Mainstream Media Coverage of Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election 

Mainstream Media Coverage of Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election 

Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim

A casual observation of media coverage of the 2023 general election since it became clear APC was set to win the presidential election, inexorably leads one to the conclusion that the mainstream media, particularly Channels and Arise TV, is committed to doing everything possible to delegitimize the election because it could not accept the victory of APC’s Muslim/Muslim ticket. The Muslim/Muslim ticket has confounded media pundits and flies in the face of a certain ideological-cum-sectarian worldview, deeply rooted in Nigeria’s mainstream media.

The media coverage of the presidential election continues to be terribly one-sided without any semblance of balance and objectivity. If one were to judge the quality of the election by what is reported in the mainstream media only and not by what is actually happening on the ground across the nation, one would think APC is the only party guilty of electoral offences and that the 2023 general election was the worst election ever in Nigeria, worse than Prof Maurice Iwu’s election of 2007. Yet, the truth is, APC appears to be the only party in the election that failed to benefit from its incumbency both at the national and sub-national levels. Fuel scarcity, the Naira redesign policy and internal friction between the federal centre and APC-controlled states in the middle of the elections extracted a heavy electoral price on the Party both at the Federal and State levels.

I have never witnessed an election in which the ruling party was so thoroughly trounced in its stronghold and in virtually all the areas it should have won hands down. It should have been obvious to those who continue to cling to the claim of election rigging that if a party can not rig an election in its stronghold, how is it possible that it is able to rig the election in other areas? It should also have been obvious that APC benefited from the splitting of ranks and, consequently, of fragmentation of votes within the opposition and among the other contending candidates and parties – LP, NNPP, PDP and its G-5 renegade governors. All these forces were on the same side in Nigeria’s 2019 presidential election. It would have been nothing short of a miracle for any of these fragmented forces to unseat a party in power at the centre and in about two-thirds of the States of the fedeation.

Here is an illustration of how the fragmented opposition helped APC win the presidential election: Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate of APC, won the election without leading in the two States with the highest number of registered voters in the federation – his home State of Lagos and Kano. However, these two States were won by two different parties in the opposition – LP and NNPP, respectively – whereas PDP won only a token percentage of the votes in both Lagos and Kano. Who then rigged PDP out of victory in Lagos and Kano? Was it Tinubu’s APC or was it LP and NNPP, respectively, that did the rigging? What would have been the outcome of the election in these two States if the PDP did not effectively break into smaller units?

Objectively speaking, both LP and NNPP are breakaway parties that essentially ended up as provincial parties, without a chance in a thousand of winning the presidential election. The freak performance of LP in Plateau was purely due to the appeal of LP among Christian voters in Northern Nigeria, who innocently bought into the divisive campaign of those who lost the running mate contest to Sen Kashim Shettima. It is not accidental that the sectarian campaign did not take root in the neighbouring state of Benue, the only other State in Nothern Nigeria with a majority Christian population, because the leading opposition figure there, Governor Ortom, was caught in the G-5 quagmire and the APC flag bearer in the State is a leading Christian figure. The provincial nature of the parties made it possible for LP to carry a token percentage of the votes in Kano while NNPP carried another token in Lagos.

Outside Lagos, LP is strong only in the South Eastern Nigeria, where the presidential candiate of the party comes from, while NNPP is strong only in Kano, where the presidential candiate of the party comes from. This fragmentation of voting power can not be helpful to both parties or to the opposition. In hindsight, we can now only imagine what could have happened if Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankawso ran the contest on a joint ticket. On the other hand, Bola Tinubu came a close second in Lagos and harvested over half a million votes in Kano. The sum total of the performance of oppostion parties in the election supports the thesis of wilful fragmentation but it does not support the claim of rigging.

Then, there is the claim that INEC rigged the election for APC by its failure to upload the close to 200,000 polling unit results in real time on its IReV portal. Uploading the results of the election on the IReV portal is just one of close to 43 public activities INEC had to undertake to deliver a successful election. Admittedly, this is a critical failure on the part of INEC for which it has received disproportionate and unfair criticism. INEC made a claim that it ran into a technical glitch with this aspect of its operations. This claim is technically verifiable but little, if any attention was paid to it by the opposition and there was zero attempt to investigate it by the mainstream media. If an investigation by any media organisation took place, it has not been made public yet, to the best of my knowledge. Anyone remotely familiar with information technology must know that the larger the size of data, the slower the upload speed, simple. All the conspiracy theories have so far remained just that – conspiracy theories – unsupported by credible data.

The fact that INEC was able to successfully deliver on the IReV aspect of its operations during past, off-season elections, does not necessarily preclude the possibility of technical failure during the general elections, when all the results from all the polling units across the 36 States and FCT had to be uploaded at once, in real time. The only way to know for sure if this aspect of INEC’s operations was going to deliver as promised was during the general election, itself. Unfortunately, this did not materialise and INEC must take the responsibility and the blame for overpromising and for poor communication when it eventually ran into this technical failure. But, to date, there is no hard data to support the claim INEC rigged the presidential election in favour of the winner. The opposition must seize the opportunity to present such hard evidence at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, not on the streets or at INEC Headquaters, as it attempted to do, days after the results of the elections were made official.

Looking at the election numbers with an open mind, it is obvious APC won the election, fair and square, not in a landslide manner like other ruling parties do in Africa but by making a strong showing in areas with higher voter population and coming a close second in virtually every other area. Clearly, that was appears to be the strategy behind the Muslim/Muslim ticket and nothing more. Those who read other motives into it have either missed the point or are using it to push a worldview totally at odds with the intended purpose, which is to win the election, or else have used it to manipulate voters because they or their proxies have lost the contest for a slot on the APC presidential ticket

On its part, the mainstream media conveniently and deliberately refused to look at the numbers. It is just blindly committed to deligitimising the election so that APC’s Muslim/Muslim ticket continues to be untenable in Nigeria and its victory tainted by allegations of rigging. On the face of it, this blind and irrational ideological-cum-sectarian worldview, deeply rooted in Nigeria’s mainstream media, is deeply flawed. It is emotional and sentimental and is not in the best interest of Nigeria. Sectarian considerations are bad for elections anywhere and portend grave danger for the future of democracy in Nigeria.

Elections are not won by the powerful deployment of the media alone and, certainly, not won and lost on the basis of sentiment and emotion but, more fundamentally, on the basis of correct demographic combinations. A political party or candidate that misses this point and relies solely on sentiment, emotion and the power of the media alone, will continue to play second fiddle in Nigeria’s political arithmetic. If APC had been intimidated, browbitten, made to succumb to the sectarian blackmail that preceded the election and made to pick the wrong combinations, it may still not have outrightly lost the election but it would have been forced into a second ballot, with the potential of PDP, LP and, possibly, NNPP coming together. In such an event, the numbers suggest it would, in the final analysis, have lost the election. That would have defeated the purpose for which the party contested the election.

It is now for those who lost the election to learn a few lessons from it, not least of which are:

a. To dislodge a ruling party from power in a multi-party environment, the opposition needs to abandon petty internal squabbles and come together on the basis of a minimum common agenda like the Nigerian opposition did in 2013

b. Sentiment and emotion are effective tools in political mobilization but not enough to win a nation-wide election in a multi-cultural environment like Nigeria, a lesson General Buhari learnt in 2015.

c. The media is powerful but not as powerful as the voter, as we have now, hopefully, come to appreciate in the 2023 presidential election.

d. A tradition of concession of defeat may not be as rewarding as winning but it can snatch moral victory from the jaws of all-around defeat as former President Goodluck Jonathan has come to appreciate, after Godswill Orubebe almost ruined his post-election future. Today, Orubebe is in APC and Jonathan is basking in the glory of his wise and timely concession.

Thankfully, not all is lost for the parties that did not make it in the just concluded presidential election. The diversity of parties in the National Assembly is good for Nigeria’s democracy. To hold the ruling party accountable is a fundamental function of the opposition, a requirement for good governance and necessary for the proper functioning of democracy. Also, peparations to unseat the ruling party in the next election must begin from there but these tasks are only for those elements of the opposition truly committed to the nurturing and sustainance of our democracy, not for power mongers.

*Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim* was one-time National Secretary, Action Congress (AC), Chairman of Inter-party Advisory Council (IPAC) and Member, Editorial Board of Trust and Thisday Newspapers.