The news media have only two words for it: mammoth crowd. This is the crowd you see at campaign rallies of the political parties. The two front-runner parties, APC and PDP, and their presidential candidates, Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, do not just pull crowds, they always pull mammoth crowds.
I have tried to work out the mathematics of a mammoth crowd, a large crowd and well, an ordinary crowd, without much success. I suppose that a mammoth crowd, like everything human, does not begin its hold on our imagination as a mammoth crowd. In the natural order of things, a mammoth crowd could begin as a crowd then develop into a large crowd before reaching the ultimate level as a mammoth crowd.
My mathematical quest was to see which makes more sense when you want to rate the popularity or the acceptability of the candidates by the quantity of real or assumed supporters at their campaign rallies. It should be interesting to know what makes a crowd mammoth and why each presidential candidate is pulling the same quantum of crowds that can only be mammoth and nothing more or less. I suppose that in the hierarchy of crowds, a mammoth crowd is the top of the political hill of beans. And because politicians love to do it big, they always go for the biggest. Thus a politician does not just win an election, he wins by a landslide.
My failure should not dissuade you from undertaking a similar exercise. Politics is serious business; elections are even more serious business. An election gives us the chance to make a choice we believe we can live with for the constitutionally stipulated period of four years in the first instance. This being the case, the political education of the electorate in terms of helping them make rational choices must not be treated lightly.
If every campaign rally crowd is mammoth, how, I ask you, do you reasonably predict who, between Buhari and Atiku, has a greater chance of remaining or becoming our president? The purpose of campaign rallies is to help the rest of us make some sense of where each presidential or governorship candidate stands in relation to other candidates. If we know that candidate A pulls a crowd; B pulls a large crowd and C pulls a mammoth crowd, then our job as voters is cut out for us. On election day we would go for the man whose magnet pulls a mammoth crowd and drop our ballot papers in the ballot box in his favour. That, I suppose, is the elementary sense of how elections are won and lost.
It seems to me that this is not quite the case any more. In this age of mammoth crowds, we are confused about how best we can carry out our civic duty in a manner that gives us the leader we want at all levels of government in our dear country. Between the politicians and the news media, I wonder who carries the mammoth portion of the blame for this mammoth confusion of the electorate.
I have tried to look back to the times before these when political rallies were more manageable in the imagination of the electorate. I always do that when I am confused about the present. It is easy to see the difference between our post independence politicians and our current crop of politicians in the yahoo-yahoo age. In the period of our national history known as the First Republic and Second Republic respectively, politicians seeking elective offices wooed the electorate through a creative approach to marketing themselves. They did not have posters and bill boards then but they knew something about the fickleness of the human mind in matters of critical decisions, and, therefore, did things that excited the public and could be talked about for a long time.
Bear in mind that campaign rallies are not forums for profound speeches. The best chance they give to candidates is to enable them do some chest beating to the loud cheers of their supporters. If a candidate chooses to be profound he wastes his valuable time because his profundity is lost on the crowd. I suppose this is why politicians less about their capability and more about the incompetence of their opponents. It always gets the cheers.
Our post independence politicians knew this and correctly chose to do things that the electorate would remember as unique to each one of them. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the most creative electioneering campaigner the country has ever known, flew around in a helicopter and rained hand bills on the people below. A helicopter was a rare and strange sight. At campaign rallies, he always tried to show that he knew what he was talking about with some quick demonstrations about possibilities in the land. This was what he always did about the capacity of the Nigerian state to fund free education at all levels.
In the Second Republic, Ayodele Awojobi, the late brilliant engineering professor at the University of Lagos, sometimes followed Awolowo with a black board to campaign rallies to show mathematical proof that free education at all levels was affordable. I think much of that was always lost on the crowd. In bread and butter politics, the maths of eating bread with butter is less complicated. You only need bread and butter – and that is it.
At campaign rallies, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the Northern Region, would make the crowd hold hands and sway to impromptu songs. He also had a knack for spotting excitable women waving to him on his way to campaign rallies. He would then send bundles of wrappers to them after the rally. It never failed to be memorable. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe had the gift of owning the crowds at campaign rallies by engaging them as if he was talking to a group of friends. Serious but casual. None of his famous big words dropped from his lips.
Awo, Bello and Zik chose to make a lasting impression on the crowds that attended their campaign rallies. You could say they had a more human approach to leadership. If you take out the mammoth from the crowds at the current campaigns, there is obvious sterility. I can find nothing memorable about them. But let me be fair to them. There is something really creative about the presidential candidates and the national and zonal leaders of the parties donning some funny clothes adjudged peculiar to each zone in an attempt to show that they are with the people. The relevance of this is that fun and politics are not mutually exclusive.
Still, I wonder, would the forth coming presidential election be decided on the basis of the mammoth crowds that each candidate garners at campaign rallies? Politics is not just a game of numbers; it is also a game of appearances and impressions. I would like to chalk that up as one good reason political decisions are not always rational. An incompetent man who pulls a mammoth crowd could beat a competent man whose campaign crowd carries no impressive adjective on election day. Unlike marriages, electoral victories are not made in heaven; they are made by our impression of the candidates from the size of their crowds at their campaign rallies. Size really matters.
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