Is Nigeria better in any way than the day President Muhammadu Buhari was inaugurated as President? What do the economic indices say? Is the pump price of petrol lower today than that day? Is the price of food lower than it was that day? Is the cost of transportation better than it was that day? Are school fees lower than they were on that day?
Well, as man does not live on bread alone, we could look at the indices of another section, which dwell not on food but on life itself; I mean national security. Is life now more secure than it was on the day Buhari assumed the huge weight of the Presidency office? Has he tamed the Boko Haram insurgency? What about the killer version called of an otherwise harmless group called herdsmen? Has that been checked in anyway? Has it even been condemned? Has the Police focused on it in any way? And hey, the bandits are still not only running riot, the problem they have caused appear insurmountable.
The result is that Nigeria has been unable to provide what the Roman Empire provided for those it governed even before Jesus Christ was born. Please think about this: though those who lived in the Roman Empire, thousands of years ago travelled freely, Nigerians are afraid of moving from one town to another because of kidnappers, bandits and killer herdsmen, who abandon the flock to seek easy cash – kidnapping.
With all this in the country, another problem was added, a totally avoidable one, police brutality. That was exactly what led to the #ENDSARS protests.
And it was the reporting of how the #ENDSARS protesters were shot, yes, shot and not dispersed, that have elicited s spat between our Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohamed. How were the protesters fired at? With blank bullets or with live ones? It is this shameful debate that Mohammed has entered into with the Cable News Network (CNN). Should soldiers have gone on a mission at all at that Lekki Toll Gate arena where the protesters, peaceful and peaceable protesters had converged? No, is the obvious answer. The Police should have been the force to be called in. They could have even come with their water cannons. But to have sent in soldiers? That beats every imagination.
The second issue: Why did President Muhammadu Buhari bypass, say a great communicator, newspaper Editor extraordinaire, a man with self-restraint, a man who would not embrace a lie that would otherwise deceive the people, an entire nation, just would serve the narrow end of politics, and go on to appoint one who would say anything to advance a temporary advantage in any situation? Here, to leave no one in doubt, I am talking about Prince Tony Momoh and Alhaji Lai Mohammed.
Well, the answer is easy; in the heat of the election that threw up the All Progressives Congress (APC) to defeat the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015, it had appeared Mohammed possessed the power to move mountains by the words that dropped from his mouth. In 2015, Lai Mohammed was seemingly an all-conquering star. An election campaign was on, it was akin to a war, and so truth had been banished as the parties fought for the votes of the people.
Ah, that was 2015. The election of 2019 was totally a different thing. Many Nigerians, who had believed in the APC four years earlier, cannot claim that there was no evidence that the god they had embraced had feet of clay. Or perhaps they had hoped in the human capacity that could have enabled the APC officials to change their ruinous ways. If so, the hope has proved false.
Third; the Mr. Lai Mohammed who was deemed a superstar years back did not appear to appreciate that massive changes have taken place. The first change is that the APC cannot go on indefinitely blaming the PDP for everything. For instance, as the APC has been the party in power for five years, it has to take responsibility for what has recently gone wrong in the country- things such as the failure to rein in the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). It was the general high-handedness and alleged extra-judicial killings that sparked the protests.
Fourth, showing that he has lessons to learn, he is right at this period threatening to deal with the CNN. Deal with CNN? Really? How far could a joke be taken? Please, mark that the operative word phrase here “is to deal with”. What will he do to CNN?
Ah, when some people face dire straits, they go hysterical. Now, in year 2020, the game has changed and Lia Mohammed and those he works for, do not know it. But I am concerned with an outcome more terrible than self-delusion, whether personal or collective.
History is replete with advisers who deceived their leaders and told them only what they would love to hear. This could be taken too far. In some moments of candidness, could Alhaji Mohammed please study the life of Joseph Goebbels. It has been argued that if there was no Goebbels, there would have been no Adolf Hitler. Historians and analysts have been wondering what could have happened if Goebbels did not call for total war in Berlin in 1943. Could Hitler have surrendered and saved the world, especially Germany, unnecessary destruction?
1943; the cause of the war had changed and Germany was at the receiving end as the Russians had not only stopped the German advance against her but winning battle after battle on the march to Berlin. Allied bombing raids were on, destroying the Reich, burning cities. The Nazi regime was under pressure to surrender but the Propaganda Minister, Goebbels, wanted to win public support, for a total war, to fight till the very end. He did and he won the support of the people – to lead them to a mass suicide.
He announced to a packed stadium: “The English claim that the German people are against the government’s total war strategy. The English say the people don’t want total war that they want to surrender.”
SABINE BOEBE: “The audience was stirred up about innocent women and children and violating the public and carpeting our German homeland with bombs. And, of course, this fed the anger in the crowd. And when the questions came and the shouting started, all control was lost.”
GOEBBELS: “Do you want total war?” Loading…
NARRATOR: Goebbels’ deceitful presentation fulfils its purpose.
BRUNHILDE POMSEL: “We were absolutely aghast that it was possible to move this overcrowded stadium into a frenzied delirium, just asking such a question: Do you want total war? Yes! Yes! All this screaming. It was a grim experience. We stood there, paralyzed. One of the people standing with us said ‘Clap! You must clap!’”
GOEBBELS: “If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?”
BOEBE: “I couldn’t imagine anything being more total. Were we to not sleep at all now, have nothing at all to eat, see all the men killed, the civilian population too? I just couldn’t imagine an escalation. It was horrible enough!”
GOEBBELS: “Now, people, rise up and let the storm break loose!”
In the end, the total war, however, led to defeat.
That speech at a Nazi rally on 18 February 1943 at the Berlin Sportpalast, with a bold sign, in capitals, that read “Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg” (“Total War – Shortest War”),made in a packed stadium, has gone down in history as the “Sportpalast speech” (German: Sportpalastrede)
Now hear this: the speech was made to a large, carefully selected audience on 18 February 1943! So, those faithful to Hitler were those who, pretending to be the German people that responded the exact way he wanted them to respond. And in the same way, some journalists, beholden to APC have been claiming to speak for Nigeria. Take this quotation: “Although Goebbels claimed that the audience included people from “all classes and occupations” (including “soldiers, doctors, scientists, artists, engineers and architects, teachers, white collars”), the propagandist had carefully selected his listeners to react with appropriate fanaticism. Goebbels said to Albert Speer that it was the best-trained audience one could find in Germany. However, the enthusiastic and unified crowd response recorded in the written version is, at times, not fully supported by the recording.
It is considered the most famous of Joseph Goebbels’s speeches. The speech was the first public admission by the Nazi leadership that Germany faced serious dangers. Goebbels called for a total war (German: totaler Krieg) to secure victory over the Allies, and exhorted the German people to continue the war even though it would be long and difficult because—as he asserted—both Germany’s survival and the survival of a non-Bolshevist Europe were at stake.
Germany lost that war… but both Germany and Europe have survived. When I think of Lai Mohammed, I ask, why he has not been made a Minister of Propaganda. My prayer is this: may he not lead Buhari and Nigeria astray.
And on his spat with CNN, he is just blowing against the wind. And about the truth; the truth will reveal itself. No force on earth can hide it, not CNN, not the Army, not Lai Mohammed, not the social media. A panel is on to get to the truth; I will wait for it to finish its duties. But we should not disgrace Nigeria by the way we talk.
Jide Oluwajuyitan, not I, wrote this: “I sympathise with Lai Mohammed, our very resourceful Minister of Information but a victim of President Buhari’s self-inflicted crisis of legitimacy. Transiting from a creative party spokesman that battled PDP in a fiercely fought 2015 election, to a government information minister, it was obvious he would be haunted by his past. And serving an elected president with a mind-set of an emir exercising authority based on tradition was to be an information minister’s nightmare. Of course, it did not take long before defeated and injured PDP and its powerful media re-christened Lai Mohammed “Lying Mohammed”.
Unfortunately precisely because President Buhari and his loyal gatekeepers did not understand that communication, which Karl Deutch (1963) describes as ‘nerves of government’ and a guide to statecraft for the modern prince, has implications for perception and interpretation of government messages, he reappointed Lai Mohammed as minister of information”. In defence of Lai Mohammed” in The Nation newspaper of November 26, 2020.
