ABUJA (Sundiata Post) Just this afternoon (yesterday, April 19), while I was busy praying that President Buhari was either misquoted or was outrightly misconstrued over his LAZY NIGERIAN YOUTH narrative somewhere in London, his SA on Media, Femi Adesina made a post trying to justify Mr President’s statement.
First, this confirmed that Buhari actually called “some” Nigerian youths lazy somewhere when countries that were former British colonies were at a meeting.
For a long time now, I have refrained from writing more than four to five paragraphs on Facebook for reasons of the low attention span such posts get here. People don’t read beyond headlines. Or may be, like Buhari tried to point out, most people do not read beyond the headlines.
But permit me to draw you on a longer route to what should have been a very simple end to what is now a national conversation over who is lazy and who is not in a country severally referred by global authorities as having the most hardworking people in the world.
Femi said Buhari committed this PR faux pas during a question and answer session. So that makes me a bit relaxed that it was not the speech writers that smuggled such vile commentary into a presidential speech.
But wait.
I insist that whatever Buhari said in his Q&A could still have been spick and span without this rather very disparaging commentary about the young people that make up over 60%of the people he has been saddled with their affairs.
Femi accepted that Buhari referred to “some Nigerian youths” and not all.
So what’s the difference? Again, what would have happened to his response had he not added this comment, the second or so in a compilation of disparaging remarks from a president about his subjects, both of which were made abroad.
Did it occur to him that Nigerian youths who are adjudged lazy here, according to Mr President, end up the best in their chosen fields once they find their way abroad?
Did it occur to him that most people who struggle to find their way to this “abroad” do so because government back home either have created limited opportunities or have frittered whatever remnants through corruption and incompetent leadership across all tiers of public sector management?
Buhari could have said all that was needed to say, earned himself a few rounds of applause, deserved or not, without bringing young, denied, deprived Nigerians into the mix. And it would neither have diminished nor attracted bile to him and to his office by so much deftly doing.
My anger has been further incensed by the manner of response. The Femi I knew as a modest, religious writer and Editor is now full of familiar political speak, penning statements filled with adjectives that serve no purpose other than adding salt to the injuries already bleeding from presidential hurt.
One of the very simple, yet complex lessons in reputation management is the lesson around what to say and what not.
The punchline is always in the simplest of statements. No one ever takes you on for what you didn’t say.
And if it neither adds nor subtracts from your thesis point, then keep it holed up in your chest.
As far as I am concerned, Femi merely exonerated the speech writers. But he ended up indicting Mr President big time for going outside the confines of even the question to single out some Nigerian youths, his subjects and addressing them as lazy before the world.
From the bottom up, Nigerians are insisting that those addressed as lazy, as few as the presidential response might try to make them, are so because leaders squandered the opportunities that could have made them better educated, better exposed and productive with and in their time.
End of story.
*Source: Facebook