ALHAJI Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was declared Nigeria’s President on March 1, 2023, while Nigerians were asleep is deeply contemptuous of Nigerians. But more important is that he is mortally afraid of Nigerian journalists. His fear of questions and being held to account by the press is deep.
Tinubu is said to own a couple of media companies, or is openly associated with them. So, he is ordinarily expected to be media friendly and savvy. He is a man and a politician who enjoys the limelight. He revels in it so you will expect him to court journalists. He does in a way by settling as many as he can since his days as Lagos State governor. Somehow Tinubu has carefully and studiously avoided journalists and the media generally. If my recollections are in order, Tinubu has granted only one interview to a television station- the BBC Africa Service with Peter Okwoche, a Nigerian as the interviewer. In the Nigerian parlance we refer to that type of interview as ‘arrangee’. An ‘arrangee’ is one in which the interviewee gets the questions to be asked ahead of time, follow up questions are avoided and softball questions dominate the exchange. While he campaigned to be Nigeria’s president, Tinubu avoided Nigerian journalists and media houses. His campaign officials ensured that he was shielded from any interactions with journalists and that there was no one-on-one interview with any reporter. Live interviews on television stations were forbidden. It was so bad that the candidate ran away from media organised town hall meetings while an opportunity to participate in the presidential debate prior to the election in February was rejected outright.
As with the campaign season so also the presidency of Tinubu- total avoidance of journalists whether local or international. If the president has an aversion for Nigerian reporters, does he also despise foreign journalists? He has made several trips abroad and if he has nothing to hide he would have taken advantage of his travels to grant interviews. Tinubu has been to India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Senegal, France and many other countries in the less than one year of his presidency and yet there has not been any report of a sit-down with any journalist in these countries. I do not even recall his sharing a podium with any host president or prime minister or monarch to answer questions from journalists. Could it be that our diplomats and protocol people who arranged the visits of the president ensured that taking questions from the press corps never formed part of his schedules?
In one month Tinubu would be one year in office. At this time of his presidency the former President, Maj.Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the tacitum and reclusive Buhari had had sit-down interviews with foreign journalists including one with Christiane Amampour of CNN, the American cable television network. Buhari, even Buhari hosted a media chat with Nigerian journalists on December 15, 2015, about seven months into the first term of what turned out to be eight ruinous years of his misrule. Buhari dislikes journalists and fears them at the same time. So it was no surprise that his disastrous December 2015 media chat was the one and only that he hosted. It had to be so because the only memorable thing he said in the course of the interview was reminding Nigerians about his abiding and deep seated dislike and hatred for the Igbo, a significant nation in Nigeria. You will recall that it was Buhari who enacted the draconian Decree 4 in 1984 in his first incarnation as a military usurper. The Decree made it an offence for journalists to publish the truth against any government official. Two journalists were subsequently jailed under that Decree. If the first year of Tinubu is any measure then Buhari may yet be regarded as being friendlier to the Press than Tinubu.
President Olusegun Obasanjo [1999-2007] introduced the Media Chat at the inception of this republic and hosted it once every month for the duration of his two terms of four years each. His successors, Presidents Umaru Yar’Adua who died in 2010, midway into his first term, and Goodluck Jonathan hosted the programme once every quarter in their time. Yar’Adua could not sustain the interactive sessions with journalists on account of severe ill-health. These were all presidents elected on the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party [PDP]. In 2015, the All Progressives Congress [APC] won the presidency and its candidate, Gen. Buhari managed to host the popular presidential media chat only once before abandoning it. He and his party figured that they were badly burnt in that outing. It was no surprise given that the APC and its aparatchits prefer to operate in the shadows, to deploy propaganda as governance tool and to shun and avoid accountability.
Unless something unusual happens, President Tinubu is unlikely to host the media chat for the years he will spend in office. The only way he can host the media chat is if the programme is thoroughly sterilised. The reporters who will interact with him will be carefully selected and briefed ahead of time. The spontaneous and live aspects of the radio and television programme will be scrapped while the audience call-in segment will be reviewed. In short, the media chat will be recorded, then edited to remove offensive questions before being released for broadcast to Nigerians. Anything to shield the President from his proclivity to gaffes such as the beffudling BALABLU BULABA embarrassing incident during the campaigns in 2023 will be done.
Beyond this Tinubu is a haunted man. The President, his handlers and his party will do anything to ensure that Tinubu will not be in a position to answer to his murky and unsavoury past and his many present failings as President.
No media chat with Tinubu will be deemed credible if he was not made to speak to the controversies surrounding his state of origin. He has to confirm or deny that he is from Iragbiji in Osun State. If he says he is from Lagos State which by the way he governed between 1999-2007, he may need to tell Nigerians where in the state he hails from- Epe, Badagry, Ikorodu, Isale Eko or where? What about his names? Was he at any time known and addressed as Amoda? Has Adekunle ever been part of his name and at which time? How did he come about Bola Ahmed Tinubu? Did the head of the Tinubu Family of Lagos at any time describe him as an impostor and impersonator? Is he an orphan who has no parents and no siblings? Was Abibat Mogaji his blood mother or what was his relationship with her?
How will Tinubu handle the many questions pertaining to the schools he attended and the certificates he claims? Did he attend Government College, Ibadan? Who were his classmates, dead or alive? Did he attend Government College, Lagos and when? Did he actually graduate from the school in Lagos in 1970, four years before it was founded? Did the Bola A. Tinubu who who allegedly attended and graduated from the Chicago State University [CSU] in the 1970s a male or a female? And was the Bola A. Tinubu of the CSU the same as the Bola A. Tinubu who was declared as the President of Nigeria by the ‘Independent’ National
Electoral Commission [INEC] on March 1, 2023, one and the same? Could he be the same person that submitted different certificates to the electoral body in 1999 and 2023?
Is the current Nigerian President the same person who was associated with heroine [drug] business in Chicago, United States of America [USA]? Was he the same person who forfeited $460,000 to a foreign government over a drug deal? How does he feel being President with such baggage? Should the President of Nigeria or the president of any country for that matter be a role model for their citizens and especially the youth? Should Nigerian youth look up to him as a role model? These are legitimate questions that Tinubu should be asked in any encounter with any serious, independent and knowledgeable journalist in Nigeria and elsewhere.
In the face of these and more, it will be difficult for President Tinubu or his managers to accept to host any credible media chat or even one-on-one interview with any serious journalist or independent media organisation. In the present, the President’s scorecard in administering Nigeria has been anything but endearing. His economic policies are ill-digested and incoherent. Inflation is on the rise and it is projected to be in the double digit for quite a while. Unemployment is prohibitively high while youth unemployment is a ticking time bomb. Mass poverty induced by the regime’s policies of insensitive petrol subsidy removal and steep Naira devaluation are ravaging Nigerians. The administration’s promises of a better tomorrow are hollow. Tinubu’s policies for economic turnaround do not have timelines and benchmarks. They are open-ended. If there has been a raft of announcement of programmes lately it would only be because the regime has an eye on its one year anniversary on May 29. But whatever Tinubu does Nigerians are poorer, more hopeless and disunited today than they were this time last year. And that’s the only measure of the success or performance of any government. There’s nothing for this regime to celebrate by end-May 2024. As we were writing this on Sunday the economy was unravelling. Petrol queues have returned all over the country. Many petrol stations were shut down. Black market for petrol was in full swing with a litre selling for N1,200 in Lagos and about N2’000 in parts of the north. Transport fares have also shot up in Lagos. There’s a dark cloud over Nigeria.
And it is ominous.
