The information adviser as metaphor for the government, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Mr Bayo Onanuga

Having lent his voice to the efforts of the NADECO coalition to draw attention to the debilitating effects of the Abacha government’s benighted governance of the country — including through protests that crippled economic activity nationwide — Mr Onanuga and the government that he speaks for would, now, prefer to channel opposition down desirable channels in a manner that would have made General Sani Abacha green with envy.

Whatever else you might think of him, in the nine months that Mr Bayo Onanuga has functioned as the incumbent president’s special adviser on information and strategy, he has been a useful metaphor for the Tinubu administration. From resigning from the National Concord newspaper in April 1992, rather than apologise to President Ibrahim Babangida — the then military head of state — over a cover story ran by the newspaper, to setting up TheNews Magazine along with fellow travellers in February 1993, through the latter magazine’s now legendary effort at containing the excesses of the Abacha junta, and the final rollback of military rule in the country, Mr Onanuga was the epitome of a patriot who would not give up on his ideals, often seemingly on the pain of death.

Today, a government that he is spokesman of hurls the treason charge, left, right, and centre at all who do not agree with it. Having lent his voice to the efforts of the NADECO coalition to draw attention to the debilitating effects of the Abacha government’s benighted governance of the country — including through protests that crippled economic activity nationwide — Mr Onanuga and the government that he speaks for would, now, prefer to channel opposition down desirable channels in a manner that would have made General Sani Abacha green with envy. These contradictions mirror, if not exactly sit, on the many irreconcilable differences that have plagued the Tinubu government since coming to power. A government whose technocratic nous had supposedly transformed Lagos since 1999 (the same 30 years over which we saw the Emirates emerge from the scorching sands of the Middle East and offer the world an alternative worldview) has struggled since coming to power to underline its competence.

Ministers, seemingly elected in keeping with the old arithmetic of power politics, continue to mangle their lines. In the government’s hands, policies have suffered the fate that flies reportedly are prone to in the hands of wanton boys. And rather than head for the famous drawing board to re-look the process by which policy is designed, the government, like Mr Onanuga, has circled the laager, hurling fiery projectiles at real and imagined annoyances. There is an argument for preferring protest types depending on the form of government one is protesting against. The point being that a democracy, being all about participation, should conduce to less disruptive forms of protests. Yet, to understand representative democracy this way is to deny that France, with its penchant for violent street protests, is not a democracy. Or that the device of the “recall vote,” an inter-poll protest, if ever there was any such thing, is not a legitimate means of expression.

Stripped of the virulence and violence, much of the disagreement between the Special Adviser on information and strategy to the president and his interlocutors is a measure of the conceptual, mental, and even physical distance between the government he represents and the disturbing reality that is increasingly the Nigerian economy.

The test of a democracy ought instead to be that it levies as little lets on forms of expression as is possible — so long as these do not distress non-participants. This is, ultimately, a conversation around concepts, events, and processes that are expedient and what are illegal in a people’s quest for effective and efficient forms of governance. It is in this sense an enquiry into the purpose, not just of government, but of our collective enterprise as a nation.

These concerns are not academic. For at their most basic, they provide the referential framework for interrogating the often puerile, but invariably intense exchanges between Mr Onanuga and his youthful adversaries on social media. Stripped of the virulence and violence, much of the disagreement between the Special Adviser on information and strategy to the president and his interlocutors is a measure of the conceptual, mental, and even physical distance between the government he represents and the disturbing reality that is increasingly the Nigerian economy.

But even in that tale, the dog was sufficiently circumspect to refrain from parricide. And the surviving parent, holed up in the ceiling, what did he? Papa canine kept offering counsel that was useful. Angry at his lot, he could, like Bayo, have met diatribe with invective. But that is not what elders do.

Our youth make up a sizeable proportion of the country’s population. They may be too young to entrust the reins of office to. But they cannot be too young to be indifferent to the circumstances of their daily lives — or that of their parents and guardians. Ought we to ignore the concerns of our youth? Angry they are. Angry they should be. True, the inflation that is currently hurting the Nigerian consumer dates to before the cash sequestration policy of the Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) devastated our rural economy. But it is no less painful for this fact. Nor is the Federal Government’s inability to rein in its fiscal excesses, even as the CBN tightens monetary conditions anything but a blot on its copybook.

There is no question but that the ubiquity of social media channels has amplified the voices of disgruntlement in our society. As with the old Yorùbá folktale, in their self-righteous indignation, our youth might be minded to take a leaf from the animal kingdom and dispense with the counsel of the elderly and wise. But even in that tale, the dog was sufficiently circumspect to refrain from parricide. And the surviving parent, holed up in the ceiling, what did he? Papa canine kept offering counsel that was useful. Angry at his lot, he could, like Bayo, have met diatribe with invective. But that is not what elders do.