Everything has its season and now it is the season of campaigns and hired crowds ahead of the 2019 general election. The Nigeria political space has been dominating the airwaves across all the strata of government, attracting significant favourable notice from all types of media; this has become the order of the day.
A new phrase has been entered into the lexicon of Nigeria’s contemporary society; “Campaign of hired crowds,” meaning the politicians using inducements of all kinds of gifts to pull crowds or attract large gatherings during campaign as parameter’s of catching the electorates attention or indices to measure their level of popularity or acceptance to the society.
Most of the political crowds of the 21st century in Nigeria are dominated by unemployed political thugs and vagrants that have to be induced with cash and other material things. People are hired and ferried across towns and villages in order to add colour to the campaign gatherings. The youths involved are sometimes either on drugs or alcoholic influence, projecting madness and animalistic instincts.
Some politicians give the youth’s psychotropic drugs in order to scare away saboteurs in a manner that ultimately leads to various criminal activities. As such, they end up either in the hospital emergency wards or mortuaries. Some of these supporters are driven to their early graves through automobile crashes and others lose their lives during rallies when supporters of opposition candidates feel threatened, resulting in a clash.
Apparently the major crowd-pulling contest is between the ruling party All Progressive People’s Party (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) which lost election in the 2015 General election although they have been in power since the inception of the fourth Republic 1999.
The politicians of the First Republic and Second Republic did not earn their fame by means of hiring crowd, but yet their ideologies philosophies and contributions towards human development were the magnets that made people clasped unto them.
So the crowd the amassed was neither fake nor a hired sort. I have been following some campaign rallies of these two political parties with their presidential candidates bragging of having the upper hand ahead of the February 16 elections. But do crowds actually translate into Election victory in the politic of contemporary society of Nigeria?
In reality or by all sorts of axioms large crowds may not actually translate election victory in the elections. This is because the political leaves are already changing colour and the wind feel different with political quotient amongst the Nigeria electorates.
Therefore you cannot judge the popularity of any candidate by the large crowds around him or her but his or her performance in the office held before.
Bello Shehu Shuni,
belloshuni79@gmail.com
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