Massive hi-tech eased Buhari’s path to presidency

There is near consensus among politics watchers that the deployment of high technology to the just concluded polls held on March 28, 2015, eased president elect, Muhammadu Buhari’s path to power in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP.
Experts are of the view that effective use of digital platforms (social media) played an important role in assisting the retired army general to emerge the first Nigerian to unseat an incumbent president at the polls, three decades after seizing power in a military coup.
According to them, the deployment of aggressive social media campaigns and the decision by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to use biometric machines, which helped prevent widespread rigging that had marred past elections, placed Buhari in pole position to win the elections.
“It was great to see that Buhari use social media effectively,” said Lewis Wiltshire, director of media partnerships at Twitter.
Speaking with BusinessDay in an interview, Wiltshire said, “Hours before the presidential election in Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari posted a manifesto on Twitter which amounted to about 50 tweets”.
According to him, the move by the retired general was a great example of digital democracy at work. Muhammadu Buhari’s appeal to the electorate lay in his successful rebranding as a man who embraced democracy in all its ramifications.
A great deal of that rebranding exercise took place in the cyberspace, where campaigning from smart phones and tablets can build momentum at low cost.
“The digital strategy has been a lifeline of the campaign for young people. We needed to create an image that enabled people to connect with him,” Adebola Williams, the 29-year-old whose Lagos-based communications company, State Craft, orchestrated Buhari’s digital drive, told Reuters.
With Nigeria recording a 200 percent increase in internet users between 2009 and 2013, market observers are of the view that the growing penetration of mobile telephony, especially the rise of smart phones afforded politicians a more cost effective platform to reach out to the electorate.
There are 13 million Nigerians in the country using Facebook. According to a recent research by TwinePine Research entitled ‘The State of Digital Media,’ 83 percent of social media users in the country is active. Twitter, the micro blogging website has about six million Nigerian users. In view of this, Nigerian politicians can ill afford to ignore social media, as the platform is gathering growing influence due to its spiralling subscriber numbers, immediacy and ease of use.
Technology experts however said that social media also allowed information and opinions to travel across networks like ripples in a pond, adding that it amplified ideas and allowed each person to participate as an opinion leader, through media production and distribution and not just by passive consumption.
During the United States (US) elections held in 2012, 30 percent of online users reported that they were urged to vote via social media by family, friends or other social network connections.
On the other hand, 20 percent actively encouraged others and 22 percent posted their decision when they voted.
Besides, the Arab Spring spawned a series of revolutionary movements that are unique, in that they utilised social media as an effective means to spread information and promote insurgent agenda.
But more significant than the online campaigning was the use of biometric machines to identify voters, which prevented the ballot-box stuffing and multiple voting that characterised past polls.
“The card reader played a constructive role in deterring individuals who in the past, had tampered with the electoral process, either through ballot stuffing or tampering with the election results,” said Christopher Fomunyoh, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a non-governmental organisation that promotes democracy. As a result, this election was judged Nigeria’s freest and fairest election yet. “Fortune favours the bold. Deciding to go hi-tech was absolutely the right thing to do,” U.S. Ambassador James Entwistle said after the poll.”