My observation of the media coverage of the 2023 general elections since it became clear APC was set to win the presidential election, is that the mainstream media, particularly Channels and Arise TV, is committed to doing everything possible to delegitimise 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 elections were the worst 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.
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I’ve 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 cannot rig an election in its stronghold, how is it possible that it is able to rig elections in other areas?
It should also have been obvious that APC benefited from the splitting of ranks and, consequently, 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 federation.
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 more than 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 has 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 any 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.
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 that INEC rigged the presidential election in favour of the winner. The opposition must seize the opportunity to present such hard evidence at the, not on the streets or at INEC election petition tribunal headquarters, 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 basically the strategy behind the Muslim/Muslim ticket and nothing more. Those who read other motives into it have either missed the point or else, are using it to push a worldview totally at odds with the intended purpose, which is, to win the election.
But the mainstream media is conveniently and deliberately not looking 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.
Concluded on www.dailytrust.com
Bashir is a one-time National Secretary of Action Congress (AC), chairman of Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC)
