Nigeria news

By Clifford Ndujihe, Charles Kumolu and Abiodun Alade
Read prologue here
January: Campaigns hot up
THE brinkmanship that marked the commencement of the campaigns ahead of the 2015 general elections in 2014, spiraled into 2015 as the leading political parties, the All Progressives Congress ,APC, and Peoples Democratic Party,PDP, reached feverish peak.
The PDP particularly had a non-issue based camping around the country, as it made the deconstruction of the APC’s presidential candidate, then Gen. Muhammadu Buhari the focus of its campaign.
There were also incidents widely assumed as deliberate clampdown on the then opposition in the build up to the polls. One of such was the invasion of APC’s data office in Lagos by the Department of State Security Service, DSS, for allegedly cloning Permanent Voter Cards, PVCs, in readiness for the elections.
The APC was not also left out in the issues that got the polity overheated, as some of its electioneering languages were termed as aggressive.
In a fashion that could have given the trend away as acceptable, the parties through incisive statements, unfounded allegations, hateful advertisements, radio jingles, and documentaries, threw jabs at each other at the expense of peace and sometimes national security.