Working in the heart of the Marketing Communications industry in 2014 and 2015, I had a front-row seat at the preparation of the PR and Advertising blitzkrieg that was unleashed on Nigerians by what was then the opposition party.
The APC invested billions of naira in media, PR, advertising, guerrilla marketing, and all manner of dubiously ethical opinion manipulation solutions to get what it wanted. The infamous role of David Axelrod’s AKPD Media and Messaging, as well as the likes of Red Media and StateCraft in playing a giant Jedi mind trick on Nigerians is well documented.
What many may not know even 7 years later, however, is that the very choice of the terminology used in campaigning for Retired General Buhari was highly strategic. The expensively deployed bombardment of Nigerians with this very terminology that dotted the eventual winner’s manifesto, was deliberate and highly strategic.
With decades of experience in massaging and manipulating public opinions in the relatively high information voter environment of the United States, David Axelrod understood very keenly how the use of specifically chosen language and strategic repetition can effectively turn an intelligent human being into a compliant moron. He did this to great effect in Nigeria 7 years ago.
Beware of soundbites and sloganeering
Keywords and key phrases like “Change,” “Corruption,” “Incompetence,” “Incompetent buffoon,” “Stealing,” and many more than I was even aware of, were drip-fed to Nigerians over the course of the 2015 campaign, which actually started in earnest 3 years before 2015.
Without realising that someone was playing a trick on them by feeding them with strategically positioned trigger words and phrases and convincing them that they came up with these things themselves, Nigerians were thus misled into thinking that their visceral dislike for the person of the ex-president was somehow their idea.
Even today, following 7 years of civilian massacres at Lekki, Obigbo, and Zaria, two different economic recessions, ruinous border closures, Twitter bans, and whispers of 3rd term ambitions, many Nigerians still do not dislike Muhammadu Buhari with anything like the amount of vitriol they reserved for Goodluck Jonathan.
This is the power and effect of Neuro-Linguistic Programming when practised on a macro scale. In all parts of an electoral campaign’s marketing communication – especially its manifesto – the presence of repetitive keyword after keyphrase without much substance in between should be an instant red flag.
The APC’s completely unearned but overwhelming public support in the online space in 2015 was built on the strategic deployment of people’s own mind functions against them.
Through the use of these empty but compelling soundbites and catchphrases combined with the lie-and-repeat tactics first espoused by Josef Goebbels nearly a century ago, David Axelrod, Debola Williams, Lai Mohammed, and dozens of similar characters manually modified the mental architecture of broadly educated Nigerians.
This is how Nigerians with university degrees and the ability to process information logically could somehow be convinced that a 3-time coup-plotting war criminal was “who Nigeria needed” in 2015.
The APC’s 2015 manifesto was hailed as the document with a blueprint for “fixing Nigeria” following years of alleged damage and neglect at the hands of the Fisherman Without Shoes From Otuoke.
In reality, what it was on closer inspection, was a meaningless hodgepodge of keywords, slogans, catchphrases, extensively plagiarised sections and an assortment of nonsense pulled completely out of thin air.
Nigerians for the most part did not catch this fact because, at the right scale, blitzkrieg marketing and effective use of NLP is indistinguishable from mind control or black magic – it quite literally takes intelligent people and temporarily turns them into servile morons.
You really need not take my word for it because there is actual science behind this. In your own time, you can do some research on how NLP is deployed in creating and maintaining religious cults, and then compare the tactics deployed in 2015 with those deployed by the Branch Davidians and Jehovah’s Witnesses for example.
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Triumphalism is also a red flag
The other major thing to watch out for when looking through the manifestos of the 2023 hopefuls is the presence of triumphalism – an exaggerated sense of presence and blithe cocksureness about breezing into power and “fixing Nigeria” in under 2 years flat. Remember “It’s not rocket science” in 2015?
Amazingly enough, it did in fact turn out to be rocket science to the owner of that manifesto. It will also be rocket science post-2023 because – let us make no mistake about this – Nigeria is not a simple, easy or straightforward problem to solve.
Anyone purporting to have the solution to Nigeria’s problems must demonstrate a clear understanding of their scale, depth, and difficulty.
In the case of the APC in 2015, all consideration of scale, depth, and difficulty was completely avoided, and the entire manifesto when examined in the cold light of day, was as facile and shallow as it was loud and attention-grabbing.
A proper appreciation of scale and difficulty – or at least a basic respect for the intelligence of the electorate – would have prevented promises like “We will create 3 million jobs every year,” or “We will feed every school child in Nigeria” from entering the APC’s 2015 manifesto.
When, however, a manifesto is put together by an entity that has zero understanding of or respect for what governance actually is, this is the sort of melodramatic, superficial nonsense that fills it in lieu of actual substance.
A proper manifesto ideally should be written in a similar language and format to that of a technical whitepaper. The premise is the same – there is a problem that needs to be solved, and here is an entity proposing its solution. Any claims made in the manifesto must be clear and backed by data. Ditto for any proposed solutions.
It is not enough for a manifesto to say “We will provide every man in Nigeria with a clone of Rihanna.” It must explain exactly how the entity intends to achieve this, and how it will get around the economic, logistical, and ethical concerns involved in industrial-scale human cloning.
The Rihanna example might seem like an exaggeration, but we had a winning manifesto in 2015 promising things that were just as materially impossible, given Nigeria’s fiscal and geopolitical status.
Stupid, impossible, pie-in-the-sky promises backed up by hifalutin triumphalist lingo and generous references to meaningless, formless, and non-specific enemies like “corruption” are exactly what you do not want to see in a campaign manifesto going into the election season. May the odds be in our favour as we prepare to hold our noses and rake through the hypothetical Abuja sewer in search of the least odiferous rat to become Nigeria’s next president.
We certainly need all the luck we can get.
