2019: Issue-driven campaigns, please!

It’s exactly 94 days to the first tranche of elections holding on February 16, 2019. This Sunday, November 18, 2018, presidential and National Assembly (Senate and House of Representatives) the official campaign will start in accordance with the provisions of Section 99 (1) of the Electoral Act, as amended. That section says, inter alia, “…the period of campaigning in public by every political party shall commence 90 days before polling day and end 24 hours prior to that day.” Against this backdrop, it is needful to interrogate what kind of campaigns that will define the 2019 elections. Will it be issue-driven or smear campaign?

Before going into the kind of campaigns I look forward to, let me recap some of the major political activities that have so far been carried out in preparations for the all-important sixth general election in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic which commenced on May 29, 1999. Hitherto, there had been registration of political parties, (now we have 91 of them officially recognised and certified by the Independent National Electoral Commission) Continuous Voter Registration was held from April 27, 2017 – August 31, now we have 84.2 million registered voters. There was also the 2018 amendment to the Electoral Act with the President signing five constitution amendments into law between May 31 and June 8, 2018.

Among the new constitution amendments are the Not-Too-Young-To-Run bill signed to law on Thursday, May 31, 2018. This new law has reduced the age qualification for the President, House of Representatives and state Houses of Assembly from 40 – 35 and 30 – 25 respectively. INEC now also has the number of days for conduct of run-off elections increased from seven to 21 days. Also signed into law was the bill putting a time limit on resolution of pre-election disputes and the bill banning any vice president or deputy governor who serves out the time left of their principal from contesting more than once. The only bill that is not directly related to elections is the one granting financial autonomy to state judiciary and the state Houses of Assembly.

Just last Wednesday, November 7, 2018, the National Assembly, for the fourth time this year, transmitted the Electoral Act (amendment) Bill to President Buhari for assent. The issue of funding for the forthcoming elections has also been laid to rest with the National Assembly’s approval of the entire budget of N242bn for the conduct of the polls. Only N189bn is due to INEC from this sum while the rest is earmarked for security agencies to provide election security.  There have also been sustained voter education and training for different stakeholders in the electoral process.

One of such capacity building initiatives is the one embarked on by the International Press Centre in Lagos. IPC with support from the European Union recently revised “The Nigerian Media Code of Election Coverage”. The centre has also been training Nigerian journalists for the Herculean task of election reporting. I have had the privilege of being part of the team of resource persons which include eminent journalists like the Founder of Journalism Clinic, Mr. Taiwo Obe; the Editor of ThisDay newspaper, Mr. Bolaji Adebiyi; Nigeria’s first female professor of Mass Communication, Professor Chinyere Stella Okunna, and an Assistant Director of Programme with the Federal Radio Corporations of Nigeria, Mrs. Funke Treasure Durodola. I was also part of the experts who trained some journalists at the “Capacity Building Media Workshop for Political Correspondents” in Abeokuta from October 31 – November 1, 2018 as well as the “Media Workshop on Best Practices and Professional Reporting of the Electoral Process” held in Enugu from November 12 – 13, 2018.

Among the papers presented at the two workshops are, “Challenges of Election Coverage in Nigeria: A Reporter’s Account”, and the “Do’s and Don’ts of Election Reporting” by Adebiyi; “Covering the Political Space using Digital Media Tools and Apps” by Obe; “Integrating socio-economic and human index development data into political reporting ahead of 2019 elections” and “Reckoning with accountability and transparency issues in election reporting” which I was privileged to speak on.

At the Enugu training, papers were presented on “According Ethics and Professionalism Deserved Priority in Reporting Elections in Nigeria” by Prof. Okunna and Mainstreaming Reports of Gender and People Living with Disabilities in the Electoral Process” delivered by Mrs. Durodola. According to the Director of the International Press Centre, Mr. Lanre Arogundade, the reporters shortlisted to attend the two workshops were among the over 500 applicants who expressed interest to be trained at the workshops.

Now that the campaigns are about to start in the next 72 hours or thereabout, I wish to see improvements in the media coverage of the campaigns and the elections arising from the capacity building some of the political correspondents and journalists covering other beats have received from organisations like the IPC. Having said that however, I want to specially appeal to political parties and contestants in the forthcoming elections to eschew hate speech, character assassination, mudslinging, inflammatory comments and propagation of fake news. Heating up the polity is an ill-wind that blows no good to anyone. Electoral violence should not be part of the characterisation of the 2019 elections. Therefore, candidates and their political parties should not engage in killing and maiming of political opponents nor should they sponsor thugs to disrupt campaigns of fellow contestants.

What is needful at this critical juncture are issue-based campaigns. As I said in my presentations at the aforementioned training, media practitioners must take candidates to task on their campaign promises by clinically examining those pledges on their feasibility quotient. The media must set the agenda for the forthcoming campaigns. Political debates, town hall meetings and other campaign strategies must be veritable platforms to ask candidates the right questions. Questions about the country’s socio-economic developmental challenges and what they intend to do about them should also be asked It is a known fact that politicians campaign in prose but deliver in poetry.   The media must not just indulge in publishing or broadcasting campaign promises, journalists must ask how these promises are to be achieved and within what timeframes.

On Monday, November 12, 2018, the acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu, boasted to have recorded 703 convictions and recovered trillions of naira within three years of being at the helm of affairs of the anti-corruption agency. Magu announced that the EFCC under his watch recovered N794bn, $261m (about N77.8bn), £1.1m and 407 mansions from looters. Can these claims be independently verified by investigative journalists?

I look forward to knowing about the stance of the 79 presidential candidates and hundreds of governorship candidates in the 2019 elections on how they intend to fight corruption and run accountable government when voted to power. What new legislation do the thousands of contestants to the national and state assemblies intend to sponsor to promote accountability in government? These are germane questions to ask by journalists and the electorate from candidates as they criss-cross the length and breadth of the country trying to woo voters ahead of the 2019 elections.

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