From years to months, weeks and now days, the countdown to the 2015 general election has hit the home stretch. Incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be facing the biggest challenge of his political life when he squares up against the major opposition candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). There is a motely of 12 other contenders but most of them have stepped down, expectedly, for President Jonathan.

By March 28, Nigerians would march to the polls to elect their next president. It is an all familiar exercise except that this time, the public awareness generated by the election has been unprecedented. President Jonathan ran against Buhari in 2011 and trounced the latter by a wide margin. At that time, the tide of emotion and sentiment was clearly in favour of Jonathan who was perceived by Nigerians as a humble man who was grossly maltreated by the cabal that managed the Presidency of his former boss, Umaru Yar’Adua whose death paved the way for Jonathan’s emergence as president.

In 2011, Nigerians across all divides, ethnic and religious, were united and unanimous in their push for a Jonathan Presidency. And he got the mandate of the people in an election adjudged as fairly free of electoral manipulations. Buhari in 2011 mustered huge chunks of his votes from the North. He was rated as a sectional champion and the voting pattern proved just that.

However, the time and the tide have changed. Jonathan as the incumbent in 2015 is up against a swirling and raging tidal wave far beyond Buhari alone. Jonathan is up against Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the self-styled leader of Yoruba politics, a money bag and a politician who commands a fair share of followership in the south west. Tinubu is the rallying fulcrum of the APC. He is the one that determines the fate of aspirants in the party. As chief financier of the APC, he calls the tune. It is to his credit that a certain Professor Yemi Osinbajo (SAN), a political neophyte got the vice presidential nod to run with Buhari. Tinubu has strongholds in Lagos, Ogun, Osun and Oyo states. This makes him a factor too big to be ignored.

In essence, Jonathan would be up against both Buhari and Tinubu in a titanic contest. But the odds favour Jonathan. His weak point has been the terror insurgency that has hallmarked his tenure. But on this, it is easy to make excuse for the president. If anything the terror insurgency exposed the reality that Nigeria lacks a military capable of defending her territorial integrity. The Boko Haram scourge greatly put a tar of incompetence on the Jonathan Presidency such that even the leadership of the terror group branded the Nigerian military as weak.

Jonathan in the eyes of the people

Then, there is the issue of the fight against corruption. Opponents of Jonathan see him as pandering to the corrupt and not decisive in his anti-corruption crusade. His utterances sometimes give the impression that he is comfortable with the graft profile of the country. Nigeria has a terrible international image in the aspect of corruption ranking with notoriously corrupt nations of the world. Under Jonathan, the nation’s corruption status improved but even this marginal improvement has not convinced his opponents that the man from Otuoke is any better than his predecessors.

Jonathan’s other weak point, and this is crucial, is that all along he got the short end of the stick in media and perception management. Jonathan has been undone by his own media management recruits who openly engaged themselves in self-seeking war of attrition to the detriment of the major business of selling the president. One of the chief obstacles to Jonathan’s re-election is the bickering, lack of cohesion and clear dysfunctional strategy among his media aides. By default or design, the president failed to engage a reputable perception management agency for a crucial election. His opponent did and it showed in the campaign and propaganda against his administration.

Perhaps, what would count for Jonathan is his performance in office. Without sentiments, Jonathan has outperformed his predecessors in office both in infrastructure, healthcare delivery, education, human capital development, power, the economy, ICT, agriculture, transport (road, rail and air) and other aspects of human endeavour. Unfortunately, his managers have not been able to articulate these achievements in a manner that it would stick to his body like a badge. Instead, what has stuck to him is the badge of “clueless, incompetence and weakness’ placed on him by his opponents.

It is to the credit of Jonathan that public confidence has returned to air travel. Under Obasanjo, one of Jonathan’s many political foes, aircraft were crashing per second in Nigeria, the airports were a complete shadow of themselves and the aviation sector was in total stasis. But Jonathan has turned the sector around, remodeling most of the airports and attracting more investments. Under President Jonathan, air traffic to the country has increased significantly.

In telecoms, foreign direct investments shot up from $18 billion to $32 billion with increase in internet and broadband penetration. Add to this a vastly improved teledensity all of which have given fillip to the nation’s socio-economic life.

Ordinarily, Jonathan need not dissipate energy campaigning for votes but he has been short-sold by his own people and worse yet by his party. The advantage however is that his party still commands a wider national structure to swing the presidential election in his favour.

The Buhari Challenge

Muhammadu Buhari, the main opposition candidate comes to the squared arena with some strength and weaknesses. First, he is being sold to Nigerians at a time the masses are disenchanted with the leadership of the PDP, especially the manner some of the key figures in the party have conducted themselves. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who was the face of the party for eight years failed in office as president. Yet, out of office he continued to brandish himself as the best thing to have happened to Nigeria since independence.

It is against the backdrop of such public revulsion of the PDP that the APC is selling Buhari to the electorate as the change they badly need. Again, being a former military ruler he is seen as one who can hold down the insurgency in the country. Plus, he is being marketed as squeaky clean, indeed clean enough to combat the bogey of corruption. One other factor that may count for Buhari is the fact that this time, unlike in 2011 when he was a lone ranger, he has the support of some money bags from both the North and South. With funding from Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, he seems swathed in the comfort belly of big cash to splash.

However, wrapped inside Buhari’s strength are his weaknesses. First, he is seen by many as an apologist and strong supporter of Boko Haram. His earlier defence of the sect and condemnation of the federal government for ever attacking members of the sect gave him out as a Boko Haram proponent. In his electioneering utterances, he kept giving the impression that it will take him alone to quench the Boko Haram fire; and he says he can only do this except he is voted into office. Many had interpreted this to mean that Buhari knew many things about the sect which other Nigerians don’t. To worsen his case, the leadership of Boko Haram once nominated him to spearhead their negotiation with the federal government.

Buhari is also perceived as a religious zealot, one intent on marching the nation to the path of Sharia, the Islamic legal code. His marketers have strived to cast him otherwise by wheeling him from church to church and tapping a Pentecostal pastor as his running mate, but even this has failed to stick. Many voters are not comfortable with his religious disposition, perceived largely as extremist.

His anti-corruption posturing has also been punctured by the argument that he is surrounded and sponsored by corrupt politicians and stolen public funds. Except for his marketers who insist that money for his campaign has come from free will donations from the public, the man on the street takes this with a pinch of salt. The talk among the voting publics is that Buhari is exhibiting malignant hypocrisy. They reason that if Buhari is a true anti-corruption champion as he claimed, he would have stayed away from certain persons within the APC who are publicly considered as corrupt.

Investigations by our Political Intelligence Team showed that on March 28, for the first time in the nation’s democratic history, the people would be heading to the polls to vote in an election that is too close to call.

The postponement of the election however seems to have given the Jonathan camp some traction. Within a short space of weeks, his administration appears to be winning the war against terror. Not only has the president gained international collaboration which he needs to win the war, he has ramped up significantly the armoury of the military giving the Nigerian military a fresh lease of boldness and confidence.

Put on a scale, the March 28 election is evenly balanced, albeit delicately but the odds still favour the incumbent. It’s Jonathan’s victory but with a very narrow margin, so narrow it might spark off legal fireworks at the tribunal and even the Supreme Court.