The Positive Agenda Nigeria, a research focused non-governmental organisation which monitored activities of political parties and their supporters during the 2022 Osun governorship election campaign, has called for true sanctions against campaign regulation violators. The demand was made in the organization’s final report.
The 39-page report with the title “Deconstructing and Reconstructing Election Campaign Strategy in Nigeria: Managerial and Policy Insights from Osun 2022 Governorship Election” documents activities of the political actors and their supporters in the areas of campaign strategies employed for marketing party and candidate’s agendas. The report also includes specific campaign and policy issues or needs addressed during the campaign.
While reading the report, our analyst discovered that PAN provides practical solutions that the Independent National Electoral Commission, the National Broadcasting Commission, the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, security agencies, and civil society members could explore. According to the report, these stakeholders are critical to developing effective and long-term sanction strategies that adhere to the campaign’s existing rules and regulations.
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Dr Adebiyi Rasheed Ademola, the Team Lead of the organisation, notes that “The Osun report is a testimony of the need to do real time monitoring of campaign activities by political actors and their supporters. It captured what went down in the real course of the campaigns. With this report, critical stakeholders could see the pattern of electioneering campaigns in the governorship election. It should be both an eye opener and early warning signals especially as the country inches towards the 2023 elections.”
He stresses that despite efforts to curtail excesses of politicians by making candidates and their parties get committed to both peaceful and fair elections and campaigns, the two established parties still toed the path of personality disparagement at the expense of the issue-based engagements.
“This speaks to the reasons the National Peace Committee in its first peace accord signing to include peaceful and sane campaigns. However, the only way to establish the aggressors and caution excesses is to monitor real time and warn or sanction any violators. The report also called on the INEC to have the will to implement its campaign guidelines and rules. These are there on paper, we await to see when it would be implemented by the body. It is a report whose recommendations need to be studied and applied as we witness campaigns both off and online for the 2023 elections.
The report has significantly revealed that the politicians, as seen in Osun, are using the social media most in their bid to undermine the personality of their fellow contestants. It did not stop there as the radio, television and other mainstream media were also deployed for attack. In all of these, the core issues of the state suffered greatly.”
The full report is available here.