Campaign: An Avalanche of Stinging Venom?

Campaign: An Avalanche of Stinging Venom?
By Sam Onimisi

With the commencement of party primaries, campaigns and convention of political parties, the approach of the 2011 general election has become palpable. Anxious to clinch their parties tickets to run and hopefully win, aspirants are jostling to outdo one another by show-casing their curricula vitae. Not enough though. Competitions, especially among political aspirants and between political parties, are as boisterous as they are cantankerous. Since when Dr. High Chief Raymond Dokpesi of the defunct Ibrahim Babangida Campaign Organization raised an alarm that he was billed to be kidnapped, campaign directors and party supporters were jolted out of their assumptions, and indeed to realize that partisan party campaign is a risky venture, even though exciting.

Mercifully Dokpesi is yet to be kidnapped and his alarm may either have been a wolf-cry or that the wolves were scared away from their prey by reason of the timely alarm. However, crying wolf where there is none has been an old tactic employed by weaklings so as to be left alone to their own devices or to attract an otherwise undeserved sympathy, attention or support. Sometimes it succeeds and at other times it fails.

In politics, as in other competitive avocations, some elements of scare-tactics are allowed if only to unsettle your opponents or competitor for easy victory. The rough turf of election campaigns is a terrain full of thorns and thistles and only the lion-hearted dares to try. Cowards often advice themselves to give it a wide berth. It is a job not cut out for the Lilly-livered, for you must be able to match or mix your brain and brawn for expected brawls.
Campaign strategies are a myriad of tactics which includes but not limited to press war, scarecrow, wolf-cry, grandstanding and red-herring. They are meant to turn the heat on the opponent, a distraction or as misleading clue. In most cases, they must be repeated if they are to achieved the desired effects. That is why Alh. Lai Mohammed in a leader and past master in political press war. The deft manner and suave mien by which he weaved stories of death threats against is party leaders and candidates stand him out as a great campaign tactician. Again, none of the fears he so generously cried wolf about had happened. Yet, when Oga Lai cries, even wolves themselves are scared! If elections are won on wolf cries alone, Lai Mohammed’s party would always coast home with victory.

Elder statesman and ex-head of State Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has left no one in doubt that the next general election will be decided by votes and voters alone. In other words, Candidate Buhari will not seek redress in the court even if he feels cheated of victory. Which also means that he owes no one any duty in restraining his supporters (voters) from taking whatever action they deem fit to recover their mandate?

This is as scary as any scarecrow and it is a political scare-tactics per excellence. If this sublime threat will dissuade riggers, then we should all be happy and merry whenever election approaches. But are riggers and thugs ever scared of the consequence of their actions? In a strange turn of unreasoning, Alh. Atiku Abubakar has turned logic upside down when he threatened to ensure that those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent change inevitable.
Meaning that if Atiku is not elected PDP’s candidate then violent is the answer?

This is a scarecrow carried too far. The new Apostle of zoning jettison it in 2003 when he threatened to run against President Obasanjo; as a convenient ploy, he claimed Obasanjo promised him a Mandela option- that is, a one term only for OBJ. In 2007, Atiku run under the AC ticket while he was a sitting vice-president under the PDP. His new pal, High Chief Dokpesi was the arrow-head of Dr. Peter Odili’s campaign team for the presidency, knowing very well his party’s zoning formula was in favour of the North. Now, both of them are now singing discordant tunes as if the North is now south and vice versa. Red-herring is not new in political struggle until it takes on the colour of treason. If Atiku will ever become president, it must not be on the wagon of treasonable felony. The security agencies may need to beam their search lights on Atiku and his associates as his scarecrow handshake is going beyond the elbows. Desperation does not win power and if it does, more desperate opponents will take it away. The snag here is that if the security agencies decide to do their job, it is the same Atiku who will cry of victimization and unfair treatment. But no one can eat his cake and still have it. In a clever and subtle manner, Atiku scared the daylight out of some newspaper editors when he let it be known that he has assembled some wolfish lawyers who are ready to devour any news medium who accepts adverts couched in a language not singing his praise. A woman observer asked the other day where those opposed to Atiku will run to if he becomes president. According to her, “the man is brimming with stinging venom of revenge and vengeance and his body language speaks volume of his hatred for …”. When a man turns a more game of chance into a passion, he makes himself more of an enemy than a friend. This country is big enough to contain all of us if we shed ourselves of inordinate ambition and unbridle gluttony.

When Atiku single-handedly established his university in Yola, no one questioned him on the sources of income and he did so while in office as Vice President. When he presided over the privatization programme of the Obasanjo regime, we failed to ask for the identity of those companies and individuals who bought our collective patrimony at give- away price. Even when he was accused of using fronts to buy off our national investments, we were still lenient enough to let the sleeping dog lie. When our revered but late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua handed over the account of the Islam-in-Africa Fund to him, our Muslim brothers have never bothered to ask him to give account of his stewardship, nor to disclose how much donations has been made into it ever since.

Atiku has been granted so much freedom by Nigerians that he married from the North, the East and the West and has homes in Yola, Lagos, Abuja and America where some members of his family once resided. Even when he was accused of some $40million illegal deposit in the U.S., Nigerians never threatened him with fatwa. A congressman in America had a tango of business dealings with him; we defended him and looked the other way just to show him how to be tolerant. Must he now wage a war against us because four individuals have voted for him to be their consensus candidate? If as an aspirant he is already threatening war, what will he do if he becomes a candidate? Will he not declare war? Haba Atiku!