By Rotimi Akinola
I’ve gone through one of those threads. The comments are hilarious, I must admit. I was inside a bus on my way to work this morning when I decided to check them out. I couldn’t contain myself. The lady sitting beside me could have thought me crazy as I laughed out loud the whole time. I’m still laughing.
Another thing I will admit is that the reaction is good, and that makes me happy. It shows there’s hope for Nigeria. Aside the body shaming orgy some commenters shamelessly indulged in, the whole thing’s good. It’s nice to see Nigerians will not no longer ingest anything at face value, and they shouldn’t. At least I wouldn’t.
I can’t recall any of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s achievements that wasn’t criticised, and that with corrosive vitriol.
Lai Muhammed would need a posh mansion in fools’ paradise to assume the manner of his first meeting with online media platforms and social influencers would pass without a criticism-bearing storm.
Besides, criticisms should be embraced no matter how acidic they appear. We equate men, and governments, with God when we raise their seats above criticisms. We live in a world where even God has had his dose of the bitter pill.
This mind set, of course, is one of the products of years of successive government failure including the failures of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – a party accorded all the time in the world to rid Nigeria of evil but failed, and that woefully.
Under the PDP, the Nigerian media went from being the biting and barking watchdog to being a toothless, potbellied lapdog which jump at every bone the government throws at it.
I’ve attended press conferences where journalists openly negotiated what their brown envelopes should contain. There was one at a leading Nigerian university where reporters actually held a meeting aside the press briefing and chose a ‘spokesperson’ to table their demands before their willing hosts.
After the press conference, the ‘spokesperson’ stood to voice the reporters’ resolve to ‘no longer collect these peanuts.’ They demanded for a raise. I was horrified. I raised my hand, got up and said ‘I have to clarify that I’ m not part of this whole thing…’ The school authority figure moderating the exchange interrupted me. ‘It’s okay, we understand,’ he said. Apparently, this was not the first time that would happen. The brown envelope ‘spokesperson’ is an award-winning journalist with a popular Nigerian newspaper.
No, I’m not trying to claim the moral high ground here. The point is, these things happen because the media is corrupt and Nigerians know. They know because, despite the hardship and failings of Nigerian regimes, all the media report is ‘good news’ as ‘arranged and bankrolled’ by government spin doctors.
Most of the time Nigerian journalists interact with government officials, you’re sure money would change hands. So when Nigerians heard the information minister met with some ‘bloggers,’ and they reacted the way they did…I wasn’t surprised.
Like the minister said, we need to choke the charlatans among us. Unfortunately, many of these lapdogs are award-winning charlatans.
I was at the meeting to represent leading entertainment platform TheNetNG and its affiliate Newsroom.ng. After the press briefing and interactive session, I waited for the minister’s goons to start handing out fat brown envelopes. Na only Lai Muhammed’s black agbada I see.
Is this not Nigeria? ‘He will share the money, and I will catch him,’ I told myself and waited till the minister had his lunch and we all left.
No dollars. No money. No package. Nothing. If you were there and you got some perks please report yourself here so we can publish it. Lol…I’m serious.
Lai Muhammed did not convene the meeting to hand out bribes. That should seem impossible in a Nigeria where the government paid and the media paid. I know. Take my words to the bank. It’s true. We had an intellectual discussion the PDP obviously failed to have in its decade-and-a-half long misrule.
Another thing I sensed in the reaction to the ‘arrangee’ meeting we had with the minister is ‘media inequality.’ I chose that term for want of a better description.
To say the meeting lacked credibility because the ‘big’ bloggers were missing in action is to claim Lai Muhammed is greater than the rest of us because he is a Nigerian minister.
All bloggers are equal, but some bloggers are more equal than the others.
Those who stripped the meeting of credibility because the big players were nowhere in sight probably hold this quote true, and that’s their cup of apple juice.
In Nigeria, and the rest of the word actually, we suffer from Acute Inadvertent Demagoguery Syndrome (AIDS). This terrible disease makes people want to ascend the power ladder so they could be worshipped by the rest of the lot. The worshipping lot also cannot envisage a life in which they have no demagogue to worship. That’s why we measure success not by the number of people we are opportune to positively impact, but by the lacuna we are able to establish between ourselves and the sorry lot. It’s sad.
We see everything in life through this broken lens. It would therefore be an aberration for a ‘mighty honourable’ minister to meet ‘beggar’ bloggers inside one Lagos garden like that (The location is not bad, though. And I love the apple juice. Lol. I’m serious.).
It’s a good thing that the APC government is apparently interested in engaging all facets of Nigerian media. If you’re not okay with that, you need to back up a bit and take a deep thought, okay?
Those who lampooned the minister for meeting with this ‘motley’ throng are not necessarily wrong. I just think they should see this. I don’t see government critics as anti-progress. There’s only one Nigeria and we’re all working together to move her forward.
Three more things…
One. I’m not just a blogger. I’m a journalist. Yeah, I know you don’t care. Me sef I nor send anybody. What’s wrong with being a blogger sef?
Two. Pro-PDP bloggers were invited to the meeting and they were critical…very, very. I watched Lai Muhammed closely as he listened to these anti-APC folks. It could all be a ruse. It’s possible. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what the PDP was doing for 16 years.
Three. I can’t wait to be called names for writing this stuff. Lol. I’m serious.
This post first appeared on Newsroom.ng
