By Monima Daminabo, Email: monimadaminabo@yahoo.co.uk
Not a few reactions by the Bola Tinubu political camp to criticisms accentuate the assurance that he is not clad impenetrably in Teflon with respect to negative responses from the public to his policies and initiatives. Unlike early in the life of the administration when he seemed impervious to public reactions to his presidential proclivities, recent times have been marked by manifest and tacit reactions by his media team – ably led by veteran media warhorse, Bayo Onanuga.
Seemingly poised like ping-pong players intent on picking every ball on the table, Onanuga and his team have demonstrated their disposition not to let any adverse blow on the president go unchallenged. However, while such responses may be the play-out of the call of duty for media assistants to a potentate as strategic as the president of the country, the content of such outings often constitute mismatches with the essence of the criticism.
A topical instance of mismatch of tit-fortat criticism and response from the president’s team was the take by Bayo Onanuga on Dr Akinwumi Adesina, a Nigerian economist and president of the African Development Bank (AfDb), who recently told an economic forum that Nigeria’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) had collapsed from $1,847 at independence in 1960 to $847 today, 64 years later. According to Adesina, the implication is that Nigerians are worse off in 2025 than 1960.
This revelation earned him a denouncement from Bayo Onanuga, who described Adesina’s empirical deduction as untrue, even as evidence from contemporary standard of living for a wider cross-section of Nigerians prove so.
While Onanuga had claimed that Nigeria’s economy had grown by 50 times since independence, its population had also increased from 45 million to 219 million in 2019, even in the face of disproportionate levels of productivity with net declines recorded.
Another instance is that of Tunde Bakare, a Christian cleric and overseer of the Lagosbased Global Community Citadel Church, politician and former presidential aspirant, as well as one-time partner of Bola Tinubu in protests against former President Goodluck Jonathan, who recently accused the president of running a ‘motor park brand of politics that has led to legislative rascality and erosion of constitutional governance.’
He warned the president to be mindful of the undeniably delicate nature of the Nigerian society with respect to his current style of exercising unlimited power, as well as stop playing God. Bakare further warned of the build-up of the ‘rage of the poor’ and marginalised, as well as the insipience of full-blown street protest over unbearable hardship of the masses.
The cleric was ostensibly referring to several twists and turns in the polity, including the recent shenanigans associated with the constitutional breaches in the declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State and the imposition of a sole administrator, based not on legal and factual premises but on security reports derived from patently unfounded grounds.
Of further interest in Bakare’s take was his reference to the National Assembly as an appendage of the executive arm in Tinubu’s administration. This derived from the growing public discomfort with the tacit condonement by the institution of whatever proclivity the presidency throws up without any significant challenge from it. The response from the president’s camp this time was a guided rebuke to Bakare, all the same without addressing the real message in the criticism.
Another instance of mismatched response to criticism by the presidency featured the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, who also lent his voice in an Easter sermon to express the unending concerns of Nigerians over the deepening state of insecurity across the country, even as the security agencies are tasked to their limit in terms of capacity and resources. In fact, with respect to rising insecurity, a more potent dimension for concern is the undeniable suspicion that Nigerians are resorting to self-help through uncontrolled proliferation of potentially dangerous, underground acquisition of arms across the country.
Except for the purpose of playing the ostrich, which puts its head in the sand when faced with a contingency, the president’s camp are well aware that Bakare, Kukah and all other well-meaning critics are referring to better manageable approaches to the disturbing situations in the country. These include the waves of recent ‘end-badgovernment’ protests, which rocked the country from border to border, as well as the spate of massacres of innocent and helpless Nigerians by blood-thirsty gunmen, whose evil enterprise has placed every Nigerian on edge as nobody seems to be safe from being a victim.
Nigerians are kidnapped from the highways, farms, homes and any location that is seen as vulnerable by the assailants. Victims are as varied as men and women of all ages, children – often on official school outings, as well as even serving and retired security personnel of higher ranks. Also of concern is the trending fad of the assailants to display on the social media, severed human body parts, including cannibalising same in public view.
In the final analysis lies a mute-point for the edification of the handlers of the president’s media front. First is that criticisms, when driven by facts and figures, are not inherently odious, and should be treated by designated government officials as leads to alternative perspectives of the performance of the administration.
What Nigerians want in the present dispensation from the handlers of the president’s media front are credible answers to burning issues and verifiable assurances. Nigerians can do with less propaganda that only massages the ego of potentates, but may be short of answers to ‘whys’ behind challenges facing the citizenry. It is the focus on the ‘whys’ that provides the interface between government and the governed for collaboration in solving societal problems.
Dominabo is a columnist with Weekend Trust
