In communicating the receipt of a leadership award from “the MLK family”, President Buhari’s media team (or whoever posted those photos on Twitter) had a clear intention: to associate the integrity and legacy of the late civil rights activist with the Nigerian president.

2018 is a commemorative year for the Martin Luther King Jr family. By April 4, it will be the 50^th anniversary of his assassination, the morning after he had virtually prophesied it in the impassioned “I have been to the mountain-top” speech. It is a bit of big deal to be associated with an icon of American plurality and democracy as Mr King was; he has a national holiday in America. So, an award for leadership from his family would mean the recipient represents everything he stood for.

The King Center has published a disclaimer stating no member of MLK’s family – neither his children nor his wife Coretta Scott King (who died in 2006) – sanctioned the award to president Buhari.

The award given to President Buhari of Nigeria was not given by The King Center, at the request of The King Center or by the children of #MLK and #CorettaScottKing. @MrFixNigeria

— The King Center (@TheKingCenter) March 28, 2018

Compare that with the various tweets from the presidency on Monday that the president “received Martin Luther King Jnr’s family” and was also conferred with an award.

To be sure, those who visited the president are related to the Africa-American activist as to be called members of his family. As some have observed, the award was given to the president by the respected Dr Naomi Ruth Barbara King, the 88yr old surviving wife of the late Rev. Alfred Daniel King, MLK’s brother. Mr Isaac Newton Farris Jr, a nephew of MLK and a member of the Board of the King Center, was also at the presentation and spoke to the press with his statement bearing some political import.

However, the award was definitely not by “Martin Luther King Jnr’s family”. If it was, it would have come from the King Center being “the official living memorial to MLK founded by Mrs Scott King” according to its bio on Twitter. The Presidency’s communicators should have known that those who presented an award to the president were not children of the MLK; it is their duty to know. To have trumpeted the presentation intentionally as though it were so was disingenuous, pretentious and embarrassing.

It was a scam, the type of make-believe that has given Nigerians bad names in various forms over the years.

The award tweets have now been deleted from the Presidency handles that published them, but the episode is not an isolated event or the unintentional mishit of a hardworking carpenter. The MLK snafu has come from the same building that told Nigerians that their president could not work from his office because of a rats invasion, one desperate for some good news for a president whose reputation and stock for anti-corruption has fallen so much it won’t be a point on which to stand for re-election. Hence, the chance to jump on a platform with the slightest connection to integrity was too good to turn down.

After now being exposed as an act, the presidency may be better served in its image management of the president by sticking with showing the president actually busy with the job he was elected to do.