YNaija Editorial: Buhari’s inept, sycophantic media team decides to show us his ‘Softer Side’ and we’re not sure why

Buhari

On January 01, 2012, the then president, Goodluck Jonathan changed the way Nigerians prepare for the Christmas and New Year holidays. Fuel scarcity has been a problem the country has always struggled with, even when our refineries were fully functional, but by the time the man from Bayelsa found himself at the helm of the country, following an election cycle that saw him largely re-elected on goodwill, access to premium motor spirits had become a tenuous problem. Jonathan’s solution to the problem was a surprise decision to remove fuel subsidies and increase the cost of petroleum products by almost 100 percent. This decision left hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who had carefully planned their budgets around the holidays stranded away from their bases, unable to accommodate the surges that followed the price hike and unable to return home. The Occupy Nigeria protests began the very next day in response to Jonathan’s decision and that singular event introduced a culture of apprehension and paranoia around the Christmas holidays.

That paranoia has persisted well into 2017, validated by the almost cyclical constraints we experience every Christmas holiday in Nigeria since 2012, constraints that has persisted into the Buhari-led administration, even though one of the major reasons the new administration was elected into office in the first place was to find a way to proffer a permanent solution to the pernicious fuel shortages in the country. Families refuse to travel out of the nation’s major commercial cities to their hometowns because they are apprehensive about being stranded there (again). Fuel queues as far as the eye can see, obstructing movement and compounding Lagos’ already dire traffic situation, transportation rate hikes in response to scarcity would spill into hikes in the prices of food products.

Everyone suffers when these hikes occur, but one cannot even begin to fathom the outsize effect these avoidable hikes have on Nigeria’s underemployed poorest, who are living below minimum wage and who simply pray not for a fantastical Christmas celebration but a predictable one.

Since this year’s installment began early December, Nigerians have loudly and vocally expressed their dissatisfaction with the overall performance of the Buhari administration, and especially with the tone-deaf and absolute nonchalance with which President Buhari himself responds to the very legitimate fears and concerns of the citizenry.

However unlike in previous dispensations, Nigerians are far quicker to whip out their mobile phones and document, in text, photographs and video just how dire the situation is and how inconsiderate the presidency has been. Several hundred tweets a day are directed at President Buhari, Vice-president Osinbajo and their team of analysts, special advisors and media personalities, who in the months leading up to the 2015 elections were convinced to maintain active presences on social media as a way to sell themselves to the surprisingly powerful digital political influencers that emerged in the 2015 election cycles. Those social media handles, revolutionary then for a country whose government has always favoured secrecy and bureaucracy might have helped win the elections. But the government in power didn’t seem to realise that unlike campaign flyers and manifestoes that can simply be waterblasted off the wall and deleted from computers, tweets are eternal and the social media channels remain a direct line to the government, even when it doesn’t want to listen. They also understand in ways, previously unavailable that they have the world’s ear and media organisations baying like wolves, looking to give audience to aggrieved citizens. As a way to counter the negative press, and forestall a productive two-way conversation that social media easily provides, the Buhari government has returned to tired tactics of foisting a ‘documentary’ on Nigerians as a way to push lazy propaganda that our president is not inconsiderate and inept, but instead the victim of misrepresentation.

The Buhari government seems to fear nothing as much as it does embarrassment in international media and political spheres and has been repeatedly shamed into action, and as we cycle through the rut of government ineptitude and action forced by public shaming, the Buhari government, spearheaded by its inept and sycophantic media team has cobbled together a tone deaf ‘documentary’ that ‘seeks’ to show that our former dictator-turned farmer-turned president leader has a ‘human’ side. The documentary which simply rehashes tired tropes around President Buhari being gentle to his family (as most dictators are) and having a sense of humour (as most dictators do), and is so lazily scripted, shot and edited that it practically embodies the backwardness and ineptitude of the Nigerian Television Authority, another government parastatal plagued with incompetence. As if the documentary isn’t bad enough, the government has decided to release the documentary on the 24th and 25th of December, the very heart of the Christmas holidays, which millions of Nigerians are spending queueing at filling stations, being disrespected and harassed by louts and uniformed police officers and soldiers (there is little difference between the two these days) and utterly disinterested in hearing that President Buhari tells deadpan jokes.

Releasing this documentary at a time Nigerians are crying is synonymous to former President’s Goodluck Jonathan’s dance of shame in Kano on April 14, 2014 – same day over 75 citizens were ripped apart by bomb blasts at Nyanya, a suburb in Abuja.

Nigerians using the power of social media have unequivocally let the government’s media team know that the decision to release this documentary now is quite plainly idiotic, and graciously explained that the government’s media team has known about the prevailing scarcity for 15 days, more than enough time to reschedule said interview. However Femi Adesina, once a vibrant example of cutting journalism, put out this maudlin statement defending their decision to air the documentary now, of all the possible times. He dismisses the plight of millions of Nigerians as ‘doldrums’, describes the very real fuel crisis that is quickly returning the country to recession era despair as ‘ephemeral’ and offers uninspired Bible driven platitudes as justification for this gross misstep. Even a bus preacher would have come up with something more inspired.

True to his nature of releasing disrespectful and insensitive statements, Adesina has once again released one so mediocre, so uninspired, so self serving and inconsiderate that we can only despair if he is a microcosm of the calibre of advisors and doers President Buhari has surrounded himself with.

But let us be clear, this documentary while substandard in conception and execution, is not in itself a bad idea. Governments should routinely pull back the veil and let us into the inner lives of our leaders. President Barack Obama routinely put out videos that showed his personal interests and love of and camaraderie with children. However, these things are as much beholden to timing as they are functional and purposeful. If President Buhari wanted us to see him as ‘human’ or in Abike Dabiri’s words ‘with a softer side’ then they shouldn’t have bothered with a documentary. We already have all we needed to come to this conclusion.

His tenure as president has been defined by its mediocrity, excuses and incompetence, all very, very human traits. We know quite well that he is human, what we need now from him, is to be a competent leader.

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