The @ThisIsBuhari Twitter handle of
General Muhammadu Buhari, the
presidential candidate of the All
Progressives Congress (APC), has
amassed over 45,000 followers in just four
days.
By contrast, President Goodluck Jonathan’s
@JGoodlucktweets, which is four years old,
has just about 40,000 more followers.
Jonathan created his Twitter account exactly
1,634 days ago, on July 6 2010, and now has
84,800 followers. The account appears to
have stopped growing, as it has been in the
region of 84,000 since he declared his run for
a second term a few weeks ago.
Buhari’s account was created on Dec 22, and
had by the afternoon of December 26, Eastern
Standard Time, amassed a following of
45,200.
It is also of interest that in the past four
years, President Jonathan has tweeted only
129 times, about two tweets per month. His
last tweet appeared on November 11, 2014.
In comparison, Buhari has tweeted 55 times
in his four days on Twitter, his last one
appearing yesterday, December 25, 2014.
Buhari’s running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, also
got into Twitter two weeks ago, on December
10, and his followers are now up to 25,000.
Vice President Namadi Sambo, who is also
running for a second term, has an even older
Twitter account than President Jonathan’s,
but although his account was created in
February 2010, he has only 3,188 followers.
When running for office in 2010, President
Jonathan was very active on Facebook and
Twitter, which he used to lure younger
voters.
After the election, when the same supporters,
some of whom said they had voted to him
but not the PDP, began to demand
accountability and productivity, they were
quietly ignored by President Jonathan.
As their agitations mounted on social media,
in August 2012 President openly denounced
them through spokesman Reuben Abati, who
in an article called them “army of sponsored
and self-appointed anarchists,” competing
among themselves to pull him down.
Jonathan included in the demographic “all
the cynics, the pestle-wielding critics, the
unrelenting, self-appointed activists, the idle
and idling, twittering, collective children of
anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook
addicts, the BBM-pinging soap opera gossips
of Nigeria.”
It is an assault the very vocal group does not
seem to have forgotten.
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