Decision day in sight, as Trump rump closes in on Clinton

The political campaign style of blackmail and digging out past offences of opponent adopted by Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton and her bitter rival Republican Donald Trump paints a picture of a similar bitter race between President Muhammadu Buhari and his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan in the pre-2015 polls when a lot were prophesied, including a possible breakup of the entity called Nigeria.

Some Nigerians following the rallies as the two candidates canvass for votes, say the Americans seem to have adopted the Nigerian hostile method where politics is seen as a do-or-die affair and the winner takes all mentality.

Similarly, the threat by Donald Trump that “I will jail crooked and corrupt Hillary” if elected President of the US and the promise to fight corruption in high places including the White House, speaks volume of a similar 2015 presidential campaign method and promises by Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC) against Goodluck Jonathan, ex-president, and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in a race that was so bitter that well-meaning Nigerian senior citizens had to compel Buhari and Jonathan to sign a peace accord that they would not incite violence.

The Nigerian 2015 pre-political arena was characterised by hateful speeches, cultural, religious and ethnic innuendos that the whole world, including America, was at alert in case of any negative eventuality as a result of electoral fallout, due to a campaign that focused on ruining the reputation of political opponents before the voters.

“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump who are jostling for Obama’s seat come November 8, seem to be learning political antagonism from Nigerian politicians. I can say they are good students of Nigeria’s political culture. Like Nigeria, during the last election, the American political arena is also highly tensed now. And again, like Nigerians were hatefully divided along Buhari and Jonathan’s line, Americans are also hatefully divided along the Clinton and Hillary line. Like you said there are lots of similarities between current American politics and Nigerian politics,” said Ovabor Usifoh, Benin-based political scientist.

He explained that going by the extreme verbal war between Hillary and Trump, it is evident that Nigerian political campaign culture is negatively impacting the American calm political culture which is highly valued by developing countries, saying that it would by erroneous for Nigerians to assume that Nigeria cannot influence western nations in a new media age.

“The ‘lock her up’ chanting by Donald Trump supporters is strange in American politics and Trump is enjoying it, otherwise he would have asked his supporters to stop saying so. He actually started it when he said he would lock Hillary Clinton up in jail if elected. These are campaign strategy of Nigerian politicians. This was how the APC bullied Jonathan out of office. Nigerians were incited against him through social media. That is not to say Jonathan was a saint. I am only drawing similarity between what is happening in America now and what happened in Nigeria before and during the 2015 elections as you asked me,” he told BDSUNDAY.

Trumps’ tax scandal

As the Election Day draws nearer, both candidates have continued to ask each other questions bordering on alleged past misdeeds. Hillary Clinton had in one of her campaign nights seized on a New York Times report about Donald Trump’s 1995 tax records, in which the Times showed he declared a $916 million loss that could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years.

The report contains some of the most detail of Trump’s financial empire that has been publicly reported. It was immediately picked up by Clinton’s campaign, which has sought to make Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns a major issue of the campaign.

In the early 1990s, Trump convinced financial backers to forgive large debts he could not repay, the paper wrote. But he avoided having to report the cancelled But Trump defended his refusal by saying that he is under an IRS audit in some years as the reason he would not be releasing any of his returns, and that he would release them as soon as Hillary Clinton “releases her 33,000 emails that have been deleted. As soon as she releases them, I will release.”

But some Democrats say Trump’s claims about his taxes and income are not independently verifiable because he has refused to release his tax returns, bucking four decades of practice among presidential nominees.

They argued that his lack of transparency is because the returns contain something Trump would like to keep secret, either that he isn’t as wealthy as he claims, that he didn’t give as much to charity as he says he did, or that he has controversial overseas ties.

On the campaign trail, Trump bragged about his ability to use tax loopholes and said his knowledge of the flaws in the tax structure made him the most capable to fix it.

The email scandal

The issue of Hillary Clinton using private server when she was America’s Secretary of State has been repeatedly used against her in the ongoing race, which lately see her rival miraculously closing her up in national polls that hitherto described as “over” for the Republican nominee.

In March 2015, it became publicly known that Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as Secretary of State, had exclusively used her family’s private email server for official communications, rather than official State Department email accounts maintained on federal server.

She reported shortly before she was sworn in as secretary of state in 2009, set up an email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York. She then relied on this server, home to the email address [email protected], for all her electronic correspondence – both work-related and personal-during her four years in office. She also set up email addresses on the server for her long-time aide, Huma Abedin, and State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, which has now sparked the latest outcries from the Republicans.

Donald Trump has already described the Hillary Clinton email controversy as the biggest political scandal “since” Watergate, but has now turned it to “bigger” than Watergate. Watergate was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. in 1972 and President Richard Nixon’s administration’s attempted cover-up of its involvement.

The Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) investigation began with one simple premise: that Hillary Clinton violated the Espionage Act of 1913 by allowing national defense information to be “lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed” through “gross negligence. Eleven days before the election, FBI broke the news that it was reopening investigation on the matter again.

But an FBI investigation initially concluded that no “reasonable prosecutor” would bring a criminal case against Clinton, but that she and her aides were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information, but has now it says there is new evidence.

The Republican Nominee is also reportedly being investigated over a secret computer server specifically to communicate with the Russian bank, Alpha Bank. Several American online news media wrote that it discovered that the Trump organisation had set up an email server that only performed one function: irregularly pinging a single email server located at Alfa Bank – one of Russia’s biggest banks, which has close connections to the Russian and Ukrainian political elite. Both servers were set up to reject connections from third-party servers, and neither was active outside of Moscow and New York business hours. But Trump has denied the allegation.

Nelson Ekujumi, general secretary, Committee for the Protection of Peoples Mandate (CPPM), said the current bitter method of White House race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not a good democratic example for African politics, where the people is looking up to the US to lead by example.

“I am very disappointed with what is going on in America. The inciting and hate speech is too much. Election is not supposed to still be a do-or-die affair in a country Africa is looking up to in terms of democratic characters. It just shows that American politics is going down. This is not progress; and no father would be happy when his child is not making progress. This is backwardness,” he told BDSUNDAY.

Before the Clinton’s email scandal and the Trump tax evasion allegation, throughout the debate period and campaign rallies both candidates leveraged on alleged past misdeeds of each other, which significantly affected the polls across America.

Until last week, several women came forward either to testify of sexual harassment from Donald Trump or alleged rape involvement with a 13-year old girl, a development that soon tilted the polls in favour of Clinton before losing some ground to her bitter rival.

Fifteen women have now gone on record to say that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them. Out of all of their stories, one is the most explosive woman who says Trump violently raped her when she was just 13 years old.

Earlier, The Washington Post published a leaked tape showing Donald Trump speaking to Billy Bush of Access Hollywood, describing groping and kissing women without their consent. Following the tape’s release, the Trump campaign saw falling poll numbers and a mass exodus of support from horrified Republicans. Trump responded to the onslaught of criticism by saying that what he described was just “locker rooms talk” – not a description of something he’d ever actually did.

At the time of this report, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are going head to head in one of the most talked