February 23: How Supporters “Hawk” Atiku, Buhari in Calabar

By Chidiebere Onyemaizu.

While the Independent Electoral Commission, INEC, battles with the backlash that has come with the aborted Presidential and National Assembly elections, PDP and APC partisans in Calabar, Cross River state, are utilizing the one week widow provided by it to engage in informal, inter-personal campaign for their preferred candidate.

Agents of the two parties are visible in restaurants, cabs, Keke, newspaper stands, fuel stations among other public places, informally soliciting for support for their principals. Their modus operandi? 

In a restaurant, for example, a middle-aged man sipping a drink sits close to a crowded table. During the intervening moments between when an order is taken by the waiter and when the food is actually served, the “drinking man” quickly strikes conversation with persons waiting to be served and in a flash, such conversation dovetails into the botched February 16 presidential election.

He dominates the conversation and again, quickly lectures on the imperativeness of voting his preferred party and presidential candidate this Saturday, February 23 which is the new date for the rescheduled polls.

Similar strategy is also adopted in cabs and keke. Here, the party man makes sure he secures a seat at the front from where he inundates other passengers with reasons his candidate is the best for Nigeria.

At newsstands, he buys a newspaper, flips through it and then provokes an argument about the delayed presidential election. In the heat of the argument, he chips in the desirability of electing his choice candidate on February 23.If sympathizers of the other candidate are also there, the argument reaches a boiling point.

Such was the case Monday, February 18, 2019 at MCC Road, near Mobile fuel station, off Murtala Muhammed High way, when supporters of PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar engaged a lone supporter of President Muhammadu Buhari of the APC in a verbal showdown. They had told the Buhari sympathizer that Cross River was completely “Atikulated” and should therefore, in their words, “stop making noise”. This prompted a sarcastic   response from the Buhari man leading to the intense verbal tango.

The pattern is the same in fuel stations where some partisan fuel attendants are the ones igniting the subtle presidential campaign. However, the fuel attendants attract sharp rebuke from motorists who view such political preachment as ploy to distract them and then under-dispense fuel to their vehicles.

Some supporters of both presidential candidates who spoke to the Magazine claim leadership of the two parties in the state are not in the know of their strange “campaign” strategies. “I want the Atiku presidency; I believe Nigeria will be better off with Atiku as President that is why I am doing this. I was not contracted or paid for this. This is my own little way of helping to bring Atiku to office”, a middle aged man who gave his name simply as Ofem, told The Source at Mary Slessor, near University of Calabar main gate.

At Atimbo area of the capital, a Buhari supporter who confessed he canvasses for vote for the president in cabs and Keke told the magazine that since the APC is utterly factionalized in the state, he supports Buhari for President only. “I don’t recognize the two factions and the factional governorship candidates, I am on my own and Buhari is my only candidate”, he said.