Matatu 49 (2017) 439–466 brill.com/mata Electoral Music Reception A Meta-Analysis of Electorate Surveys in the Nigerian States of Lagos and Bayelsa Garhe Osiebe Lagos, Nigeria [email protected] Abstract Audiences in Africa are a grossly under-researched demographic.This paper centres on the comparative analysis of two electoral audience-based surveys conducted between April and September 2012 in the Nigerian states of Bayelsa and Lagos; following the April 2011 presidential election in Nigeria that ushered the erstwhile President Good- luck Jonathan into power. The surveys sought to know the electorates’ reaction to the electoral campaign songs that endorsed Jonathan and how these songs informed their choice of candidate. The paper’s analysis combines an appreciation of the surveys’ results and the surveys’ procedure while focusing on the middle-ground between aes- thetics and politics in the context. Keywords elections – audiences/electorates – Nigeria – prebendalism Introduction Karin Barber draws on Deborah James’s work “‘Music of origin’”1 in arguing that “audiences themselves, by choosing to participate, constitute themselves as members of a collectivity [and] thus be active participants in the emergence 1 Deborah James, “‘Music of origin’: class, social category and the performers and audience of kiba, a South African migrant genre,” Africa 67.3 (1997): 454–475. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18757421-04902011Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:52:25AM via free access 440 osiebe of new alignments.”2 She describes kiba performances, which are adaptations of an old Sotho oral genre as a central means of signalling alignment with the people of the nation or traditional belief and in contrast to white- or Christian- oriented performance types, although these alignments meant different things in different contexts. Barber goes on to show the significance of James’s study in how audiences constitute themselves around kiba, thereby affirming the things they have in common with the performers. As a powerful active organizing principle in different people’s experience, the kiba became a focus of patronage from the national elite of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (anc). James’s work is so far the most extensive examination of popular music audiences in Africa. The present study takes up from James and Barber to carry out, on a special platform, a quantitatively based analysis of electoral audiences in Africa’s largest democracy. This paper is an effort to fill the gap in research into audiences through a meta-analytical assessment of two separate audience-based studies carried out in the Nigerian states of Lagos and Bayelsa by Campaign Professionals (tcp), a Nigeria-based political communications and polling organization. The surveys were conducted between April and September 2012 to determine the effects of electoral music (campaign jingles) on voting patterns in the April 2011 elections. Since electoral music loses its relevance once elections are concluded, the paper presents ‘electoral songs’ as by-products of elections which encourage the tendency to switch genres among popular musicians who otherwise specialize in other forms of popular music. Electoral music is part of the subgenre of political praise music.3 tcp took a survey of sampled populations of at least suffrage age in select areas in the aforementioned states. The stated objective of the investigation was to reach conclusions about how actual voters at the elections responded to the accompanying electoral songs and how these contributed to choices made at the ballot. Before the data of tcp’s surveys are presented for analysis, it is worth engag- ing in a contextual discussion of circumstances pertaining to the present study: The run-up to the 16 April 2011 presidential election in Nigeria was character- ized by a few firsts: it was, for a start, the first time that an ensemble of popular musicians and a core majority of entertainment practitioners had actively cam- paigned for a presidential candidate on such a scale in Fourth Republic Nigeria. Anne Schumann terms the “patriotic galaxy” the constellation of organizations 2 Karin Barber, “Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa,” Africa 67.3 (1997): 355. 3 The collection of the songs singing the praises of political leaders. DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 439–466 11:52:25AM via free access electoral music reception 441 that proliferated in support of the regime of Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast.4 Indeed, it was in Côte d’Ivoire that popular culture was employed as propa- ganda in exploiting conflicts to the benefit of the Gbagbo government. Analo- gously, the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign Organization sought to exploit every issue—conflicts and non-conflicts alike—likely to promote the electoral mar- ketability of Jonathan’s candidature.With the charm of a prospective Nigeria of ‘good luck’, popular musicians had their work cut out across tribe and tongue. Nationally, the Campaign Organization sought the musical services of Zaaki Azzay to write and record a campaign song in the Hausa language, the rapper 2Shotz to write and record a campaign song in Igbo, Dekunle Fuji to write and record a campaign song in Yorùbá, the Mamuzee twins to do the same in Ijaw. Onyeka Onwenu and a cross-section of Nollywood actors and actresses were enlisted to write and record a campaign song in English, and D’banj to do the same in Pidgin English. It is thus safe to say that Goodluck Jonathan had an impressive patriotic galaxy of popular musicians advocating for his 2011 presi- dential bid. This panoply of multilingual coverage makes sense when one considers that the April 2011 presidential election in Nigeria was the first campaign in the postcolonial nation’s political history in which a major party put forward a candidate regarded as belonging to a ‘minority’—from none of the Yorùbá, Hausa, or Igbo ethnic majorities—as its presidential flag-bearer. Being the representative of a minority, he needed all the support he could muster through popular culture and languages. To this extent, tcp’s surveys, centred on the popular music appeal of the Goodluck Jonathan candidature, are a potentially powerful resource. Appraising the Survey Sites It is noteworthy that since the inception of Nigeria’s democracy in 1999, Lagos state has been governed by the opposition (Alliance for Democracy: 1999–2006; Action Congress/Action Congress of Nigeria: 2006–2013; and All Progressives Congress: 2013–to date). Bayelsa, on the other hand, has been a stronghold of 4 Anne Schumann, “Songs of a New Era: Popular Music and Political Expression in the Ivorian Crisis,” African Affairs 112/448 (2013): 440–459. Whereas Schumann’s ‘contested spaces’ draws attention to ‘patriotic’zouglou songs which simultaneously incorporated the idioms of ‘praise’ and ‘protest’, it needs to be pointed out that the valency of ‘praise’ and ‘protest’ depends on whose interests are furthered or opposed. One man’s praise may be another’s protest. Matatu 49 (2017) 439–466 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:52:25AM via free access 442 osiebe the People’s Democratic Party (pdp), which has been the ruling party through- out Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, until 2015. At the 2011 elections under review, the pdp’s Goodluck Jonathan recorded 504,811 votes in Bayelsa, representing 99.83% of the total votes cast in that state. In Lagos, where voter turnout was a dismal 31.84% (the third lowest in the federation after Ogun and Ondo states, also in the southwest), Jonathan polled 1,281,688 votes, representing 65.90% of the total votes cast in the state.5 Lagos is the nation’s former capital city; it was not until 1991 that it was replaced by Abuja. Nevertheless, Lagos remains Nigeria’s melting pot, the heart of commerce and most cosmopolitan city. Bayelsa, by contrast, is one of the most recent states to be created, belonging to those formed under the regime of General Sani Abacha on 1 October 1996. Prior to this time, the state was under the administration of Rivers state.6 With a population of some two million inhabitants, it is only now beginning to undergo urbanization. Bayelsa state is also home to Goodluck Jonathan, President, and correspondingly the ‘minority’ referenced above. Jonathan is not only the first Bayelsan indigene to be President; he is also the first President from the Niger Delta region in South– South Nigeria. Since independence, Nigeria’s ethnic majorities have rotated government leadership among themselves with those from the Hausa/Fulani north pre- dominating. Olusegun Obasanjo’s combined eleven-year stint as Nigeria’s leader together with the three-months interim national government of Ernest Shonekan puts the southwest in second place. The Igbo of the southeast have had top job representation in the persons of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Major Gen- eral J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi. The best the minorities of the South–South managed was the position of Vice-President: Admirals Augustus Aikhomu and Mike Akhigbe—both ‘minority’ representatives from Edo state—served as second in command to Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar respec- tively.7 Jonathan’s emergence as the vice presidential candidate of the ruling pdp in the 2007 general election was thus no novelty. However, it was ground-breaking to the extent that, hitherto, major political parties fielded presidential and vice presidential candidates to reflect the ethnic majorities in Nigeria. Indeed, it was considered suicidal to field a ‘minority’ in a contest where the votes of the 5 Nigeria Elections Coalition, Nigerian Presidential Elections—2011 (final) (2014), http://nigeriaelections.org/presidential.php (accessed 11 December 2016). 6 Bayelsa.gov.ng, Bayelsa State: Glory of All Lands (2014), http://bayelsa.gov.ng/portal (accessed through 2014–2017). 7 Toyin Falola & Matthew Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2008).