The 2027 general and presidential election campaign season kicked off in earnest last week, not with great elocution, thoughtful programs, mouth-watering campaign promises or slam-dunk observations, but with eight notable gaffes spewed by important political actors.
Senator Francis Fadahunsi of Osun East had kicked off the gaffes season days before last month’s off-season Osun State governorship polls. The senator, an APC chieftain, led his supporters in a protest march to the palace of the Owa Obokun of Ijesaland to, he said, protest the incessant killing of his party members ahead of the election. Fadahunsi led the march a day after three people were killed in a shooting in the Imo area of Ilesa.
Blaming the killings on members of Governor Ademola Adeleke’s Accord Party, the senator said, “The cap they wear – it is Yellow Fever cap, it is the cap of an animal. It is animal that kills. Have you ever heard that APC killed anyone? Are those being killed not your people? So, we have come to tell you, up till the day of the election, if we see them, it is killing.”
When a video of the remarks went viral, the police invited Senator Fadahunsi to their station to explain his remarks. He however appeared on a live TV programme and said the remark was “political and metaphorical”, that he was only urging his supporters to defeat Accord at the ballot box rather than attack its members physically. Fadahunsi, who made his remarks in Yoruba language, said it was wrong to interpret his remarks literally. “If you listen to me very well, I didn’t say it in English, so you cannot interpret it in English. I told them that this shows that they are weak, this shows that they cannot win. They should shut them down with their votes.” The senator’s media office later said his comment was “a call on supporters to overwhelmingly reject the Accord Party at the ballot box through lawful, peaceful and democratic means during the August 15 governorship election.”
Borno State Commissioner of Youths, Sports and Poverty Alleviation Saina Buba soon added a gaffe of his own into the fray. He threatened to cut off the finger of anyone who pointed at government officials. Speaking at a City Boy Movement Empowerment Programme in Maiduguri, Buba said all citizens who vote for the ruling APC party would be fed with honey, while those who refused to support them would be caned. When sharp criticism followed from opposition politicians and civil society groups, Buba at first stood his ground, saying at a press briefing that he had no apology to offer because there was no opposition in Borno and no one could fairly accuse him of threatening opponents. However, when Police Headquarters declared last week that it would investigate him and two other persons who made incendiary remarks, Buba climbed down and apologized.
Incendiary remarks in this campaign season appeared to acquire a distinct North Eastern flavour. In neighbouring, politically peaceable Yobe State, Chairman of the state’s ruling APC Alhaji Mohammed Gadaka raised eyebrows when, at a rally in Nangere Local Government Area, he urged married women to divorce husbands who prevent them from voting for APC. Gadaka said he would find new husbands for them and would personally pay the dowry for them to remarry.
Political opponents and some clerics soon charged that his remarks were harmful to family values. Gadaka at first said his remarks were a misunderstood cultural joke rooted in traditional banter between Ngamo and Kare-Kare ethnic groups. He never intended to encourage marital discord, the chairman said, but he later released a video retracting his words and apologised.
Lest political gaffes become a monopoly of the states, the Chairman of Kuje Area Council in the FCT, Samuel Danjuma Shekwolo, was captured in a viral video telling residents that they should either support APC or they should leave the area council. He said the council had benefitted from development projects undertaken by President Bola Tinubu and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, so its citizens must show political appreciation. The Nigeria chapter of Amnesty International and the opposition ADC immediately demanded for Shekwolo’s arrest and prosecution. The chairman then tried to climb down on his incendiary remarks, saying he had no power to disenfranchise anyone and that his remarks were made in a particular context during a meeting with APC youths and loyalists. Whatever the “particular context” in which he spoke, Shekwolo’s remarks quickly became a remark of particular concern.
Not only commissioners, party and Area Council chairmen, but a state governor soon joined the incendiary remarks train. Mid last week, Governor Francis Nwifuru of Ebonyi State vowed that he would remove from office any local government chairman who fails to secure victory for APC in next year’s elections. Speaking in his state capital, Abakaliki, while inaugurating new chairpersons and vice-chairpersons of 13 Local Government Areas, Nwifuru said, “Any chairman who fails to win his council will be removed from office and replaced with a councilor. I want this information to be on the headlines of newspapers because, as politicians, we would not speak in secret. The chairmen know we would win in the state, and if they choose to sleep and allow others to take their areas, they would be removed.”
Politicians had better harbour some thoughts in secret, because Governor Nwifuru’s remarks quickly drew flak from many quarters, especially because he also charged the council chairpersons to do all they can to deliver a 100 percent vote for APC. It was not at all clear if the law empowers a state governor to remove elected Local Council chairmen from their seats for failing to deliver their areas in elections, but Nwifuru apparently knew something that most Nigerians didn’t. His incendiary remarks at least obscured other events at the Abakaliki inauguration, including the fact that one of the new council chairpersons is Osborne Umahi, son of the state’s former governor and current Minister of Works Dave Umahi, and Chidi Nwode, brother of Governor Nwifuru’s wife.
Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike, never famous for temperate language, released another verbal cat among the pigeons when he said he would become the first target should President Bola Tinubu lose the 2027 presidential election to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of ADC or to NDC’s Peter Obi.
Not satisfied with enough controversy to be the godfather of a rump PDP faction while at the same time being the lead battering ram of President Tinubu’s reelection campaign, Wike said during a media chat that he was fully aware of the consequences of the position he had taken, which he said had already made him a prominent target of his political opponents. “I will be the first politician that I think they will come after. I will be the first politician. I know they will come for my head,” he said, adding however that the possibility of political consequences had not weakened his resolve to campaign for Tinubu. “Each day I sleep, I am thinking about the president’s reelection. When I am eating, I think about the president’s reelection. Everything I am doing now is about the president’s reelection,” he stated.
Wike’s raising the red flag of political reprisals so early in the campaign threatens to push programs and promises to the backyard and for all actors to instead concentrate their minds on political reprisals, from denial of rights to targeting of business interests to detention to imprisonment and exile.
Presidential candidates themselves got into the gaffe action last week. Mr. Peter Obi, NDC Presidential Candidate, declared at a town hall meeting in Port Harcourt on Thursday that he is ready to lose his life while protecting his votes in the 2027 election. Nigerians, he said, should prevent a repeat of the “irregularities” witnessed during the 2023 general election. Urging his supporters to go all out and exercise their franchise on election day, Obi said, “Somebody said, ‘We are ready to die.’ Let me tell you, I’m ready to die too.” Oga Obi, what brings death into this matter? If we die, what is the use of votes, elections or even democracy? Please, let us protect our votes, but let us stay alive first.
Political gaffes are too serious a business to be left to politicians, so at the end of last week, Defence Minister General Christopher Musa jumped into the fray and released the political equivalent of armed drones inside the political field. Musa has long been regarded as one of the country’s ramrod stiff, apolitical, straight-talking Four-Star Generals. Since his removal as Chief of Defence Staff and his rejuvenation as Defence Minister, Musa had concentrated on the task of ridding the country of insurgency and banditry, the political Archilles’ Heel of the Tinubu administration. Now he has decided to become a politician. Appearing on a live television program, he fired salvos at the detained former Kaduna State governor Nasiru el-Rufaí, saying he caused division in the state and showed hatred for the people of Southern Kaduna, Musa’s home region.
Attacking el-Rufaí is politically safe because he is clearly seen as an enemy of the Administration. It might also win wide applause for Musa in Southern Kaduna State, where he said el-Rufai is loathed. On the flip side, it is morally questionable to launch a scathing attack on a man in detention and is unable to answer; the ancient Romans at least gave a condemned man a club to defend himself against a charging lion in an execution theatre. A military hero trying to become a politician is a delicate art.