Setting agenda for the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Muhammed

By Omogbolahan Babs

The Honourable Minister, sir,

Against all odds, you got a reappointment. I am cocksure you must have read or heard many comments from the public suggesting your second appointment into President Buhari's cabinet was a flop. That is a school of thought for those who think you did not do anything really tangible to deserve a reappointment. Another school of thought also hold the view you did your best within the time frame and resources available to you. Then, there is this other third group, not akin to Baba Obásanjó's 3rd Force anyway, the group I appear to have belonged to. This third group is neither here nor there. We believe you did not do badly, but you could have done better and put your name, which then was often tagged with needless mudslinging in a cleaner slate. But then, that is all in the past now.

Now, let me say congratulations on your reappointment. This time around, we hope your comeback will be analogous to that of Christ Jesus' second coming with major task of removing the Anti-Christ or what the Muslim folks would call 'Dhajjal'. We hope your second coming will fight the many Anti-Christs or Dhajjals confronting our nation in the areas of information management and cultural re-orientation. We hope your leadership this time around will address the so many ills that purport to promote hatred, anger, hostility, naysaying and all misanthropic tendencies within the polity. We sincerely hope your recall into President Muhammadu Buhari's cabinet this time will be to initiate action plans that will complement his #NextLevel agenda.

Permit me therefore, to share some thoughts with you on some of those issues that need your immediate and urgent attention as we journey through the next 45 months of this administration. First thing first. We must, as a nation deal with this menace of fake news. It is the very primary role of your leadership as the information minister. The rate at which fake news has skyrocketed in recent times has reached a crescendo. It is at the apogee that if nothing drastic is done to arrest the situation, we have big wàhálà in our hands. HM, sir, I need not remind you that the Rwanda crisis of the 90s was largely a corollary of media sensational reportage. We all know the many casualties from both Tutsis and Hutus of the East Africa country. The Ife/Modakeke crisis from 1997-2000 was amplified by unsubstantiated news. I was part of the then brouhaha. I knew what we heard.

Lai Muhammed

Today, the Nigeria media relishes more in fake news than in objective reportage. There is virtually no single outfit that does investigative journalism. No good reportage based on fact-finding. All we do is sell stories that will earn high sales and astronomical traffic on the internet. I have lost count of how many times media tabloids like The Punch, This Day, Vanguard had come out to retract fake news they had already dished out to the consuming public. We all know many of our people are gullible. They hardly verify information. This ill must be addressed. There is need to device mechanism at curtailing the continuous spread of fake and sensational news. These are capable of throwing the country into conflagration, which will not affect only the have-nots but also the moneybags, the political class and the apolitical community. Your action may be tagged 'gagging the press', but Nigerian lives matter more than any press freedom. We must come to reality, after all, the United Kingdom parliament - a 'saner clime' for that matter only last week considered censoring the social media arising from fake news.

Growing up in the 80s through 90s, we were constantly inundated with radio messages (in various dialects), graphics, TV adverts by an agency called MAMSER under one Dr. Samuel Joseph Cookey during the Ibrahim Babangida military junta. The then Mass Mobilization for Self Reliance, Social Justice and Economic Recovery was in constant touch with the public to intimate people government programmes. Today, such agency had been scrapped and replaced with the National Orientation Agency - NOA which appears to be dopey, hebetudinous and comatose. Meanwhile, this agency has offices in all the 774 Local Government areas that make up the country, yet, there is virtually no noticeable activity coming from its stable. The agency is primarily set to counter issues like fake news, but today it is overtly somnolent. The social media today is the in-thing but the agency is found wanting in this area. I understood the man in charge of the agency today, Dr. Garba Abari is cerebral and geek. Kindly oblige him all requisite wherewithal sine qua non to delivering on his mandate.

HM, sir, your ministry is by extension in charge of our cultures and heritage. However, a look at our national heritage depicts outright neglect and reckless abandonment. Nigeria has all it takes to be the most visited tourist attraction centre in the world, but these God-given, money-spinning assets are left wasting away. Do we talk about the many waterfalls, the several hills and mountains or the springs? Perhaps we may want to look at caves or lakes like that of tarn lake found in Iseyin town in Oyo State. There are two places of such lakes in the world - one in Mountain Park, Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada and the second at Iseyin town, Oyo State, Nigeria. Imagine if such is developed to attract tourists. I was at Obudu Cattle Ranch, Cross River State in 2016 and was wowed by what nature has given us. I knew how much I spent on that trip. I saw the type of job opportunities projects of such gave to the locals. We can replicate such across all states of the federation. There is no single state without one tourist attraction or the other. What then is wrong with us? Why can we not enter into Public Private Partnership to develop our tourism sector. By so doing, we will generate more jobs for our teeming youths. And they will be less interested in the get-rich-quick syndrome that bedevils us today.

Our soporose postal system must be revived. It is the era of internet services with less paper work, no doubt, but our post agency is not only for despatch of letters. A look at its mandate shows that it provides many ancillary services. This is an agency that is capable of employing over 1,000,000 Nigerians if properly rejigged. We must put on our thinking cap. We have slept for too long as a nation. Your ministry has a lot of synergy work to do with the Ministry of Communications and ICT. I will not end this write up without a mention of the need for you to rebrand the two major brands projecting the country's image before the international community - Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) and Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN). The picture quality output of the NTA is grotesquely appalling. The workforce needs constant training and retraining.

Many issues abound to raise, your excellency, but permit me to halt here as I wish you the very best in the next 45 months.



Omogbolahan Babs, a Forensic  and Criminal Investigation Expert sent this piece from Abuja