The Presidency on Thursday said the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), and African Independent Television ( AIT) “Maltreated” candidate Muhammadu Buhari during the 2015 presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
The presidency alleged that aside from air uncomplimentary materials,\u00a0 the campaign was denied slots to air positive reports,\u00a0 and sell to the public\u00a0 strengths of\u00a0 candidate Buhari.<\/p>\n
Speaking at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, Thursday,\u200e spokesman,\u00a0 Garba Shehu said\u00a0 that he won the election despite the deployment of state forces against him.<\/p>\n
He was however silent on how fairly,\u00a0 Asiwaju Bola Tinubu\u2019s’s Television Continental ( TVC), Nation Newspapers,\u00a0 and Radio Continental treated candidate Goodluck Jonathan.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuhammadu Buhari\u2019s goodwill greetings to you is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people think he was not going to win,\u201d said Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, \u200e\u200ewho represented Mr. Buhari.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmericans say that elections are won on the dollar. It\u2019s very improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We didn\u2019t have advertising money on our campaign. Even when we had little money to spend on advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority was not making available to us slots, neither was AIT.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember on a particular night I called NTA, they had 16 slots of one minute adverts and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari campaign, they said all 16 had been sold.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome other instances that exposed the partisan nature of the NTA. Money was returned to us, from AIT money was returned to us. They simply won\u2019t advertise for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Shehu expressed the presidency\u2019s gratitude to Statecraft, an arm on The Red Media, for \u200e\u201dselling an unlikely candidate to a very skeptical nation.\u201d
\n\u201cThe day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to see that my house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the campaign,\u201d Mr. Shehu said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn fact it was the cocking of their guns that rose me and my family members from our sleep. Only to discover that tens of policemen, police vehicles, and some other unidentified vehicles darkened our windows around my home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first thing I did was to say \u2018Who will help me out of this situation?\u2019 I needed to expose what was going on, and the\u200e first man I reached was Adebola Williams of Statecraft. Adebola began to announce on Facebook and Twitter from that moment until the security elements realized that the whole world was looking at what they were doing, because I remained indoors throughout the siege.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course it was much later that we came to know why they had come. Even the APC Presidential Campaign was penetrated by fifth columnists, and I will make this confession, because a day before that siege we had had a meeting with the security committee at which we agreed that we were going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser at that time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d\u2019etat against Muhammadu Buhari.
\n\u201cThe former National Security Adviser was involved in a coup that threw out Muhammadu Buhari as military president in 1984.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis time around, all the things that followed, the postponement of the election on account of this and that and a lot of the thinking of the campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by the National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege on our homes was to pre-empt the story.\u200e\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier, Biodun Shobanjo, the Chairman of the occasion, said the media landscape in Nigeria had changed over the decades.<\/p>\n
\u200e\u201dIn 1975, it costs N16 for a billboard advert. Today it is between N7 million and N10 million,\u201d said Mr. Shobanjo, Chairman, Troyka Holdings.<\/p>\n
\u201cBetween then and now there has been a massive flux resulting from a media flux. In the past it was easy because you had 8-10 media platforms, today, it is so difficult to plan how to reach the consumer.
\nIn 2013, according to Mr. Shobanjo, about N136 billion was spent on advertising in Nigeria \u2013 N63.3 billion to TV, N23.5 billion to print media, N20.5 billion to radio, and N23.8 billion to outdoor advertising.<\/p>\n
\u200e\u201dThose days you knew who your consumers are and what you wanted out of them,\u201d Mr. Shobanjo said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I ran a radio commercial in those days, all I wanted the consumer to do was to participate by taking a buying decision. We made them followers from what we\u2019d beamed to them, and subsequently identify leaders among them that we can use to influence others.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday all of that has changed \u2013 both from the perspective of those who are in marketing to those who are used to distributing that information.
\n\u201cMarketers must embrace a world with more uncertainties and must use multiple media vehicles to reach their target markets.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Presidency on Thursday said the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), and African Independent Television ( AIT) “Maltreated” candidate Muhammadu Buhari during the 2015 presidential campaign. The presidency alleged that aside…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusive"],"yoast_head":"\n