[ ] The Monday Column Poor copy of Dick Tuck

Within a few short weeks, political calculations regarding the 2015 elections have changed in Nigeria with PDP gaining in momentum while the main opposition APC increasingly looks like it has got its back to the wall.

Since last year when it became the first major opposition party in 35 years to be registered by the electoral commission, APC has strutted on the political scene with the self assurance of a Himalayan mountain goat. Its calculation, widely shared by this country’s newspaper pundits, is that CPC’s wide appeal in the North added to ACN’s grip of the West plus a few other pockets in Rivers and Imo would produce a majority in a presidential election. Well, think again.

The first substantive body blow for APC was the Ekiti election when Governor Kayode Fayemi was defeated by PDP’s Ayo Fayose. Although a shell-shocked APC later found its voice and attributed its loss to “militarisation” of the state during the election, most observers think the vote reflected the true wishes of Ekiti voters. It was a severe body blow not because Ekiti is a critical state electorally but because it showed that APC’s hold on the South West is not a given as generally assumed. The winning formula in Ekiti was that PDP fielded a candidate with a high degree of common touch and pitted him against an APC governor with a high degree of elitist touch.

One would have thought that going forward, PDP strategists would build upon this winning formula and add it to its store of other advantages, such as money. But that is not what PDP is doing. Instead, it is unfolding before our eyes a bag of dirty tricks in order to stack up the cards in its own favour in the run up to the 2015 elections. This bag of tricks includes impeaching APC governors, factionalising other state assemblies in order to make life miserable for APC governors, using aviation agencies to ground planes chartered by opposition figures, sending soldiers to seize newspaper distribution vans, closing an airport in order to curtail an APC governor’s movement, selectively opening it to facilitate a PDP mole’s movements, and withdrawing military protection for an APC governor in a state ravaged by Boko Haram insurgency in order to prove President Jonathan’s live television statement that “he cannot stay in that Government House if I withdraw the soldiers”.

Who is the architect of these no-holds-barred, spareno-punches, take-noprisoners programme of driving the opposition into the dust and winning the election before it is even here? Most probably it is PDP’s National Chairman Ahmadu Adamu Mu’azu, publicly described by President Jonathan as “the game changer”. I will like to recommend to him a little reading of political history on the double-edged potentials of dirty tricks. It is the American story of Dick Tuck and Watergate, two contrasting sides of the dirty tricks political coin.

Let’s begin from Santa Barbara, California, in 1950 when Richard Nixon arrived to give a speech as part of his senatorial campaign. A huge auditorium was hired for him. When he arrived he found that there were only a few people in it even though his previous campaign appearances had been well attended by enthusiastic supporters wooed by his fierce anti-Communist rhetoric. A plump young man stepped forward and introduced himself as Nixon’s advance man. He then made a marathon introductory speech that ensured that half of the people in the hall left. By the time the few people left in the hall were dying of boredom, the advance man invited candidate Nixon to speak on a topic that he said “most absorbed California and the nation”, the IMF. According to the account, Nixon struggled through the disastrous evening and as he was leaving he asked the advance man his name. “Dick Tuck,” said the man. “Dick Tuck,” Nixon said, “you have just made your last advance!” t turned out that Dick Tuck was a mole planted in Nixon’s campaign by his election opponent Mrs. Helen Douglas. For Dick Tuck, it was the beginning of a long career in negative political creativity within the boundaries of the law. Over the next two decades he played many such pranks against Republican candidates and in particular Richard Nixon. For example, during the 1960 presidential race, Nixon flew to Memphis, Tennessee soon after a televised debate against John Kennedy. As soon as he emerged from his plane a huge woman wearing an outsized Nixon button flung her arms around him and said, “Don’t worry, son. Kennedy won last night but you will do better next time.” It turned out that the woman was planted by Dick Tuck.

Not long afterwards, Nixon was on a whistle-stop campaign by train through several cities and towns. He was in the midst of a speech in one town when the train suddenly began to move. It turned out that Dick Tuck had donned a railwayman’s cap and signalled to the train driver to start moving. On yet another

Ioccasion, Nixon was having a fund raising dinner and the final item on the menu was the opening of a fortune cookie. When the guests opened the cookie wrap, they found a slip of paper inside it that declared, “Kennedy will win.” It had been slipped in by Dick Tuck. here was yet another occasion in 1962 when Nixon was campaigning, this time for governor of California. When he arrived at San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nixon saw a group of children lining up the route, cheering him and holding aloft a huge banner written in Chinese. Nixon stopped his motorcade, went over to the kids and posed for a picture, smiling broadly. It turned out that the banner in Chinese was supplied to the children by Dick Tuck and it read, “How about the Hughes loan?” This was a reference to the scandal involving Nixon’s brother Donald who took a $205,000 loan from the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

Let’s flip the coin to the other side. In 1971, while putting together President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, his top aides decided to borrow a leaf from their old nemesis and they put together what they called “Dick Tuck capability”, a dirty tricks operations team. The concept of dirty campaign tricks had a philosophical foundation, such as it was. The father of this philosophy was a California lawyer called Murray Chotiner who specialised in selling rightwing candidates. He managed Nixon’s first campaign in the 1940s. As summarised in one small book I read many years ago, “Murray Chotiner’s theory of campaign politics is very simple. He believes that when voters go to the polls, they vote against politicians, not for them.”

This means that if you win an election it is not because you are popular, no. It is because your opponent is more unpopular than you are. What this means in practice is that when you are campaigning, you should not waste your time trying to make yourself popular. Instead, you should concentrate your energies in trying to make your opponent as unpopular as possible. When voters go to the polls, they will vote against him and therefore for you. This is the essence of the dirty tricks campaign. While it attained great artistic status in the hands of Dick Tuck, it was carried into the gutter by Richard Nixon’s political aides in 1972.

The supreme moment of truth came when Nixon’s campaign team hired a team of Cuban exile professional burglars from Florida. Nixon’s campaign chairman believed that his Democratic counterpart had dirty secrets against Nixon which he kept in his office drawer. Tapping at his own drawer, he told the burglars to enter the Democratic National Committee chairman’s office in the Watergate Hotel Complex because “I want to see what he has in here.” It was the beginning of the Watergate scandal that ultimately consumed President Nixon. lhaji Ahmadu Adamu Mu’azu could try the high art dirty tricks of Dick Tuck or he could stick to the path of impeachments and airport closures that could lead to our own Watergate.

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