President Muhammadu Buhari has restated his gratitude to Nigerians
for his victory at the general elections saying he emerged winner
against all odds.
Speaking at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, Thursday, Mr. Buhari that
he won the election despite the deployment of state forces against him.
“Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you is on account of the
fact that he won an election that many people think he was not going to
win,” said Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President on
Media and Publicity, who represented Mr. Buhari.
“Americans say that elections are won on the dollar. It’s very
improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We didn’t
have advertising money on our campaign. Even when we had little money to
spend on advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority was not making
available to us slots, neither was AIT.
“I remember on a particular night I called NTA, they had 16 slots of
one minute adverts and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari
campaign, they said all 16 had been sold.
“Some other instances that exposed the partisan nature of the NTA.
Money was returned to us, from AIT money was returned to us. They simply
won’t advertise for us.”
Mr. Shehu expressed the presidency’s gratitude to Statecraft, an arm
on The Red Media, for ”selling an unlikely candidate to a very
skeptical nation.”
“The day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to see that
my house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the
campaign,” Mr. Shehu said.
“In fact it was the cocking of their guns that rose me and my family
members from our sleep. Only to discover that tens of policemen, police
vehicles, and some other unidentified vehicles darkened our windows
around my home.
“The first thing I did was to say ‘Who will help me out of this
situation?’ I needed to expose what was going on, and the first man I
reached was Adebola Williams of Statecraft. Adebola began to announce on
Facebook and Twitter from that moment until the security elements
realized that the whole world was looking at what they were doing,
because I remained indoors throughout the siege.
“Of course it was much later that we came to know why they had come.
Even the APC Presidential Campaign was penetrated by fifth columnists,
and I will make this confession, because a day before that siege we had
had a meeting with the security committee at which we agreed that we
were going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser
at that time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against
Muhammadu Buhari.
“The former National Security Adviser was involved in a coup that threw out Muhammadu Buhari as military president in 1984.
“This time around, all the things that followed, the postponement of
the election on account of this and that and a lot of the thinking of
the campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by the
National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege
on our homes was to pre-empt the story.”
Earlier, Biodun Shobanjo, the Chairman of the occasion, said the media landscape in Nigeria had changed over the decades.
”In 1975, it costs N16 for a billboard advert. Today it is between
N7 million and N10 million,” said Mr. Shobanjo, Chairman, Troyka
Holdings.
“Between then and now there has been a massive flux resulting from a
media flux. In the past it was easy because you had 8-10 media
platforms, today, it is so difficult to plan how to reach the consumer.
In 2013, according to Mr. Shobanjo, about N136 billion was spent on
advertising in Nigeria – N63.3 billion to TV, N23.5 billion to print
media, N20.5 billion to radio, and N23.8 billion to outdoor advertising.
”Those days you knew who your consumers are and what you wanted out of them,” Mr. Shobanjo said.
“If I ran a radio commercial in those days, all I wanted the consumer
to do was to participate by taking a buying decision. We made them
followers from what we’d beamed to them, and subsequently identify
leaders among them that we can use to influence others.
“Today all of that has changed – both from the perspective of those
who are in marketing to those who are used to distributing that
information.
“Marketers must embrace a world with more uncertainties and must use multiple media vehicles to reach their target markets.”
Comments