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BY SOLA EBISENI

Lai Muhammed, Minister of Information, is not having the best of times, no matter the posturing to the contrary.

He was most visible and authoritative in the process of birthing the All Progressives Congress, APC.

He played the Paul Joseph Goebbels as the chief propagandist in the management of the information machinery in securing victory for the party and ousting the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP-controlled Federal Government from power.

It did not end there. Like Goebbels to Germany’s Hitler and his Nazi party, Lai Muhammed is a confidant of the national leader of the APC and ended up as the Minister of Information in the new government.

However, while Goebbels had such a great influence on Hitler, his principal and comrade in Nazism, it is doubtful that Lai would have such an impact on any of its two principals, either in the party or government.

The common goal of the APC contraption was to wrestle power in 2015. Strange bedfellows flocked together for this purpose and Nigerians swallowed the propaganda hook, line, sinker and pole.

Lai Mohammed, a Lagos based lawyer, dominated the waves helped also by media men and women with preponderant presence in the West.

To Lai and his supporters, the strategy of dishing out misinformation wrapped in the garb of truth by spaceless and repeated dissemination worked out with the people in the dire need of change.

Lai did with everything in him and like Goebbels of Germany, he earned the medal of membership of the cabinet in the ministry most Nigerians believed he was best suited.

Like the house moulded by the Yoruba proverbial spittle, the APC edifice soon got cracking. First, the component blocks lacked the necessary cement, sand and water for smooth plastering.

It wasn’t their fault that the Nigerian Constitution gives the President such an awesome power that nothing else matters in government.

The CPC bloc of President Buhari became irritatingly inaccessible to members of other blocs.

The New PDP breakaway PDP faction was the first to pull a smart string as their most visible leader, Bukola Saraki snatched the post of President of Senate against the schemings of the dominant Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, and Buhari’s CPC.

While Tinubu’s ACN tags were swallowing the humiliations visible to all, the nPDP threw in the towel and moved back to PDP; the ANPP led by Ogbonnaya Onu, Minister of Technology, decided deliberately to lie lower than its own shadow for genuine fear of annihilation.

With such speed unknown in political rapidity, the package of falsehood was being shredded by the stark reality that Buhari does not possess the magic wand for the change promised. Before our very eyes, Boko Haram festered, joined by the world dreaded ISWAP.

Buhari, either deliberately or nonchalantly, soon lost control of the government. As written on this page recently, the myth built around him evaporated due to an Ahitopheli which advised him wrongly that the cry for Biafra was a deliberate attempt to rubbish his government.

Thus, he soon moved against IPOB, largely a breakaway group from Uwazuruike’s MASSOB. The Federal Government most unnecessarily antagonised the group declared it a terrorist organisation and drove it underground. The treatment meted out to Igboho is most pathetic.

The majority of Nigerians, particularly with the Yoruba, believe that Sunday Adeyemo is a victim of official terrorism for daring to drive some killer herdsmen and commercial kidnappers from his area.

If President Buhari and his government ever had any benefit of the doubt, the predicted sweet disappearance of Iskilu Wakilu from the hands of the law is proof that we are indeed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm wherein some animals are more equal than others.

Lai Muhammed must be in a state of such confusion that his statements on national issues these days no longer reflect who he is. Like a salesman whose Garri is either visited by rain or sands or like an agbadagiri fish exasperated by struggle from the fisherman’s hook, Lai is just managing to come to the surface of the water for some breath of fresh air, gulping insufficiently for survival.

His travails had long been noticed but became combustible when he would rather have the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission discipline media houses and individuals until he was reminded of his professional ethics of the defence of expression as an inalienable human right.

As Nigerians vent their anger with vituperations on a government to which they have literally conceded other rights, at least, for their security which has worsened with no comparable precedent, Lai searched the books for the definition of hate speech and its limits.

The only time his principal attempted Twitter personally, to the best of our knowledge, the outcome was unpalatable. Pronto, the Minister of Information resuscitated his machinery, amusing himself with public statements of the readiness of Twitter to negotiate.

Knowing that he could not sustain the war for too long, Twitter needed to be seen to do something with which government may cover its face as they say.

In the game of the survival of the fittest for which his party is ever known, the political onslaught against him in his home state of Kwara is enough hassles.

The other day, not minding questions that may be heard in anti-corruption circles, the serving minister told the world of how he singlehandedly funded his party and the elections of most of the members of the National Assembly from his state. The predictable verdict of the Appeal Panel on the parallel congresses organised by him and his state governor in mutual antagonism will say much.

We keep that in view as they say in civil service.

The reason I am soliciting for mercy for Lai Muhammed was his statement last week on banditry. The minister has said, contrary to the reports of the Economist on insecurity in Nigeria, that the Federal Government was indeed not treating banditry with kid gloves.

Justifying the refusal of the government to appropriately treat and declare the killer gangs around the country as terrorists rather than romancing them verbally as bandits, Lai Muhammed said they were not separatist agitators as he dubbed them tax collectors in kidnapping for ransom.

Several Nigerians were speechless that the minister, a learned gentleman, could liken people who bring down military fighter jets, attack Nigerian military fortress, destroy rail tracks and amusingly kill undergraduates to instil fear in the parents of their seriousness to area boys who solicit the attention of the rich for little change, as they say.

The same was the Attorney General’s mindset when he compared killer herdsmen with gentlemen in the business of vehicle spare parts.

No other group, not even Boko Haram, threatens the corporate existence of Nigeria as those the Federal Government has nepotistically been rubbing their backs as bandits.

If Lai Muhammed and government must know, no other group attempts to rubbish and humiliate our gallant military men and women as these so-called bandits. Boko Haram, as dangerous and wicked as they are, are territorially determined.

Nigerians know who and where they are. There is not as much ethnic sensitivity in their area of operations, the indigenes of which most of them are.

The so-called bandits most of who carry the identity of a particular group has no territorial limits and in fact, boastfully declare that the territory of entire Nigeria belongs to them and that they would choose only those laws to obey.

They do not only kidnap for money, they rape, kill and deliberately target our military in a strategy to humiliate and provoke them. All Nigerians are crying that they are declared terrorists and dealt with in the language they would understand.

Our military men who are restrained by the body language and official permissive pronouncements have wondered loudly why such men who have taken up arms against the citizens of Nigeria in all states and call the country’s sovereign integrity to question are still being treated with such kid gloves.

Those who fail to speak truth to power deserve mercy from God, for they know not what they are saying.

SOLA EBISENI, Afenifere Scribe, writes from Lagos.

Vanguard News Nigeria