Article written by media entrepreneur and
Future Awards co-founder, Chude Jideonwo.
Read below..
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
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