President Muhammadu Buhari has restated his gratitude to Nigerians for his victory at the general elections saying he emerged winner against all odds.

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.”