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When you were named the spokesperson for the presidential campaign of the APC, what immediately crossed your mind on the challenge of competing against your seemingly better-oiled PDP media campaign team?
Indeed, the opposition was formidable. They had access to state resources to buy all the pages in all the newspapers at any time. They had money to buy all the air time available for sale. I will give you an instance. There was a day I called the FRCN and I wanted to buy one minute for a jingle I wanted on air. They told me they had 16 slots for a minute jingle but maintained that the whole of the 16 had already been bought by the PDP. So they told me there was no one minute available on their network.
In the run-up to the election, they also seized control of virtually every newspaper. They crowded us out of the front pages of virtually all newspapers, except in a few like the Daily Trust, The Punch and The Nation. They bought every newspaper wrap-around, and you know how much that cost. We just didn’t have the resources to compete with them.
Beyond that, we knew from the pronouncements of their spokesmen that they had an arsenal of abusive language. They were inviting us to a slanderous shouting match, but we said no. We decided we would not reply their Fani-Kayodes on whatever they say.
At the onset of our campaign, we had mapped out the salient issues we would be campaigning on. General Buhari knew the number one problem of the country is lack of security. And then, there is the economy which is the problem creating unemployment and is as well breeding crime, terrorism and corruption. The general made it clear to all of us from the beginning not to insult or abuse anyone. He said we should just campaign on issues.
That was how we started. Yes, it was intimidating and challenging. They were just pouring out venom. Quite a number of the masses out there, after watching or reading the venom, would call us and said, “Oga, what are you doing; can’t you respond?” But we realized that if we jumped into the gutter with them, we would all dirty ourselves together and we in the APC would not be able to achieve our core objective of discussing the real issues of economy, insecurity and corruption.
They, on their own, had no contribution to make on those issues. They had no defence for the six years of President Jonathan on why insecurity has eaten deep into the country, on why corruption has become a massive industry and why the economy is working for only a few opportunists and not the majority of Nigerians. Because they didn’t have what it would take to answer the questions on those key issues, they resorted to insulting people. They wanted to distract us so we wouldn’t discuss germane issues but instead join them to fight in the mud. But we resisted that. It was not easy but we had to do that in order to achieve our objective of delivering our message to the people.
How difficult was it in the beginning?
Shehu Garba
In this job, professionalism doesn’t come to nothing! We knew that in order to succeed, we must run an issue-based campaign. We just couldn’t descend to their level running a person-based campaign in which they were insulting people. For example, someone from the president’s team was on the television telling people how someone had slept with other people’s wives. That was the kind of campaign they were running. They were churning out one hate documentary after another.
Despite it all, I was not intimidated because, with all due modesty, I think I had the professional background and experience for this kind of job. I was a journalism practitioner, I had been in broadcast and print, and I was also a public relations practitioner. I also did the union side of journalism. I taught journalism at both graduate and undergraduate levels. And far more than any other thing, I am always a team player. When they called upon me to do this, I never thought it was one huge assignment to me.
Consider how we have been running the Atiku media office. When people heard Garba, they would think I was one field-marshal or I was the only one running the place. But when they came here, they realized it was a fully established office with a number of people, including researchers working on issues.
So it was team-work that did it. In the APC Presidential Campaign Office, the media committee had the highest number of people. What we did was that all the media assets of the presidential aspirants who ran against Buhari – Atiku Abubakar, Sam Ndah-Isiah, Rochas Okorocha and Musa Kwankwaso; and those of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Buhari were brought together. We had representation from these groups. We would sit in the plenary just like we would do in the newsroom. When the newspapers came in, we would look at everything, we would read them aloud.
Then, we would talk about TV and radio. We would take a joint decision on what to say and how to say it. It was never done by one man. Yes, I am the team leader and that comes with a lot of responsibilities – showing the way, providing guidance and ensuring moderation.
Beyond that, the effort was aided by so many unseen hands not in the committee. Buhari enjoyed a lot of goodwill, including from civil servants who would call to give us suggestions, and newspaper writers who would say, ‘do this, don’t do that.’
I would also say the social media clinched it for Buhari. Nigerians seized the campaign on the web. They took it with both hands and were driving it. The only thing we could do was to offer guidance here and there, and inject direction and debate. Nigerians had engineered a revolution without firing a single shot.
Would you say there was enough fund in your office to run the media campaign for Buhari?
Where are the funds? No, no, there was nothing. You will be amazed to know that many of the states were donating air time on radio and television to us. People who were sympathetic to the party and Buhari from the states were also donating air time. A number of independent stations gave us free air time for jingles – from Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Port Harcourt, etc. In quite a number of cities, we had electronic billboards and air time donated to our campaign. Of course, we didn’t have the money to do all that.
In newspapers, our advertising level was very low, compared to theirs. There was a day I opened one newspaper on Monday and it had 13 PDP colour advertisements, all of them attacking one person, Gen Muhammadu Buhari. If we had money, maybe we would have replied to some of them. But we didn’t have money. That was the kind of campaign we ran.
What was typical in many of those newspapers which ran PDP’s hate advertisements, was that if a discerning reader went through their (the newspapers’) editorial contents, he would discover that the stories there were clashing with the advertisements; the content was pro-APC/Gen Buhari. But then the advertisements were paid for.
How were you able to handle what has been widely condemned, even now by some PDP’s top leaders, as the party’s hate speeches and documentaries?
The volume of vituperation against our candidate and our leaders was something no one has ever envisaged and nobody has ever seen in the life of politics in this country. It was scary because it wasn’t as if there were no laws in this country. There are government agencies which were there to regulate those things. If it is the advertising content, APCON is there; if it is broadcast content, the NBC is there; and if it is newspapers, the Press Council is there. Even though the Press Council is toothless, at least it is there. But it was clear that the government was not going to allow these regulatory agencies to do their job.
In any case, the government people engaged in the wrongdoing were bypassing the regulatory agencies to place advertisements that had no APCON certificate on AIT and NTA. These channels were not asking questions. But in our own case, if we take any advertisement to them we must produce an APCON certificate. If we go to APCON, it would say our advertisement did not meet their standard. They rejected so many adverts from us. The government was an outlaw government; it was operating outside the laws. They didn’t bother to obtain approval from anybody; they just went to the TV or radio stations to place the adverts. They had the control and support of television stations like the NTA and the AIT they paid heavily to, and these channels were not asking any questions.
Why couldn’t the APC produce its own documentaries?
It was not as if we didn’t try our hands on a negative documentary also, but not to actually air it but to test their (the hostile media stations) waters. We did produce a documentary that would hurt the government, but ours was factual on the failure of the federal government to protect lives, get the economy going, do the right thing on jobs and things like.
But, not surprisingly, the NTA and AIT rejected it. In case of the AIT, they even assessed it and said they would do it. They gave us their terms and how much they would charge and we said we were ready. Later, they came back and said well, the management has decided they should not use it. Even in their wrongdoing, in the terror they were engaging in, they were not ready to balance it up. They would do it for government and refuse to do it for the opposition, but at least the point had been proved.
Gen Buhari was said to have stopped a documentary produced by the APC on president Jonathan. How true is this?
Well, his position has always been that we should not abuse or attack anybody. As I said, when we produced our own documentary, it was to test the waters. We wanted to see whether these television stations that kept saying if we bring our own documentary they would also use it would do as they claimed. We understand that you cannot do things that are below the ethical standard in Channels TV. If you take anything that is below the ethically approved standard to the station, it will not show it. We didn’t even try to talk to Channels on it; we chose the NTA and AIT to make a point that the contempt they have for Buhari, his family and the party was irredeemable.
Do you have any ugly story to tell regarding the handling of the Buhari media campaign?
Of course, yes. On one occasion, men in police uniform surrounded my home around 2am and were there until daybreak. They woke me and my family members with the noises they were making and the corking of their guns. It was clear that they had come to take me away because they came with a long van with tainted glasses. I saw them through the window and what helped me and my family was the social media. The moment I saw that they had surrounded the entire place, I began to send sms messages to some of our social media friends and before you knew it, the story was everywhere that my home had been surrounded. I think it was that realization that what they thought they were doing in the darkness of the night was already there in the public glare that compelled them to pull out and went away.
We tried to know why they did that, but both the police and the SSS denied knowledge of anything like that. Maybe there were some powerful people in government or even the party who were controlling a secret army or policemen that they can deploy without the Army chief or Inspector-General of Police knowing. It was a regime marked by terror. It didn’t happen to only me, it also happened to some of our leaders like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Okorocha.
On the day of the Presidential election, by 5am I woke up to find out that all my registered telephone lines had been jammed by a constant streaming of incoming calls, and that did not end until about 8pm. I couldn’t make any call. Throughout the election period, whenever I switched my phone off and back on, it would keep streaming incoming calls or unknown number. That was an electronic warfare they launched against me and some of the party leaders. The phone of Gen Dambazau, who is the head of the security team was also jammed. That of the National Chairman of the APC was jammed as well. I think they chose a number of people that they wanted to disconnect from the telecommunication system for the whole period of the election that day. Thank God we survived all of this.
At the height of the hate speech, the APC threatened to take some organizations and individuals to court. How many of them have you taken to court so far?
No, we have not taken any of them to court. The only person we have taken to court so far is Mrs Patience Jonathan who we dragged to the International Criminal Court. It was clear we needed to do that because the woman had gone haywire. She was attacking Gen Buhari without due respect for his age and seniority. She had no regard for Buhari at all; she called him all manner of names. She was at one point saying “whoever comes to you to say ‘change’ stone that person.” So we said no, she has reached her limit. We were happy the ICC responded immediately and said they were interested in the case.
When you are in this job, you should be wary of taking people to court for libel, defamation and the like. I always advise on this especially in terms of media relations. I always advise that politicians can’t win against the media. No politician succeeds without the media. If they said you are a thief and you decided to go to court, what a mischievous media would do is that on every hearing of that case, it would be repeating the same libel pretending to be reporting details of the court case.
What is the true position of things now between your office and the AIT? Was it true the TV station was barred from covering the activities of the President-elect?
No, AIT was not barred or banned. Some journalists have a way of reporting things like this. Security issues were raised concerning the AIT. There is a difference between barring somebody and saying ‘step aside’ because there was an issue we wanted to discuss with him. But they turned around to say we barred them. Nobody can ban or bar the media from the coverage of a president’s activities. We have to be very careful as journalists because security is not our domain. Even when it might not exactly be the case, we must be careful not to cross the lines. We investigated both sides of the claims. We were able to do this within a short period of time and we said there was no point keeping AIT out of the coverage of the President-elect’s activities and we reinstated it.
It was not about the campaign issue. If a government wants to punish a media house, there are 1001 ways to do that without attracting the attention of the public. I believe the AIT is carrying a huge moral burden already. It will be a mistake on our part to say we want to share that moral burden with them. We will not give them that privilege; it is their problem.
On the documentaries they were airing during the campaign, we had wanted to answer them but we realized that the more atrocious they were the more sympathy they were winning for our candidate. More Nigerians were coming to our side, so they were helping us. In trying to hurt us they were campaigning for us. So why should we start a fight with them; there is no basis for that. They were unprofessional throughout; they were atrocious and they knew they broke all the laws. The AIT is a pro-government station that thought there was nothing anybody could do to it. The NBC just sat there and watched them do all the dirty job they did throughout the campaign period.
Source: Daily Trust
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