A word for the minister

One of the points critics of the Muhammadu Buhari administration keep making is that the party had not properly transited from an opposition party to one in power. Perhaps nowhere is this reflected more than the utterances of some of those elected and appointed into public offices. This is true of our minister of information and culture who thinks he’s still serving the All ProgressiveS Congress (APC) and not the entire country. By virtue of the oath of office he took, we need to remind our dear minister that Nigeria is his constituency now and so his words must be carefully thought out before uttering them. As a former journalist and a lawyer, Lai Mohammed should understand this best than others.

The first time I met the minister was in 2010 when the news organisation I worked for then invited him for an off the record briefing on issues that would shape the election and how his party, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) would resolve the matter of who will be its governorship candidate in the 2011 Lagos State governorship election. That was the peak of the ‘war’ between former governor Babatunde Fashola and his godfather, Bola Tinubu.  He was a study in calmness and you could not but admire his brilliance and deep analytical mind. It was, therefore, difficult for me to reconcile his image during that encounter and what he became during the campaign for the 2015 election as national publicity secretary of the APC. No issue was too little for a reaction from him and a joke among journalists was that what could we do without Lai Mohammed’s press releases? They came in torrents and it seemed there was a machine churning them out from his bedroom. Theirs was a well-oiled machine with the ruthless efficiency of German machines. But the campaign is over and we now have a government in place, one that Mohammed is privileged to serve as minister.

From afar, I’ve followed him as he settled down in the ministry. It was gratifying watching him visit the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and challenging the agency that  ”It must show more passion, more hunger and more creativity. Since the news business is dynamic, the agency must train and retrain its staff to mould them into top class professionals.” This was followed with that photo op visit to Bama with him dressed smartly and doing press ups with the soldiers battling Boko Haram. Wonderful, one would say, but his last two public statements seemed to have come from the APC propaganda mindset. Speaking after a meeting of the federal executive council on December 21, he said, “One of the reasons for the fuel scarcity was the inability of the last government to make adequate provision for fuel subsidy. We do face some other logistic problems but majorly, we are paying for the sins of the last administration. What I will be telling Nigerians is that what we met on ground is such that we are paying for the sins of the last administration. I am being very serious.”

Good enough that Nigerians took him up on that and did not allow him to get away with such obfuscation of a serious issue. To further show that our dear minister put his foot in the mouth was the apology his principal, President Buhari, tendered the next day for the persistent scarcity while presenting the 2016 budget at the national assembly. While it will be too much to expect a minister in Nigeria to resign over such a ‘trivial’ issue, Mohammed must have received a tutorial in public communication: tell us what you are doing rather than blaming somebody for the present situation. The APC was elected to lead and not make excuses, dear minister.

The second instance is the briefing to editors in Lagos last week, a mere two days after his gaffe on the past administration. He said of our soldiers, “They have so degraded the capacity of Boko Haram that the terrorists can no longer hold on to any territory just as they can no longer carry out any spectacular attack.” However, there have been two ‘spectacular attacks’ by Boko Haram since then. This is not an endorsement of terrorism as I think Mohammed actually made greater sense in his appeal to editors on our reportage of the terrorists’ activities, but his wild claims of ‘victory’ were off the mark. Nobody set the December 31 target for the soldiers but the president himself did and it takes nothing away if the government admitted this was no longer feasible. Wild claims might turn out to be the albatross of this government and hopefully, the minister will not continue on this path.

Have a wonderful 2016, folks.