By Don Slim
I recently
stumbled on a Nigerians For Obama Twitter handle, launched on October 10
this year. "We nigerians in American (sic) want to tell obama that we
have got his back," the inaugural tweet read.
There's nothing surprising about that -- after all, Barack Obama, born of an African man, is "our son."
The story of
"Obamagic" goes back four years, when it emerged that a black man
actually stood a chance of becoming the president of the most powerful
country in the world. Here, the boss of the stock exchange launched an
"Africans for Obama" group (never mind that she probably meant to say
"Billionaire Nigerians for Obama") and organised a fund-raising dinner
that amassed $600,000 for the Democratic candidate.
There was only one
snag; no one had taken the time to find out what American campaign
financing laws had to say about such a move. The Obama campaign wasn't
allowed to receive the money, and Nigeria 's anti-graft agency stepped
in to probe the fundraising.
Tolu Ogunlesi
For those who
couldn't say "Yes we can" with their checkbooks, there was Facebook
which, back then, was a relatively new phenomenon in Nigeria. We could
join the Americans and the rest of the world to share our opinions about
the son of Africa on his way to the White House.
Just a year after
Nigeria's 2007 general elections -- which brought Umar Yar'Adua to power
in a election derided by some as a "charade" -- Obama's race to the
White House was a chance for Nigerians to vicariously participate in a
political process that appeared transparent and was no doubt inspiring;
not to mention the amusement of indulging in debates about whether
things would've been different had Barack Obama, Sr. been Nigerian and
not Kenyan.
Four years later, a lot has changed. The novelty of 2008 has worn off, and many Nigerians appear to have moved on.
Much of the energy
that in 2008 went into the U.S. elections has since found an outlet in
our own electoral processes. As I wrote this piece one of the prominent
things on my Twitter timeline was a running commentary on the live
broadcast of the governorship debate in Nigeria's Ondo State, where
elections are due this weekend. A scenario like this was highly unlikely
four years ago.
We also now have
our own "Facebook President" -- Goodluck Jonathan announced his decision
to run for president on Facebook, and is today one of the world's most
"liked" heads of state on the social networking site (he has actually
been called "Nigeria's Obama.") It is this homegrown excitement that the
Obama-Romney contest now has to compete against.
I've been randomly
asking friends if they stayed up to watch the first presidential debate.
While most respondents didn't, as the debate took place at 3:00 a.m.
here in the capital, a U.S. debate is just the sort of thing -- like the
Academy Awards or English Premier League matches -- that would have set
Twitter afire in Lagos.
I awoke the next
morning to find a BlackBerry message from a friend to a group of 16 of
us. He'd sent it during the debate, asking if anyone was up. When I saw
it the next morning, I panicked slightly, wondering what emergency had
arisen overnight. It turned out there'd been no emergency; he simply
wanted to know if anyone else was watching. Only one other member of the
group was awake at that time.
Lawyer and Big
Brother Nigeria alumnus Ebuka Obi-Uchendu, another of my friends who
watched that first debate, told me he did so as a "cynic", merely for an
opportunity to see Barack Obama "challenged" after a lackluster first
term.
Linda Ikeji,
Nigeria's best-known entertainment blogger, has been weighing in on the
U.S. presidential debates. In response to her post asking readers if
they watched the first debate, and if it "harm[ed]" Obama, a comment
described the U.S. president as "simply clueless" -- an interesting
choice when one considers that "clueless" is one of the most widely used
epithets used to describe President Jonathan.
Perhaps we're
seeing in Obama a reflection of our own president: swift dissipation of a
hope founded largely on a campaign charged with personal stories; a
case of soaring soapbox poetry swiftly replaced by the clunky prose of
presidential politics.
Yet none of the
Nigerian love Obama may have lost appears to have found its way to Mr.
Romney. Blogger Ikeji's post about the second debate clearly
demonstrates that the fondness for Mr. Obama in these parts is
instinctive.
In the last couple
of days I've seen friends on social media tickled by the idea of a "Myth
Romney." Mitt's faith isn't a big help to him here either, in a country
where fervent Pentecostals remain wary of Mormons (of whom there are
roughly 100,000 in Nigeria today).
Still, we're
nowhere near the 2008 levels of U.S. election enthusiasm. If the
Africans for Obama dinner was the high point of 2008, the high point of
the 2012 U.S. presidential season in Nigeria was the controversy around
the presence of opposition party leader Bola Tinubu at the Democratic
National Convention.
Initial reports
quoted his team as saying he was specially invited by Obama --- but it
quickly emerged that Tinubu did not receive any special invitation, and
his party reportedly said he'd paid a fee to attend.
For days national
media feasted on the story and the ruling People's Democratic Party
seized its chance to pillory the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria,
describing it as "founded on fraud and deceit."
That sort of
name-calling, as opposed to debates around manifesto highlights, lies at
the heart of Nigerian politics. 2015 might actually end up being the
first Nigerian general election in recent history in which "issues" --
power, state subsidies, taxation, roads, etc. -- will carry the day.
Just maybe.
Since we're not
conditioned to judging candidates on the strength or otherwise of their
beliefs in health insurance or taxation or foreign policy, it's easy to
tune off when the American elections slide into that territory.
"A lot of Nigerians
don't understand the politics or economy of America ," says journalist
Olumide Iyanda, Saturday Editor at the Lagos-based Independent
Newspapers. "It's the soap opera that Nigerians are interested in, not
the issues."
Fresh WorldNews
No comments:
Post a Comment