President Jonathan May Be ‘Liked’ On Facebook, But May Be ‘Unliked’ On Votebook

President Jonathan may be described as a ‘Facebook President‘, or perhaps, ‘the man that brought Facebook to Nigeria’, as one of his ministers gaffed last year, but would this guarantee his winning the 2011 Presidential polls this April.

A recent article on FastCompany suggested that perhaps African leaders should avoid Facebook, citing a new statistical analysis that indicates that the more Facebook fans an African politician has, the more likely they are to be forced out of power.

At the time of writing this, President Jonathan has over 500,000 fans on Facebook, which makes him Africa’s most popular leader on any social media site.

But Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, asserted that having more followers on Facebook was directly proportional to regime instability, according to FastCompany.

My Thoughts

While Zuckerman’s analysis may be correct given the ousting of the Egyptian President, we should not forget that there were serious protests and unrests in each of these countries during which their Facebook pages saw increased activity, including ‘likes’ and ‘comments’. (Oh, make that ‘dislikes’, even though Facebook doesn’t have a ‘dislike’ button).

On the other hand, President Jonathan gained more than 250,000 Facebook ‘likes’ on his official page in the first five months and has been described as the favourite to win the April Presidential polls.

So would Jonathan be ‘unliked’ on election day? That is very unlikely! In fact, the President has gotten much more ‘love’ from the nollywood and entertainment industry more than any other Presidential candidate. Thanks to celebrity endorsements from D’banj et al.

In a few weeks when Nigeria decides who their next President would be, I’m guessing that they would prove Zuckerman’s stats and analysis very wrong.

What are your thoughts? Will President Jonathan be ‘unliked’ at the April polls?

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