Just 4 Days: Buhari’s Twitter Followers Already Over Half Of Jonathan’s Twitter Account Created 4 Years Ago

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.