Welcome notes for the information minister

There is a new song in town summarized in sudden excitement. Tinubu’s Ministers have been waxing lyrical about their readiness to transform this nation, called Nigeria. It has been one wave of euphoria after the other. The President has given me a job. I will do it without looking back, some have vowed. 

All of a sudden, it’s like an opportunity of a new dawn has come and nobody, it seems, wants to fritter any atom of it. After all, it can be justified privilege for one to be given a prime job by a new boisterous government from a population of over 200million people. Emerging from the swearing in ceremony, the first primary assignment perhaps, was to burnish promises into the people’s psyche, even if they were just words which, according to Prof Femi Osofisan, in Who is Afraid of Solarin, are cheap.

But that is the prevailing atmosphere in the country so far. Government officials and even lawmakers, rich in words but very poor in action. Things have happened in the life of this young administration that are difficult to explain. If wonders don’t happen in Nigeria, it means the word has no meaning in the dictionary sense of it. 

Apart from a few fresh brains that really signpost a readiness to offer something new, none of the Ministers, including former governors, feels any sense of remorse for being a member of a party that has dug the country into a devilish hole in the past eight years. They feel no responsibility, even vicariously, and would wish the entire nation overlooks that shameful page of our history, except that a body knocked out of shape or twisted by hunger cannot be fair to, or lie about history or give meaning to words issued by people that ruined their past and are, unfortunately, primed to do so, well into the future. 

In the bedlam of these syndicated promises, one man has remained cool, so cool that when he spoke the other day, it was so refreshing and so nearly out of sync with the daily nightmares that confront us as a people. While people were still trying to situate the personality of the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris Malagi, he simply shocked them when he said he would not lie under any circumstance in the pursuit of his new assignment. 

Speaking at an official reception organized by the Ministry in Abuja, Malagi was reported to have said: “Today is not for policy announcement but a day to familiarize ourselves with all the stakeholders in the Ministry. We are poised to ensure that the Renewed Hope of Mr. President gets serious traction. Mr President has sent me to come and say it the way it is. He didn’t send me to come and lie. And this is the new covenant with you and Nigerians. We are going to say it as it is.”

Inadvertently, the Minister may just have made a parabolic reference to a period that is not far away from us, a time people wished never existed, a period of eight years that a government in power was in attrition with itself, seeing enemies in the eyes of innocent people, and blaming everybody but itself for glaring failure. Even the media was vilified and numerously scapegoated by a government which never took responsibility for anything, including the fate of millions of Nigerians plunged into poverty. By the time Muhammadu Buhari administration was packing up in May, the nation had been plunged into multidimensional poverty besides being the poverty capital of the world. 

I have no reason to serve a dreary picture of our nation because we are all going through it. I have only tried to recount what everybody knows since there is a gentleman in this government who has promised to break from an unsavory past in order to offer something new, to say the truth and nothing but the truth. Methinks, such a man will also want to hear the truth and that is what I have decided to serve here.  

The Minister may not get the truth from the kind of gathering that welcomed him. Instead they will say the things he wants to hear and try to move on with the tricks of the civil service while studying his administrative style. But truth has one colour which hardly changes no matter the heat, circumstance and time.  

The Minister should know that the information Ministry that should function as a unified whole to communicate the activities of government, functioned in silos under the previous administration with the Minister presiding over a divided house where he thought he was king. For reasons that may remain in the realms of mystery, not even the Nigerian Television Authority liked the administrative style of the Minister. Of course, they would usually grumble behind him and execute his directives very reluctantly. 

Under former Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) suffered the most. The activities of the broadcast regulator were not only put on hold, instead some functions were completely taken over and executed from the Ministry. For instance, licensing which remains a cardinal responsibility was done directly from the Ministry with the regulator being only directed to allocate spectrum to the organizations so licensed in such a dubious manner. 

It wasn’t just that the NBC decided to be insipidly docile but its hands were tied behind by the National Broadcasting Commission Act CAP No 11, 2004, which gives overwhelming powers to the Minister. It takes a good man to have a sharp cutlass in his hands and not use it to do evil. The former Minister used the Broadcast Act to the best of his capacity and took actions that history will not forget in a hurry.

Section 6 of the Act states as follows: ‘’Subject to the provisions of this Act, the Minister may give the Commission directives of a general character relating generally to particular matters with regard to the exercise by the Commission of its functions under this Act and it shall be the duty of the Commission to comply with such directives.’’

There have been Ministers before Lai Mohammed but he can simply be referenced as one Minster that gave life and impetus to what may have been overlooked or treated with caution by his predecessors.   

For instance, early February 2021, after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved the sum of N9.4bn for the NBC to escalate the Digital Switchover (DSO) process, the money found its way to the accounts of the Ministry where it was being approved piecemeal to pay for contracts executed at the NBC until the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) stepped into the matter. How can a parastatal’s money find its way to the accounts of the supervising ministry? This writer is not aware that the matter has been resolved by the ICPC. Perhaps the wheel of justice is grinding slowly. 

Oh, the matter of the DSO should attract your attention immediately. While the DSO process was expected to have ended globally nearly a decade ago, that matter has stalled shamefully in Nigeria. By way of giving bite to the process, President Goodluck Jonathan had set up a Presidential Committee to drive the process. This Committee was replaced by former Minister with a Ministerial Committee and domiciled same in his office to drive the process. The DSO simply died in Nigeria and every little stir in the sector was designed to fester the esoteric taste of interlopers. 

The broadcast sector was supposed to have profited from the digital dividends. As I write I am not sure the sector has received any share. 

Let me suggest here that you should actually start by mending the broken relationship between the media and government as a direct fallout of serial intimidation by previous administration. Stations were demonized and fined arbitrarily.  I can recall a particular story. Former Minister insisted that the name of a particular station must be added to the list of debtors just to humiliate the owners even when they had made substantial part payment. 

The Minister should not abnegate his policy functions for regulatory meddlesomeness. I pray your pedigree serves you right and, just to add one more thing, only a Minister with a large heart and responsible knowledge can stir a robust and productive regulatory environment. I wish you well.