launderer and the glorification of persons facing charges by endorsing them for big political positions or directly appointing them to manage aspects of his campaign do not sit well with many people.

Ironically, Jonathan’s weaknesses in these areas are considered to be Buhari’s major strengths. Many voters believe that, as an Army general, Buhari is better placed than Jonathan to fight insurgency. At least he knows what the soldiers need and how to get them to work.

He might have angered some people with his highhandedness as a military Head of State and perceived discrimination against the South; but his administration was generally credited with high discipline and intolerance for laziness and tardiness in the civil service. Above all, he is viewed as incorruptible as evident in his austere mien and a testimonial by a former President, being courted by both presidential candidates.

A third factor in Buhari’s favour is the general feeling among the electorate of genuine tiredness with the PDP administration since 1999 as well as the pervasive negative perception of Jonathan and his administration. So much money has been stolen or lost since 1999, leading to perceptible decay in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Like Chief Nanga, the corrupt politician in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, PDP politicians have taken too much for the owner to see.

Finally, there are credibility issues as recently demonstrated in a campaign video, featuring President Olusegun Obasanjo indicating that Jonathan had sworn to be a “one-term” President, to which Jonathan assented. He even went further to say that whatever he could not achieve as President in four years, he could not in 100 years. His wife, Patience, was seen clapping in agreement.

True, as I indicated last week, Jonathan has done reasonably well in certain sectors, such as transport, especially railway, and agriculture; but his overall grade in handling the economy and the raging insurgency leaves much to be desired. So is his tardy approach to problem solving. As a professorial colleague put it recently, what are regarded as Jonathan’s achievements lie squarely within the normal run of governmental duties. In this thinking, there is nothing transformational about what he has done.

It must be admitted that the rival APC cannot be completely exonerated from corruption. As Professor Biodun Jeyifo pointed out in his Talakawa column last Sunday, the APC is populated by a large number of PDP politicians, who came with the same corruption mien, thus making all of them birds of the same feather (The Nation, Sunday, February 1, 2015).

The difference, however, is that visible signs of development abound in APC-controlled states. Prof. Ayo Olukotun cited the Oyo example in his column last Friday (The Punch, January 30, 2015), while I have repeatedly written on this column about innovative developmental strides in Osun. The case of Lagos State needs no elaboration.

If the above semiotic reading of Buhari’s rising popularity is not giving the leaders of the PDP some feat, then they are not reading the electoral signs well enough. Nor are they effectively decoding the signals from the international community. Worse still, it is either they have no intelligence reports at all about the nation’s electoral mood or they are discountenancing what they are told. However, if they have been reading these semiotic signs well, then it is high time they changed their campaign tactic, by focusing on substantive issues.

- This Piece was written by Niyi Akinnaso/Punch