 2023 elections may make or break Nigeria, Abbas Anjar warns politicians. Tonight, we continue our conversation on civic education ahead of the 2023 elections. And the Court OK's Obie Supporters Rally in Lagos saying participants can't converge on Lecky Toe Gate. This is Plus Politics, I'm Mary Anna Coffey. A former president of Nigeria, Chifu Lushegun Abbas Anjar, has warned that the 2023 general elections may make or break the country. Abbas Anjar, in a statement signed by his special assistant on media, Kande Akemi, warned that politicians are capable of wrecking havoc and could make or break the country if leaders fail to watch it. While joining us live to discuss this is Shegun Chopit on his public affairs analyst and is also of ACT Network and Austin Ayigbe is a Senior Programs Officer, Centre for Democracy and Development, West Africa. Thank you so much gentlemen for joining us. Thank you. Pleasure, Mary Anna. Thank you. I'm going to start with you, Mr Ayigbe. This is not the first time that we've heard a politician or a political leader say or this election will be the one that, you know, this will be the watershed moment. We had that same experience in 2015. And here we are in 2023. Seems like the same, you know, story is being told to us, but then I might be wrong again in my assertion. So I'd ask, what exactly, you know, is the defining moment for 2023 and why must all hands be on deck? So thank you and thank you for having me. You're right with those assertions. You're very, very right. Man, in 2015, if I had in 2011, it was like that was the election that would make a man in Nigeria in 2015, the same thing came up in 2019, the same thing in 2023, yet again it's coming up. So election, it's something, it's a convergence that brings all manner of thought including the possibility of violence. You know how post election violence in 2011 almost destabilized the whole region of Nigeria. So let me, let me try to bring it to the focus. Recently at the Center for Democracy and Development, we had released a report which we called the SWOT analysis of the election. So we were interrogated in a number of things, which included insecurity in Nigeria. In 2015 elections, we knew, we remember, you remember that the Northeast in some of those local government areas were occupied by insurgency and there was need to clear those areas. The election was postponed for about six weeks and eventually the military returned and all of those areas were cleared, election then took place. In 2019, we had almost the same challenge of military intervention, I mean insecurity in the political landscape of Nigeria. In 2023, what makes 2023 so unique is arguably that Nigeria is facing a pandemic of insecurity. It's literally in every state of Nigeria that some form of insecure narrative, whether it's in Eqiti or Bayesa or not West, not East or even the South East, across the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, there's really no states that you can take out that this is free. I know that some parts of South West may be free, but so there are certain areas in the South that is a bit freer than other areas in the North. So the kind of dynamics, with the level of kidnapping, with the level of bandit free, with the level of bandit attack is becoming a challenge that the whole nation to conduct an election in a tight country will be challenged and Ennecas also raised this as a matter of fact. What is very important too is also to bring in a new narrative, talking about the, you just talked about just now, that they caught us okay, the Gadrin of a political party of folks. So there's a new movement, there's a new wave of support for a political party, particularly coming from young people. Looking at what happened in 2020, the anti-protest and all the agitation that happened, there is that fear and President Bassinger, former President Bassinger, is raising those that for us to have a free, for us to have a Nigerian state beyond 2023 that should be free, fair and credible election, an election that Ennecas intend to conduct. Again, the electoral commission seems to be very ready because they'll be able to do their work by telling us that certain things are going to be happening. This is the processes, these are all of this. So if citizens therefore know what to do, there's a possibility that violence in the election will be reduced. And I tell you, when there was a misconception, misinformation recently about the use of electronic transmission, and a lot of people went on Twitter and no, why are you going to cancel online, I mean, electronic transmission results, the electoral artists clear and we must be conscious going into 2023 election, it is going to be a war on electoral disinformation. What is generally called fake news. Fake news, we destabilize Nigeria and we are getting worse, the country is getting worse in terms of the peddling of fake news. And I think that's where we need to focus on. When we deal with it, we'll have a free, fair election and Nigeria, election will not man Nigeria. It will be greater for us as a country. I want to pick it up from where he stopped. Recently there was a photo that was making the rounds on social media, even on WhatsApp, about a CNN postcard, not necessarily a postcard, but a flyer with presidential candidates. And there was one that was photoshopped without the face of the presidential candidate of the APC, replaced with the face of his deputy as opposed to the original one. Now for many people who necessarily do not support the APC, this was a good thing because they thought that international media was on their side. But I'm going somewhere with this, this is an example of what we're talking about. And many people retweeted, many people posted it on their social media. Now for those of us who are in traditional media, who know the art behind investigation and making sure that you have the right information put out there, we had to go get both photos, put both of them out there and say, well, this is real and this is fake. Unknown to the media house, of course, that this was what was happening in the country. Many people are now on social media. Most of the movements are on social media. How can civil society also hop on social media, not just leaving the job to just, you know, to traditional media? And maybe, you know, those who are charged with the responsibility of dealing with disinformation or misinformation. Civil society does have a role to play. How do you come in here? I mean, thanks, Marianne. Look, the question you have, of course civil society will play its role. In terms of just trying to perhaps provide some sort of moderating voice in all of the conversations that are happening in the lead-up to the... Oh, Shagun, I think that we're losing you. We're having some connection issues with you. I do not know how we're going to deal with that. Shagun, can you hear me? Shagun? Can you hear me? I'm going at each other. Okay. Oh. Okay. Let me see. Yeah, I can hear you. I think there's a net of problem. Let me try and resolve the net of problem and then... So maybe you just go on with the... Yes. I will go back to Ayib. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Ayib, so I'd like for you to take on that because I've seen many times where these false information keeps... It moves at the speed of light and hopping on it is... The media, yes, were many, but then civil society does have a role to play. And just as I asked Shagun, how can you capitalize on also the fact that we all are on social media to spread the message that is right or the proper? So the Center for Democracy and Development does run a fact-checking hall. One of the key strategies to try to build a number of... To build a community of practice of fact-checkers, including the media, civil society, citizens having the digital literacy to know what to share before you share, how do you confirm it? Every citizen needs to be fact-checkers. We need to acquire a certain level of digital literacy that not everything that looks like that shines like gold is gold. I mean, not everything that shines is gold. I mean, the geometric expression. So what is important, going to the 2023 election, people need to know that fake news will destabilize. In fact, I used this narrative somewhere. I'm going to put it now that if fake news can bond down Nigeria, beyond what you just talked about, just now, about the Photoshop, with a simple digital tool like Google reverse image search, you can easily discontinue that picture. But most people, because of the political sensitivity, because of their biases, because of their orientation, what we call confirmation bias. Once you don't like the candidate, you are tempted. In fact, you're not even tempted. You love it to share it. Not everything, because at some point it is going to target your own candidate. And the way it is, is to say any pictures or messages you receive on social media, but carry on WhatsApp, the E2E, the end-to-end encryption, you need to ask the person to send it to you. Excuse me, where's the source of this? Take this CNN, like that one that was trending. CNN is public, it's so global. Go on CNN and search and be sure that it's correct. And if it is fake, go back to the person who shared it and say, why are you sharing fake news? What's your problem? Advice fellow, you are actually demarcating your candidates when you try always to peddle fake news against your opponent. And I say this again, and I said it in 2015 elections when we began to see all of the disinformation that trending us on even the mainstream media, whether it's like Belgium or the Wikipedia or whatever, in 2015, I had a 2015 election, I said to a couple of candidates and all of them, I said, the energy you spend on trying to pull out fake news or disinformation against your opponent is more than enough energy to populate and project your candidates. What I see young people are doing now, they try as much as possible to demarcate opponents. Even political parties are near them. In 2019, we saw a narrative where political parties were hiring youth and creating what they call the data boys. Data boys are folks who stay in one room to create content. They create content against their opponent. And what did we do? We have our own mechanism. Every fake news in the narrative, we usually don't use fake news, but for the sake of this conversation, for ease of communication, fake news. The world will be disinformation or misinformation. Every time we spot disinformation, immediately we engage with it and release it immediately. Before you know what was happening, we were reducing the popularity of the so-called data boys and shaped by boys in Biasa. What do we do? What do we need to do in this election going forward in 2023? Plus TV Africa, all of the mainstream media. We need to acquire this key and build a community of practice where we spot fake news. Because we now know that fake news will be a destabilizing factor in the 2023 election. We can all work together to put the right news on. We can build up a synergy between CDD plus Africa and a couple of others to always populate the right one in the election of 2020. Right at the polling unit where the governor voted. The current governor was in that time. There was a channel video that popped up on WhatsApp that the governor had been attacked in his own polling unit that is where they were injured and they were risked away. Coincidentally, we were in the same polling unit. Immediately, we had to rush out to channels to say, please, they are using your videos to dis-reform caution people and of course Nigerians and the global community. Channels needed to quickly run on live, run live and quickly put a tag on the same video to say this is not caution state. This is not a war. That video came from Delta State, one of the political party primaries where there was a lot of conflict and there was some violence happenings in that party primaries and eventually parallel boxes and all were destroyed. People bought it. They loved it because elections in movement where things are very fast. So to answer your question correctly, is that we all need to be fact-checkered. Don't share information if you don't have the correct fact, if you don't have the correct source of it. Because you could be happy to burn the country and you don't want to be part of it. Absolutely. Let's talk about propaganda as a tool in the hands of politicians. You know that each political party has, one way or the other, gotten the services of a spokesperson, a mousepiece, image makers, people who are going to be speaking on their behalf and half the time these people are propagandists. We all bore witness to the drama between Femme Farnick Haye Day of the All-Progressive Congress and of course, Senator Dino Malay and we saw the drama that happened on social media again. So it makes me wonder, it's not enough for politicians to sign peace pact or peace accord. I mean, I don't think that's enough, right? But then what about the role that these politicians have to play in making sure that their political parties are also not playing a role in the spread of propaganda, even though some would say that someone would be at the school of thought that this would benefit them one way or the other. Shagwa, I think that you would like to take that. Okay, yeah, thank you. Apologies for the disruption. So look, this question you ask is pretty much right at the core of the challenge and the situation that we find ourselves as a country. And if you do a simple cost and effect analysis, because sometimes when I look at these types of issues, it's always good to go to the core of what's driving the issue, right? So all of the things that my colleague has just said now, fantastic, and it's something that we all must take stand up, take the responsibility to fight him. These are fake news and now talking about propaganda. Propaganda is a tool anywhere in the world for driving the public narrative, and you can drive it in a positive way, you can drive it in a negative sense. But unfortunately, in Nigeria, our politicians, the defining line between propaganda and outright lies is very, very thin. And a lot of times what you find is that what you might be referring to as propaganda is in fact fake news. It's developing narratives that are completely untrue. We saw it at play in the lead up to the 2014 elections. We're seeing it at play now, between the major candidates, the supporters for now of the major candidates, when the campaigns kick off as they have now and as it begins to gather momentum. Of course we're gonna see a lot more of all of this information flying around that you have to consistently try to fact check and debunk. The challenge for me, and I think to solve this problem, we have to take a step backwards and ask why it's happening. And you know, Mary, and we've been having this conversation for years, funny, like it's been years now. And the truth of the matter is that the incentives for this, why are they doing these things? It's a dual direfare for them to get into office. They are pursuing these political offices, whether you're talking about the presidency, whether it's the governorship at the various states, or even the national assembly positions. The reward available to them for women or capturing those offices is tremendous. And the rewards are such that people would spare no effort, including taking of lives to get into those places, which means we need to take a step backwards and find how we can re-jig the entire political system to ensure that it's more of a service driven thing rather than a place where people can go and enrich themselves, line their pockets and take care of their generations of born, with the public resources. And how do we do this? At the end of the day, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, it still comes back to this question of the ballot, which means Nigerians will need at some point to decide whether they're tired of the status quo or not and make informed choices that will lead us out of this terrible catch-22 situation that we have found ourselves in and that we've been running around in circles. I'm curious, and I'm sorry to talk over you, but I'm curious, when will Nigerians realize? Because I think that's where I'm stuck. Because if we realize that people are willing to kill for an office that they say they want to come in and serve us and we're still banding behind these people, then maybe the point of realization is a bit more of a mirage as opposed to us coming to realization. So I don't think it's a mirage and I think it's gonna happen. And when President Abbaso just says, you know, this might be a make or break election for us 2023, I think this is actually what is kind of viewed into, because I think that what's happened in the last 23 years, but especially in the last seven years, is that Nigerians have come to sort of realize, and if you have a conversation with pretty much almost everybody, I think there is a bit of a consensus as to the fact that neither of the two major political parties have the answer. I think there is a bit of a consensus on that. Of course, everybody would not agree on that, but I think it's beginning to become clear that the political players, actors themselves, who are scattered across all of these parties are the problem, right? So that's the first step, you know? Before you'd find that, oh, people are rooting for a PC and then all of a sudden it's all about the PDP. In some states, it's one party or the other. But I think we're getting to a point where Nigerians are beginning to say, hey, wait a minute, these guys are the same. So that's the first step. Now the next step in this question, in this journey, we hope that it may happen in 2023, but in case it doesn't, it will happen eventually. We'll get to a point where Nigerians will then realize that we need to elect leaders and maybe one there says a leader that can start the process of healing the country and more or less delivering us from this political system that has been deliberately rigged to keep Nigeria and Nigerians in this vicious cycle of non-development. Until we get to that point, I'm afraid, propaganda will be there, rigging of elections, even with all the fantastic and lofty ideas that INEC has come up with by model verification system. Hey, see what's happening. They're still looking for ways to compromise this thing. So until we get to a point where we can fix our leadership, we must understand that these things are going to continue and we'll get there one day. I don't know whether it's 2023, but I believe, I'm a hopeful person, so I believe that we'll get there one day. Let me come back to you, Aieewe. Still talk on the lines of realization. We've seen that there have been more and more divisions across the country, along the lines of religion, along the lines of ethnicity, and we've seen more and more, the lines are getting wider and wider. And in the midst of all these divisions, stands a political leader from one political ethnic group or from one political party, I beg your pardon, or the other, representing ethnic interests. And half the time, most of the people who seem to be their followers are looking at these issues as opposed to looking at it based on how it affects us as Nigerians. We see them looking at it through these same prisms of religion and ethnicity. Now we're hearing the senting voices. The North is saying this. The Middle East is saying this. Why can't we say Nigerians are saying this? Aieewe, can these lines ever be blurred, especially as we get ready for 2023 elections, or is it going to be business as usual? So you see what's happening in Nigeria is to some degree, there's some kind of real awakening of a consciousness that Nigeria belongs to all of us. There's some form of real awakening that the Nigerian state, if we don't protect it, if we don't choose our own leaders, we are going into a state of, I mean, a state of irrelevant as a country. Nigeria is the largest black nation, whereas in Africa, across the globe, whatever statistics you have, but the peoples of Nigeria deliberately, by way of political manipulation, are kept under the poverty line. A poor person is likely to do anything for 500 naira or a thousand naira. What the politicians have done is to keep people within a threshold that at some point you use them for your own will. When you use the word just now as propaganda, and I like the comment made by my colleague, most propaganda for political parties or candidates are not propaganda. They are disinformation, aimed to manipulate the psyche and the mindset of the citizenry. Does poverty have ethnicity? Does insecurity have ethnicity? Does poverty have religion? Does insecurity have...? Unfortunately, we have lost that connection. Finally, because we're almost out of time, Shagun, finally. What should we be...? Okay, quickly, Aiebe, because we're running out of time, quickly. Okay, does strike action have religion? No. It is time now that we need to converge as Nigeria, that you need a leader that's a Nigerian and not a session leader, a Nigerian leader. And that happened... I mean, there's a lot of stories to talk about, but because of time, I will just stop at this point because Nigerians need to know that you need a Nigerian leader that knows how to deal with poverty, know how to do with insecurity, know how to do with education, health, agriculture, and all of the things that make good life for all of us. Finally, Shagun, what should be the messaging from now till Election Day? In closing. I think for me, in closing, right? If you look at what President Abbasan just is saying, I think that's what we need to actually let Nigerians digest and perhaps begin to think about. We may, if we're not careful, right? We may be in the last few years of this entity, as we know it, if we're not careful. And I say that because if you look at the trajectory that the country has traveled in the last 23 years, you find that it's been a consistent downward spiral, right? And it's all driven on the back of poor governance. It's as simple as that. Poor economic policies, poor, you know, whatever, just look at all the good governance indicators. We're simply failing at it because the political system is not designed to deliver good governance. And it will not continue indefinitely. Eventually, we will get to the Rubicon and the country will fall over the cliff if we continue downwards. So I think Nigerians need to understand that we are basically in an existential situation. We need to save ourselves from these guys by electing a leader or leaders that are genuinely interested in delivering development. It's not an easy question to answer, but I think that's the question that we need to answer. The person you cast your vote for, does he intend, by track record, to serve you or himself and his people? I'll just leave it there. I think a question that all Nigerians have to answer is this one. I want to say thank you. Shagil Shopita is a public affairs analyst and is also of ACT Network. And Austin Ayebe, it's the senior program officer Center for Democracy and Development West Africa. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for this conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, we'll take a quick break when we return. We'll be discussing the Labor Party March here in Lagos on Saturday. We have one of the conveners here with us in the studio. Stay with us.