A minister’s difficult journey to the national assembly

It can be exasperatingly helpless when somebody tries to make a point and nobody seems to understand. So it was the other day as the Information and Culture Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, made a passionate appeal to the lawmakers at the National Assembly to, at least, add more funds to his 2023 budget to enable his ministry perform its responsibilities in the remaining but challenging days of this administration. He was stone-walled by a group of people who seemed to have woken up on the wrong side that very day or probably waited long for the opportunity to deal him a telling blow.

The reputation of the minister precedes him. You hate him before you see him. People jump to a conclusion before they even hear him. And working for a government whose success is harboured only in the imagination of those who work for it, his job, which he has pursued with unwavering loyalty and doggedness, is particularly difficult, thus earning him some unsavoury sobriquet and a natural attraction to loathsomeness. But he is never one to turn his back in a battle. So, he is resolute in every sense of his job at the Information ministry.

Lai Mohammed had a case, and a very good one, in my opinion. He had gone before the House Committee on Information to defend the 2023 Budget of his Ministry. With him were his lieutenants from the parastatals under him, which include: Voice of Nigeria (VON), News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) and Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON). It was his final budget defence, he wanted to leave on high personally and leave the ministry in some financial comfort and buoyancy.

What he got was a shocker. While the ministry enjoyed an approval of N2.5bn approval in 2022 as capital budget, with N1bn of that sum going to the ministry; for 2023, the House has only approved N869m capital budget for the entire ministry with the ministry itself getting a miserly N346m, making Mohammed to cry out that his ministry “has been dealt a very heavy card in this year’s budgetary allocation.”

Just looking at the parastatals alone tells you that Mohammed has a very important job to do for the government. Apart from ARCON, the other ones like VON, NTA and NAN are major vehicles of mass mobilisation and information dissemination. Without speaking for the minister, media is not cheap; making it work and getting the right personnel is even more challenging.

But his concerns are much more than that. Fighting hate speech, fake news and disinformation, which have been his major obsession, serious push back at the international community to educate them on the goings-on in Nigeria, instead of the kind of advisory issued recently on security by some countries, awareness campaign on the coming elections, the national census that may happen in the lifetime of this administration, and above all, just to get the right funds to properly inform Nigerians of the great work that the Buhari administration has done in nearly eight years. One thing you can say about Mohammed is that he doesn’t fit the description of some of the people the President himself accused recently of not speaking well enough of the achievements of his administration. He tries his best and he wants to continue to do so but he needs funds.

“I fully understand the current challenges the country is facing, but I don’t agree that the ministry of information and culture at this critical time should have less, it actually should have more,” he appealed.

The minister is only getting a small taste of what happens to the media each time there is a little dip in the economy. The media is the first to be affected. Everybody loves the media. They want to be seen, they want to be heard, and they want lofty stories written about them, sometimes, just celebrating their inanities. But they cut the budget, take advertising from the media or, in some other orchestrations, make it impossible for the media to operate.

Apart from some kind of excuses the lawmakers pleaded, I want to observe here that the minister was unfairly treated. He got a raw deal. Some obviously have premeditated reasons for not listening to the length of his appeal. Apart from the

Committee Chairman, Hon. Olusegun Odebunmi, who counselled the minister to return to the executive to launch his appeal, a member of the Committee, Hon. Ahmed Jaha, simply told the minister it was hard for them to do anything as the National Assembly members had been serially accused of padding budgets.

“It’s the same federal government that will come through the ministry of information and accuse the National Assembly of padding the budget. So, minister, I want you to understand that we are being placed between the devil and the deep blue sea,” the lawmaker said without mincing words.

It was payback time, and that smacks of some cheapness. In the description of the 6th Edition of the Nigerian Broadcasting Code, both NTA and VON are public broadcasters which should be funded by the government or the public, as they shouldn’t generate money through advertising. But the Nigeria situation is amorphous as the public broadcaster, like the NTA, collects lots of money from advertising, but accounting for such revenue has always been a matter of concern. It then becomes difficult to make a case for government support but it does not absolve government of its responsibilities to the stations.

Irony has no respect for anybody, not even the occupant of the big office of the minister who has only been made to experience what it means to have power and yet be castrated into helplessness. Which is what he has done to broadcast operators since he assumed office. Under his watch, private broadcasters have been made to feel pain as they are often threatened or sanctioned without following due process. It is not that the broadcast regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) would not know what to do, it is often pressured to expedite the speed of punishment and impose sanctions.

It may not be superfluous to also point out to the minister that some of the parastatals under him, like the VON, NTA and NAN, have not been properly run, and that could irritate some people, including the lawmaker who accused the platforms of being used by the government against the legislative arm. They are public channels but their public seems to be approximated only by the government. Opposition parties or even dissenting voices have no place in their programming arrangement. Good professionals who should be allowed to thrive in their trade are micromanaged by the ministry and thrust on the borderline of mediocrity, to their shame and impotence. Were the government outfits allowed to run more professionally, perhaps it would have more support from the advert market, no matter how incongruous the idea is, and enjoy more hefty votes from the National Assembly.

And this leaves me with a plea. Is it possible for the minister to spruce up the operations of the agencies under his ministry – NTA, VON and NAN, among others before the end of this administration, early next year? At least make them run like media outfits and not some kind of rag-tag ministerial appendages. It will be a befitting parting gift. But is such a good thing capable of coming from this administration with tendentious fidelity to the illusory reality of life in our nation, and obtuse entitlement to non-existent achievements? I wait to be proved wrong.