Now that American security, intelligence and military boots are on the ground in Nigeria in order, it is alleged, to help in the fight against terrorism and genocide, American political boots appear to have joined them on the ground in order to tackle another Nigerian pandemic, of bitter political contest. With general and presidential elections now only a year away, major combatants appear to have imported a political campaign principle first popularised by American Republican political strategist Murray Chotiner in the 1940s.
I first read about Murray Chotiner during my secondary school days, in a small book about the Watergate scandal. An interesting passage in the book stated, “Murray Chotiner’s theory of politics is very simple. He believes that people vote against politicians, and not for them. If you win an election, it is not because you are popular. It is because your opponent is unpopular. In order to win an election, you should not try to make yourself popular; instead you should try as much as possible to make your opponent unpopular, so that when voters go to the polls, they will cast their votes against him, and therefore for you.”
I suspect that this principle will work very well in Nigeria due to a combination of factors. For one, few politicians in Nigeria have been truly popular since the First Republic. It is a tricky business for a Nigerian politician to make himself or herself popular. Too many variables are involved. Good looks often help, especially since most voters are likely to meet a candidate only on wall posters, on television and in social media video clips. In 1983, former Kano State governor Mohammed Abubakar Rimi, whose PRP Santsi faction had just teamed up with NPP, boasted on the podium that all Nigerian women will vote for NPP because of the handsome looks of Anambra State governor Jim Nwobodo and himself.
A second attractive personal campaign asset is eloquence. Voters here respect those “who get mouth,” such as the late Danmasanin Kano Alhaji Yusuf Maitama Sule, who could say the same thing in a dozen different ways. And the late Dr. K.O. Mbadiwe, the famous wordsmith. Soon after the 1983 elections when the newspapers were saying NPN had recorded a landslide victory, Mbadiwe said, “No, no. It is not a landslide victory. It is a political earthquake.” Fiery speech also attracted instant popularity to Alhaji Sabo Bakin Zuwo, who seized upon a popular Radio Kaduna politics program with his fiery speeches.
In Nigerian politics, sharp intellect and thorough preparation could get you so far with the elite, but not necessarily with the masses. In 1979 reporters stopped Chief Obafemi Awolowo at Lagos airport and asked him how he intended to fund the free education and free medical care programs that he was promising. Unusually of a Nigerian politician, Awo stopped right there, opened his briefcase, brought out a sheaf of papers and began to reel out complex financial calculations. By the time he finished an hour later, many of the reporters had fallen asleep!
It is difficult to become popular in Nigerian politics; it is much easier to make your opponent unpopular in the minds of voters. The practical application of the Chotiner Principle is what Americans call the dirty tricks campaign. Its top practitioner, called the “Democrats’ Prankster-in-Chief,” was a man called Dick Tuck, who perfected it on Richard Nixon with many tricks over several decades. In 1950, for example, when Nixon was running for a Senate seat in California, he arrived in Santa Barbara to give a speech. A huge auditorium was hired for him. When he arrived he found that there were only a few people in it even though his previous campaign appearances had been well attended by enthusiastic supporters wooed by his fierce anti-Communist rhetoric. A plump young man stepped forward and introduced himself as Nixon’s advance man. He then made a marathon introductory speech that ensured that half of the people in the hall left. By the time the few people left in the hall were dying of boredom, the advance man invited candidate Nixon to speak on a topic that he said “most absorbed California and the nation”, the IMF. According to the account, Nixon struggled through the disastrous evening and as he was leaving he asked the advance man his name. “Dick Tuck,” said the man. “Dick Tuck,” Nixon said, “you have just made your last advance!”
It turned out that Dick Tuck was a mole planted in Nixon’s campaign by his election opponent, Mrs. Helen Douglas. It was for Dick Tuck the beginning of a long career in negative political creativity within the boundaries of the law. During the 1960 presidential race, Nixon flew to Memphis, Tennessee soon after a televised debate against John Kennedy. As soon as he emerged from his plane a huge woman wearing an outsized Nixon button flung her arms around him and said, “Don’t worry, son. Kennedy won last night but you will do better next time.” It turned out that the woman was planted by Dick Tuck.
Not long afterwards, Nixon was on a whistle-stop campaign by train through several cities and towns. He was in the midst of a speech in one town when the train suddenly began to move. It turned out that Dick Tuck had donned a railwayman’s cap and signalled to the train driver to start moving. On yet another occasion, Nixon was having a fund raising dinner and the final item on the menu was the opening of a fortune cookie. When the guests opened the cookie wrap, they found a slip of paper inside it that declared, “Kennedy will win.” It had been slipped in by Dick Tuck.
On yet another occasion in 1962 when Nixon was campaigning for governor of California, he arrived at San Francisco’s Chinatown and saw a group of children lining up the route. They were cheering him and holding aloft a huge banner written in Chinese. Nixon stopped his motorcade, went over to the kids and posed for a picture, smiling broadly. It turned out that the banner in Chinese was supplied to the children by Dick Tuck and it read, “How about the Hughes loan?,” a reference to the scandal involving Nixon’s brother Donald who took a $205,000 loan from the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.
In Nigeria, mainstream PDP, ADC, NNPP and Labour Party opposition politicians are already embarking on efforts to make the ruling APC as unpopular as possible, so that when voters go to the polls next year, they will vote against it and therefore for the opposition. This is much simpler than trying to make themselves popular by unrolling election manifestoes, which Nigerian voters pay scant attention too, since they believe that all politicians fail to deliver on campaign promises. Already, a dirty tricks element in the opposition’s efforts is emerging, such as the [alleged] hacking of the National Security Adviser’s phone. This closely resembles the 1972 episode when four Cuban gangsters hired by Nixon’s reelection team entered Democratic Party Chairman Larry O’Brien’s office in the Watergate Hotel Complex to plant bugs. The burglars were later caught but here, no one caught the NSA’s phone hackers until opposition chieftains boasted about the feat on television.
Not only opposition, but ruling parties regularly engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, they often have more resources to do so. In 1971, while putting together President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, his top aides decided to borrow a leaf from their old nemesis and they put together what they called “Dick Tuck capability”, a dirty tricks operations team that did the Watergate burglary. In Nigeria in 2013-15, the then ruling PDP tried many dirty political tricks, including impeaching opposition party governors, engineering frictions within their state assemblies, closing airports to impede opposition governors’ movement, sending policemen to seal an opposition Government House in Port Harcourt; closing Maiduguri airport to the governor but selectively opening it to a PDP bigwig; and threatening to withdraw soldiers who were guarding Maiduguri Government House at the height of Boko Haram insurgency.
We do not yet know who is coordinating APC’s dirty tricks campaign. Some of its elements that surfaced at the weekend include excluding PDP, NNPP and ADC from the ballot in Kano legislative by-elections; merging APC and PDP structures in FCT and in Rivers State; imposing an unnecessary lockdown of the FCT; raiding some polling stations, firing tear gas and seizing election results; unleashing the combined might of EFCC, ICPC and DSS on major opposition figures; relegating to the background fraud cases involving trillions of naira against major figures who defected to the ruling party, and wooing [some say, cajoling] opposition governors to migrate to APC.
It is not only American military and intelligence boots that are on the ground here. American political dirty tricks boots appear to be on the ground here as well. Only that, while Murray Chotiner and Dick Tuck tried hard to remain just within the boundaries of law in their dirty tricks, our political combatants here are set to stray outside it.
