2015 elections and the role of social media

The 2015 general elections may have come and gone, but there are lessons still to be gleaned from the way they were won and lost, especially the role of the new media cum social media in the outcome.
It can be described as the first ever election in Nigeria that had huge social media presence since the country’s return to democracy in 1999. In fact, it is the first ever election that generated so much interests in all ramifications.
Many factors can be indorsed to the reason for the attentiveness that the 2015 polls got in the run up to the actual day ballot casting. The campaigns, especially the Presidential vote canvassing across the country generated so many issues, emotions and several other sentiments, but thank God for the presence of social media platforms such as facebook, twitter and other news websites that brought live feeds of events to the people on the ‘go.’
Gone are the days when the traditional media - television, radio, newspapers and magazines etc. maintain the monopoly of exclusivity to information dissemination. The new media, boosted by the consistent growth of information and communication technology (ICT), which has given birth to the social media, are playing pivotal roles in the way messages are sent and consumed in the public sphere.
Nigeria’s 2015 general elections have largely been acknowledged as victory for democracy with the first ever victory of an opposition candidate –it was also a model in how social media brings transparency to the electoral process.
President-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressive Congress party’s lead in the vote last month quickly became apparent a few hours after polling units closed, thanks to technologically savvy Nigerian voters using social media to share each step of the process. Locally developed voter monitoring applications, Revoda and Nigeria Elections were in robust use during the entire period.
Long before the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) shared any official polling numbers, Nigerians, who had volunteered among the about 700,000 electoral officers shared the voter numbers from their units. While nearly every tweet and Facebook post came with the “unofficial” forewarning, it was a good indicator of the trend.
By the Sunday evening of Presidential elections, Nigerian social media had metamorphosed into a beehive with several posts either confirming a result earlier collated, or giving more information, especially in areas where elections were postponed. In some senses it’s not a complete surprise that social media was accurately reflecting a trend.
According to an online survey recently published by an Appraisal Company in America, Nigeria has one of the fastest growing Internet penetration rates. Last year alone, the country added 10 million new internet users to have around 75 million Internet users.
The growth of social media usage in the country cannot be taken away from since the Occupy Nigeria nationwide began in 2011 when the Jonathan administration suddenly removed fuel subsidies and set off inflation. Social media’s national prominence has risen more since over a year ago when the over 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok by the ultra-violent separatists group, Boko Haram.
The Bring Back Our Girls campaign reverberated around the world and even found its way to the White House due, partly to the influence of the social media. Before the votes, through Facebook posts, Twitter usage, and even sharing video through the messaging the application ‘WhatsApp,’ it often seemed that the campaign of President Goodluck Jonathan was playing catch-up in the lead up to the vote.
In one of his facebook posts, a social media critic in Lokoja, Kogi State, Barr Aaron Josiah told me thaty the president Jonathan’s re-election campaign had been caught flat-footed on social media. “The APC campaign was consistent with their message on social media, they completely shaped the narrative there,” he said. “By the time people here started to throw money at the social problem, it was already too late. Then there was multiple messaging which was confusing for voters.”
And it was the same in this Nigeria Decides campaign influencing both leading parties’ respective campaigns. As Techcabal noted that every trick in the book was in play even online polls with surprising results. On Election Day, everyone with a social media account played a role in disseminating results. Nigeria Decides was the top trending hashtag on Facebook and Twitter on March 30th as Nigeria and the rest of the world eagerly anticipated the results.
“Many people who stationed themselves at the polling centers until the close of election were able to know the results of those centers, record events and also photographed copies of results pasted,” Tony Okeregbe, a professor at the University of Lagos told an online magazine.
“Then, they connected, via social media, with friends at other centers who did the same thing with other friends. At the end of the day, a rough estimate of what the results would look like was known beforehand”, he added.
Many soft-sell websites set up their own situation room from where they gathered results from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), as collated by the people who witnessed the elections in the polling units. Nigerians of all ages and creed also transformed, if for that period alone, to journalists, sending what is referred to as “Eye-witness Report” to various websites and other media organizations.
The consensus from all sides is that while social media didn’t decide the vote, it had a significant influence on perception, expectations and a demand for transparency. It seemed that social media was a winner because it was largely responsible for what resulted in citizens proclaiming that Democracy is alive and well in Africa’s most populous nation.
It takes at least a second look at the political space in Nigeria to realize something has shifted. A space that was all about power brokers and media moguls has become so deregulated to the extent you could consider it the freest space in Nigeria right now. All thanks to the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan for the way he handled the flacks that he got, and still gets, from most of the users of various social media outfits.
The main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is probably the biggest beneficiary of the value social media brings to the table. Long before the party was formed in February of 2013, young Nigerians used to congregate on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to express their anger against the government. They used the platforms to organize protests like “Enough Is Enough” in April of 2010 to campaign for the then-Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to be made Acting President, a move that eventually led to the “doctrine of necessity” that got the National Assembly to name him Acting President. The force of Nigeria’s young people rose to a crescendo with the Occupy Nigeria movement in January of 2012. That anger has since been sustained and indeed spread to other young people who would ordinarily not be interested in politics.
According to social media critic and blogger in Nigeria, “today, the Nigerian awakening is fully on. All the APC did was harvest the anger of these young people. All along, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has been playing catch-up. The Goodluck Jonathan administration failed to sustain the momentum of President Jonathan’s unprecedented move of declaring his intention to run for the 2011 elections on his Facebook page first before anywhere else. Even though the administration started out well through President Jonathan’s Facebook account, it would be safe to say social media have been one of its greatest undoing ever since.”
Take, for instance, President Jonathan’s Twitter page @presgoodluck with 32 tweets and 25,000 followers has been abandoned since May 2011. Imagine what four years of tweeting would have done to the president’s social media image! It is only used these days is to be listed on his World Economic Forum profile during the yearly Davos meetings and the Economic Forum, Africa sessions.
Compare this to the President-elect Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, who only joined Twitter last December. With just over 900 tweets, he has garnered over 117,000 followers and has since been verified by Twitter along with his running mate Prof. Yemi Osinbajo who, with some 430 tweets, has almost 80,000 followers.
This doesn’t tell the whole story. Their biggest strength has to be the fact that they have been able to plug their campaign into the organic anger against the government that has been cooking in Nigeria’s social media space for at least 4 years.
While the opposition’s social media presence has been mostly organic, the ruling party’s has been most inorganic and at times bordering on the comical. You’d see about 200 Twitter handles express their anger about Buhari’s interview with the same words at exactly the same time. The robotic approach hasn’t helped as much as they would have hoped because social media is not about robots but humans.
Elections may not be won on social media but perceptions are shaped there. More often than not, these perceptions even influence the so-called “legacy media”. Hence there is the need to hold on to any opportunity that you, as a politician, can get from users of the media or the other party may ingrain an idea in their minds that may last for a long period of time.
The truth is, the president is right on the damage social media has done to perception of him as the president and that of his government. But he also needs to pay attention to the fact that he abandoned the space to his own detriment.