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.
