Abuja’s unending war of posters

“Indiscriminate pasting of posters is a form of environmental degradation because it defaces the environment. It makes the environment look dirty,” says Stephen Ahile, an environmentalist in Abuja.A long major streets of the capital city, you see posters of political candidates vying for various elective posts on street light poles, walls around the streets, police […]

“Indiscriminate pasting of posters is a form of environmental degradation because it defaces the environment. It makes the environment look dirty,” says Stephen Ahile, an environmentalist in Abuja.
A long major streets of the capital city, you see posters of political candidates vying for various elective posts on street light poles, walls around the streets, police posts and bus stop sheds. Sometimes even on waste bins the posters are pasted.
But it is not only politicians that deface the city. Pastors, especially of Pentecostal denominations plaster any available space with their posters announcing crusades and night vigils. As a matter of fact, they have become a major feature in the city as one can hardly walk for five yards before seeing such posters.
If a statistic was to be taken of the number of posters that despoil the once beautiful façade of the city, it would be realized that those of pastors and employment agencies outnumber those of politicians. Especially at Wuse market, which appears to be the navel of Abuja, every police post, every nearby wall and every pole is plastered with these posters.
Mr Ahile said the “dirty act” should be discouraged by all means, stressing that a legislation should be passed to disqualify politicians whose posters are found pasted on the streets from contesting in elections.
According to him, a similar legislation was enforced on the University of Jos Campus during his undergraduate days and it was effective.  “Let me take you back to my undergraduate days at the University of Jos were a bill was sent to the Student Union Parliament that posters should not be pasted on the walls of the university and henceforth, billboards and banners should be used instead of defacing the walls with posters. The bill was passed and subsequently it stopped.  The penalty was if anybody was found pasting posters on the wall stood disqualified in the elections.”
He said if there was an enabling law, the Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) can enforce same law on politicians and the defacing of the capital city would stop.
Mr Ahile lamented that it was embarrassing that up till now there was no law against pasting of posters. “I noticed that in the last elections Ghana conducted, there were no campaign posters on the streets. What I saw was electronic billboards, so if Ghana can do that, why can’t we do the same?,” he queried.   But the spokesman for the (AEPB), Mr Samuel Musa has told Sunday Trust that the board has no business going after politicians and pastors whose posters smear streetlight poles, police posts, bridges and bus stop sheds.
He said it was those caught in the act of pasting the posters that will be dealt with, adding that the board is already patrolling the streets at night to arrest defaulters. “The perpetrators are individuals not politicians. We have a night patrol team that is up and doing and if we catch anybody doing it, he will face the music. We have 21 mobile courts to prosecute offenders,” he said. 
But an Abuja based lawyer, Barrister Raymond Nyagba says the AEPB very often “acts in an offensive and illegal manner. “ To be candid with you, the so called Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB), most of their activities I consider them more offensive and more illegal than legal,” he said.
Mr Nyagba added that there was no federal legislation prohibiting anybody from pasting posters anywhere in Abuja, saying that Abuja as the federal capital city is governed by laws enacted by the National Assembly.“I am aware, in Lagos, there is a law against indiscriminate pasting of posters but I am not sure if there is any in Abuja. There was an attempt by the Federal Capital Territory Administration to come up with a law prohibiting the indiscriminate pasting of posters but I am not sure if that attempt was successful. So to the best of my knowledge, there is no known legislation enacted by the National Assembly to that effect,” he said.
He insisted that arresting and prosecuting those caught pasting posters is an illegality since you cannot punish somebody for a law that does not exist. “I know there is a law against street hawking but there is no law which says you cannot paste posters. In most cases, you see them arresting people pasting posters of opposition candidates. I have never seen a case where someone has been arrested for pasting posters of those in power,” he said.
When Sunday Trust asked Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) what it was doing to discourage pastors and their followers from pasting posters on the streets of Abuja, the general Secretary of the association, Engineer Samuel L. Salifu, said CAN cannot act on what it does not know anything about.
He said if the (AEPB) was disturbed that pastors and churches were some of the people defacing the walls of the city and that was in any way offensive, it (AEPB) should have written to CAN and then CAN would have appealed to its members to desist from the act.
An AEPB official who spoke with Sunday Trust  in an unofficial capacity said officials of the board have been directed to pull down posters of opposition politicians, especially those of former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida (IBB), and former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar,  who are both contesting for president under the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Largely, you still can see posters of General Muhammadu Buhari (Rtd) and those of other politicians on the streets but it is very hard to see those of the duo of Atiku And Babangida.
Efforts to get campaign organizations of these politicians to speak on this raging war of posters in Abuja failed. Several calls were made to the mobile phone of the spokesperson for the IBB Campaign Organisation, Prince Kassim Afegbua pbut he did not respond.
Attempts to get the National Publicity Secretary of Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) also met brick walls. Our reporter went to the national Secretariat but he was told the relevant officials were not around. The National Publicity Secretary could not reply a text message sent to him, neither did he picked his calls.     
Like the politics itself that is often considered to be dirty in Nigeria, posters of politicians have made the capital city an eyesore with posters of all kinds of politicians, in all shades of colours competing for space at any available space on the streets. Perhaps, the war of posters is symbolic of the political battles that are becoming dirtier day by day.