This morning, my team member, Oluwatobi Soyombo and I sat in the office, and discharged our final responsibility to the Buhari Campaign Organisation – we changed the bio of the Muhammadu Buhari account across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and everywhere else to ‘President of Nigeria’. I asked Tobi for the privilege to do this myself, with my own hands. Then, as he looked at me, shocked, the tears began to follow. After sending out the tweet for the new president of Nigeria (personal tweets from him are signed –MB), I took to my own private account and shared: ‘@MBuhari better not disappoint us. This is too important. This is too important’.
My team and I were offered the job to
handle the communication for the Buhari campaign in November 2014. I couldn’t
believe it. We had never been close to the All Progressives Congress; I had
never even met Buhari. Even the ‘closer’ Tinubu, I have not met since that time
in 2002 when I served him tea as a production assistant at the Nigerian
Television Authority.
I had a few weeks before declined a meet to
discuss youth communication for the Goodluck Jonathan campaignbecause I no
longer had any faith in his leadership, but I was almost certain he was going
to win anyway.
In May 2014, I had arrived Abuja to speak
at a #BringBackOurGirls event. But I had hardly left the airport, when someone
high up in the government called me: “If I see you up on that stage with Oby
(Ezekwesili), you are finished in this country.”
So, I wondered, was it wise to finally set
up enmity with the government for the next four years by working directly for
its opposition?
All through the time my co-founder, Adebola
Williams worked hard with the team of Uche Nnaji (OUCH) and Kelechi Amadi-Obi
to shoot the photographs that redefined Buhari’s image, all through the period
the team was assembled from Tobi to Alex Yangs to Kathleen Ndongmo, I couldn’t
move. I was transfixed in fear, in hope that dared not speak. Could Nigerians
actually unseat a seating President from the People’s Democratic Party?
I wondered if the rage I felt was worth the
sacrifice I was about to make – putting my life, my relationships and my
business on the line in a country where the biggest advise our richest man has
given entepreneurs is ‘never fight with the government of the day’?
All of that is history now. What looked
like a mirage then has become reality. The job became a mission. After four
months of the most emotional campaign in my lifetime, sleepless nights at the
StateCraft Inc headquarters, from the campaign office in Abuja, supervising the
setting up of billboards, fighting TV stations that didn’t want to air our ‘Is
This Transformation?’ promos, Adebola following the candidate around the
country, and rewriting speeches in the dead of the night because the candidate knew
exactly what he wanted to say, we are here now. Nigerians have unseated a 16-year
monopoly.
So, this morning, I shared a story on my
Instagram pagethat I haven’t spoken about in public before.
In 2013, six of us friends including
Adebola Williams, ‘Yemi Adamolekun, ‘Gbenga Sesan and Kola Oyeneyin came
together and decided that, beyond mobilising citizens, leading protests and
using the media to drive conversation, Nigeria needed our passionate, sustained
prayers. A year before, after our active involvement with #OccupyNigeria, and
the events after, we were beyond disillusioned.
And so, every Saturday morning, we went
from the houses and offices of one to the other and we would cry, and we would
scream, and we would pray for country. Ah, we prayed. Nigeria’s future looked
so bleak. It looked so dark, didn’t see any logical pathway to change. So we
went to God with our hearts, we went to him with our disappointment; we went to
him with our pain. We asked him, “What should we do? How should we do it?”
One day, as we prayed, in an office on the
Lagos Island, I was so overwhelmed with despair I fell down on the floor and
began to speak in frenzied tongues, tears streaming from my face, banging
furiously on the cabinet in front me. My heart was desperate; just desperate
for something to give way.
I didn’t know my friend, Kola, had the gift
to interprete tongues. But then he began to interpret what I was saying. And it
frightened me, because he was absolutely right. He captured the fears in my
heart, and the requests I was making. He said, paraphrased, ‘God says He will
change Nigeria. It looks like it won’t happen, but He will do a new thing and
it will spring forth. We won’t understand how He will do it, but He will.”
Two years later, God has kept his promise.
I do not know what the future holds. I
cannot even say with certainty that this new dispensation will fulfil the
promises it made to us when it called us on board and to you when it asked you
to vote.
But I know one thing: I spent the past four
years giving the Jonathan government the benefit of the doubt, willing it to
succeed. Yet each time it failed, I was on the street, passionately denouncing
it. And when, finally, after the Chibok girls went missing, I lost hope in it, I
put everything on the line to join Nigerians in punishing it.
Things have changed.
I have invested faith that Buhari will be
different, not just because he is a new president today, but because I have
been priviledged to sit in the same space with him, I have listened very
carefully to his wisdom and his depth. I have counted the cost and I have
overwhelmed faith that he is the leader we need.
But we, and he thankfully, know this: he
cannot play with our future. He cannot play with the future of our children.
We have cried for this nation, because it
has failed us too many times. We have worked our fingers to the bones, and our
‘bloods’ have boiled because we believe in its potential. Therefore, our
tempers will be short, our forgiveness will be costly, our reactions to real
and perceived failures will be swift.
Our hearts our broken, our spirits
burdened. We desperately need the promised change, and we need it to start
immediately.
Nigeria
has suffered enough.
*Jideonwo
is managing partner of Red Media Africa, ‘the media group to reach and inspire
the largest number of African youth at any time’. One of its companies, Statecraft Inc, was official communication agency to the Buhari Presidential
Campaign