Ajuri Ngelale, senior special assistant to the president on public affairs, says democracies must protect each other from “empathetic” demagogues who disguise themselves in the toga of populism.
Addressing a press conference at the Voice of America (VOA) headquarters in Washington DC on Thursday, Ngelale said the ability to post “news” on social media has sacrificed truth and “informed voter decision-making on the altar of profit for western tech companies”.
The presidential aide said this has eroded “liberal democracy” with the resurgence of totalitarian appeal and hostile takeovers by power-hungry militaries in less developed nations.
“World democracies must actively defend each other against the twin evils of fake news and coordinated attacks on their shared systems of government by falsely empathetic demagogues who disguise themselves in the toga of populism,” Ngelale said.
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Ngelale said going by the recent coups in West Africa, in the last three years alone, advanced democracies “must be mindful not to play into the hands of global faux-populists”.
The presidential aide said big tech behind social media companies should work towards reducing “the fake news-for-clicks business model that is actively fueling confrontational divisions within nations and a pervasive breakdown of public trust in systems-based democratic governance”.
Ngelale is one of the representatives of Bola Tinubu, the president-elect, who have been parleying with the media in the US.
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