by Alexander O. Onukwue

Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, while speaking in the video of that visit to the President in London said “the President is very much back and is healthy, and he has not lost his sense of humour at all”.

In like manner, Abike Dabiri-Erewa tweeted that she was “Glad to see PMB in very high spirits. And full of his usual humour”.

Both comments evoked reactions on social media regarding the fact that Nigerians did not vote Muhammadu Buhari to be the Comedian-in-chief but the Commander-in-chief, for change. In the estimation of many, Nigeria was becoming something of a laughing stock to the global community for its brazen waste of resources under the Goodluck Jonathan administration and Buhari was supposed to be the man who fixed it all.

Instead, what is the case at present is another form of mockery from news channels from overseas. The recent quiz on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN was an example of how Buhari’s unknown illness has made the country a talking point for jest.

In their job of making the President appear more appealing than the tough rigid dictator persona, he is believed to have, Buhari’s supposed sense of humour is always attributed to by his aides and loyalists. In a piece written on May 27, 2016 titled “Buhari: Beyond the Iron and Steel”, Femi Adesina did his best to paint a picture of the man who has gone from being the man to whom “smile was alien to his lips, laughter a total stranger”, to being “This President” who “enjoys good laughter, and, indeed, has a rich sense of humour”.

After coming under attack for calling the President a private citizen on TV, Lauretta Onochie posted painted pictures of the President Buhari, including one in which he was doing his laundry by himself on a local stool.

Over the years, Nigerians have learned how to devise their own humour from the frustrations of the state, as the proliferation of such comedy skits on Instagram would show. All of the presidential PR is admirable if they are actually changing the lives of Nigerians who voted Buhari. Otherwise, it will not become strange to reference them as distractions that did not help the President, just as we now go back to those moments when Goodluck Jonathan would make analogies of corruption with anecdotes about nyams, goats and plantains.