The Economist And Buhari's 'Change Begins With Me' Campaign

By Lai Mohammed

Our attention has been drawn to a story by The Economist, datelined Lagos and featured in the paper's print edition of Sept. 24th 2016, entitled: ''Nigeria's War Against Indiscipline, Behave Or Be Whipped''.

*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed

Contrary to the newspaper's self-professed belief in ''plain language'', the article in question, from the headline to the body, is a master-piece of embellishment or dressed-up language. It is loaded with innuendos and decidedly pejorative at best, and downright racist at worst.

The Economist wrote that President Buhari wants to ''tame'' Nigerians with the ''Change Begins With Me'' Campaign. For those who are the owners of the English language, the use of that word is unpardonable, the verb ''tame'' suggests that Nigerians are some kind of wild animals that must be domesticated, and the usage reveals the mind-set of the authors of the article: a deliberate put down of a whole people under the guise of criticising a government policy.

The paper, in striving to reach a preconceived conclusion, also insinuated that some 150,000 volunteers are being trained as enforcers of the ''Change Begins With Me'' Campaign. This is not true. In his speech at the launch of the Campaign on September 8th 2016, the President, a globally-acknowledged leader who believes strongly in the rule of law, left no one in doubt that moral suasion, the very antithesis of force, will be employed to achieve attitudinal change among Nigerians. In that speech, the President said: ''I am therefore appealing to all Nigerians to be part of this campaign.'' To the best of our knowledge and, surely the knowledge of those who own the language, the words ''appeal'' and ''enforce'' are not synonymous.

In its rush to discredit the ''Change Begins With Me'' Campaign, The Economist, a widely respected newspaper, fell below its own standards by choosing to be economical with the truth. Enforcement is not part of the strategies to be employed under the Campaign, and nowhere has it been said that the ''moral police'' will be unleashed, as reported by the newspaper. In writing the story, the paper did not even deem it necessary to speak with any official of the government, thus breaching one of the codes of journalism, which is fairness. It chose instead to quote a ''critic'' of Mr. President in a perfunctory manner.

Again, The Economist made the same mistakes that most critics of the ''Change Begins With Me'' Campaign have made: Rushing to comment on a campaign they do not understand. The Campaign had barely been launched when the critics brought out their big guns to shoot it down. In the process, many of them ended up shooting themselves in the foot. Had they tarried a while to allow the government to roll out the details of the campaign, they might have shown more circumspection than they did in their criticism.

Buhari, President Of Criminals?

By Uche Ezechukwu

My people, the Igbo, claim that no mat­ter how well a mad man had been ad­judged cured of his mental ill­ness, he must, from time to time, wink and mutter to himself. While meditating on, and read­ing the many comments on the latest verbal flagellation of Nige­rians by – who else – their presi­dent, I started thinking that this proverb can be creatively applied to the case of Nigeria’s current helmsman and his regular talk-down on Nigeria.

*President Buhari 

I remember vividly in 1984 or so, when the gifted musical ac­tivist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, re­leased that song, in which he described as ‘animal talk’, the tendency of the Buhari adminis­tration to routinely castigate and write off Nigerians, at every drop of the hat. The indefatigable Fela, like most other Nigerians at that time, were angry that Buhari had ruled all Nigerians as lacking in discipline, and had gone ahead herding them in the queues, with horsewhips, like herds of cattle. If Nigerians had been pained, they had mostly borne their pain with equanimity, as not many people had the courage – or fool­hardiness – to complain openly, as Fela had done.

For Buhari in those days, that horrendous indiscipline, against which he inaugurated the elabo­rate ‘War Against Indiscipline’ (WAI) was so pervasive that it even included saying anything that caused embarrassment – even it was true – to those in authority. Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson, The Guardian journalists that got imprisoned for doing their job, will forever, remain the living icons of the intolerance of the era of General Buhari’s first coming.

While Buhari prosecuted his quixotic battles against indis­cipline in 1984 and 1985, there were many people, in and outside Nigeria that had pooh-poohed the whole exercise as hypocriti­cal, arguing that the take-over of an elected government with the force of arms was, perhaps, the gravest form of indiscipline. Even if Nigerians had reluctantly ignored that fact, it was diffi­cult to excuse the fact that his ADC’s father was allowed to pass through the Customs gridlock at the Lagos airport, which was as narrow as the ‘eye of a needle’ with 53 suitcases of ‘whatever’, unsearched, when the coun­try’s entry points were under a vice-like lock, as the nation was embarking on the issuance of new currency notes. After that 53-suitcase saga, Buhari’s WAI campaign became less worthy than the paper on which it was scripted.

No matter how much Muham­madu Buhari has tried since his return to seek power under the democratic dispensation to prove that he has metamor­phosed into a born-again demo­crat, the vestiges of his past dis­dain for the people, has stuck out like a sore thumb. President Buhari has hardly stopped looking down on everybody else, in the typical manner of the military that had been inherited from colonial masters, on the people as mere subjects – idle civilians. He still sees himself as a koboko-wielding soldier, looking down on the rest of us, idle civilians, and wishing to ‘double’ all of us with a frog-jump.

Even though he is doing his honest and transparent best to bring succour to the nation eco­nomically by trying to convince foreigners to come and invest in our country, Buhari has proved to be the worst enemy of that possibility, because as Nigeria’s best and number one salesper­son, he has always presented his country and his people as those that should not be touched with a ten metre pole. Because Nigerians are corrupt, robbers, fraud­sters, cutthroats and other manners of criminals, with which foreign prisons are inundated, why would anybody bring his money and business here, only to be pillaged and out-foxed? After all, they were warned by – who else – their president himself!