There are emerging crystal clear elements of the ongoing campaign for the 2019 general election in Nigeria. Some of them are those normal campaign rhetorics that should be expected in a season of high wire politics that we are going through now. Others are outright disinformation. We have seen a few that are totally unrealistic and simply dump. This is the right time, I think, to talk about them. Name calling is one of them. Supporters of the opposition People’s Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar have come up with the word, Artikulated, formed from the English word, ‘articulated’. This is to impress it in the minds of Nigerians that the candidate is sufficiently versatile on what to do about the problems of the country and therefore deserves to replace Muhammadu Buhari as President come next year. However, his opponents have been quick to coin their own derogatory word that they called Artikulooter or Artikulooted. This is derisive of Atiku. It is a connotation that the PDP candidate has something to do about corruption. It is like a warning that the electorate should beware of him. On the other side, President Muhammadu Buhari has been stigmatized as being a clone of one Jubril or Jubrilla from Southern Sudan. The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu who is championing the cause of secession of Southeast from Nigeria had some time ago propagated the hoax that Buhari had died while on medical vacation in London and a replica of him had been brought back to Nigeria to continue acting as the country’s president. The words, clone and replica have been used as if they mean the same thing. Nevertheless, patrons of the social media latched on to the clownish endeavour and before long, there are some who started believing Kanu’s hypothesis and even sharing it. It is nevertheless obvious that some of the arch opponents of the president would like other Nigerians to imagine that truly, the Buhari that we see now is not the real person. Even when the President recently commented in a chat with newsmen in Poland that he was the real Buhari, his detractors in Nigeria ridiculed him for going all the way to Poland to talk about a burning issue about him right here in the country. Disinformation is another issue gaining momentum during this campaign period. Disinformation is a process of spreading false rumour about anyone or anything with insinuations that the rumour is factual and truthful in order to discredit that person or thing. President Buhari and agencies of Federal Government are receiving a lot of this now. So also is Atiku. For example, Buhari has long been associated with nepotism, a charge that he had favoured people from the northern part of Nigeria with appointments into his government. The one that is most regularly cited is the composition of security chiefs. Even in ministerial appointments where the Nigerian Constitution specifically spells out the geographical spread of the appointments, he is often accused of reserving juicy appointments for people from his area of the country. In recent times, allegation of arrest of Atiku’s sons by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC surfaced mainly in the social media and began to spread like wild fire. The Commission had to quickly issue a statement that the claim of its arrest of Atiku’s children was false. The same EFCC was accused about the same time that it had frozen Peter Obi’s bank accounts. Peter Obi is the running mate of Atiku Abubakar. Again the Commission denied that it took such action against Obi. There are indications that some individuals and organizations are being funded to spread false information across the land and such persons and groups are lurking around in the ruling and the opposition parties. Some of them may be have been sponsored by interest groups as there is no smoke without fire as they say in Nigeria. Then there are useless protests too. PDP Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar was said to have been granted visa to enter the United States of America. The All Progressives Congress, APC called the action America’s interference in Nigeria’s election. The party perceived the idea of issuing Atiku with an entry visa to America as a suggestion that the US Government was endorsing him for the election. Quite a number of people who are aware of how international relations are conducted felt disappointed that APC would reason that way when it is a matter of discretion of a country to issue visa to any individual that it considers merits it. The visa issue was perhaps carried too far when a group picketed the American Embassy in Abuja with all sorts of banners and slogans. We should expect more of such diversionary protests in the weeks ahead. One should also mention the role of Photoshop images that are now dominating campaign issues on the social media. Some photos from campaign rallies are being doctored. Supporters lift old images of mammoth crowd to illustrate the campaign rallies of their preferred candidates. Their opponents paint the picture of a virtually empty campaign ground. The ordinary person is left with the surprise of ‘which one to believe’. We will call attention to more of these monstrosities in Nigeria’s electioneering as we approach the crucial months of February and March next year when the general elections will take place. The point to be stressed is that in the confusion that we are now seeing, the real issues have been buried deep down the ground. Even where candidates promised the people that the campaign would be on issues and not on persons, it is glaring that no one is sticking to that unwritten gentlemen’s agreement so far. Watch out for another piece on “The Vagueness of Campaign Promises”.