All through history, even with the advent of modernism, despots who hate the power of free speech always have their own version of repressive ancient monarchies’ abenilori – ones entrusted with the task of beheading opponents. While Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe had his in Minister of Information and Publicity, Jonathan Nathaniel Mlevu Moyo, President Muhammadu Buhari has Lai Mohammed, his Minister of Information and Orientation. History recorded that Mugabe’s Moyo lent himself as a tool in the hands of a man who became one of the most tyrannical Africans to sit in a Government House.
In a full coercive capacity, he helped articulate Mugabe’s wave of oppression against Zimbabweans. Five years younger than Mohammed, having been born in 1957, from 2000 to 2005 and 2013 to 2015, Moyo drafted and vociferously defended Mugabe’s tools of repression. These came in the form of the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) (2001), the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (Commercialization) Act (2003), the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) (2002), the Public Order and Security Act (2002), and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (Commercialization) Act (2003). All of these restrictive legislations were targeted at muzzling freedom of speech and attracted widespread criticisms for their violation of Zimbabweans’ rights to free speech. Upon being brought to the Zimbabwean parliament, Chairman of Zimbabwe’s Parliamentary Legal Committee, Dr. Eddison Zvobgo, repelled AIPPA thus: “I can say without equivocation that this bill, in its original form, was the most calculated and determined assault on our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, in the 20 years I served as Cabinet minister.”
So when Nigeria’s own Mugabe tool went the Zimbabwean route in a bill recently parcelled to the national legislature seeking an amendment to the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Act, so as to enable Mugabe – oh, my apologies, Buhari – control online media operations in Nigeria, it was obvious that, as physicists say, like was attracting like. Last week, the minister told the House of Representatives Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Values that he wanted the committee “to add that internet broadcasting and all online media should be included in the bill.” In the specifics he seeks, Mohammed wants NBC’s powers amended so that it can superintend over the licensing, registration and regulation of social media. His morbid thirst for the blood of free speech is not done.
He also wants the Press Council Act amended, as well as the Advertising Media Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) code, all in the bid to place the media on the laps of government. And Mugabe smiled mischievously in his grave. As Minister, Moyo turned pugilist against the Zimbabwean press, until he got expelled from the ZANU-PF. Beaming like a voyeur at the government closure of one of the most vociferous newspapers in Zimbabwe, he had remarked, “The Daily News is a victim of the rule of law which it had been preaching since 1999.” He was vilified in zimbabwe and became as worthless as the country’s dollar, so much that, in 2005,
Asher Tarivona Mutsengi, a student leader, journalist and agronomist at the Solusi University, described him thus: “…he will go down in the annals of history as a minister who lacked foresight and for pouring vitriol against his perceived opponents, his shopping spree in South Africa of scarce foodstuffs, causing unemployment to a multitude of journalists and a penchant for uncivilised propaganda.” Mutsengi poured the last vitriol: “…my final analysis is that he is heading for the precipice… He might be a spin-doctor and intelligent as some claim, but I don’t subscribe to that myself.”
Scholars have established that there are two models of leadership that exist in Africa. First is one that swivels from benevolence to repression. The second begins as a dictatorship and significantly graduates into heroism. I add a third and the fourth: a leadership that begins as a dictatorship and enjoys this sadism’s bumpy ride till its last day in office. The last is one that begins benevolently and never departs from this highway.
Two African Heads of State personify the first two models. They are Mugabe and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana respectively. General Sani Abacha represents the third and Nelson Mandela, the fourth.
Mugabe, African nationalist and ideologue, began his leadership journey as a moderate. When this revolutionary got into office, he was extremely people-friendly. He expanded Zimbabwe’s healthcare and education phenomenally, tickling the world into a state of exhilaration. A dotting world waited on Mugabe as a competent and benevolent leader. In recognition of all these leadership feats, Mugabe was garlandedwith international awards and honors, the most
outstanding being the knighthood he received in 1994 from English Queen Elizabeth II and his shortlist for the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize in the 1980s.
By the turn of this century, however, Mugabe had morphed into a recalcitrant monster and grew fiery Dracula fangs. The world in turn robed him with the trophy of one of the most repressive governments in the globe. The Zimbabwean economy nosedived horribly under his grips, so much that a fourth of the population was forced to flee the country to seek refuge elsewhere. More than 90 percent of Zimbabweans were unemployed and healthcare nose-dived to its nadir, shooting HIV-AIDS prevalence figure to a fifth of the population. Mugabe’s government got so repressive that, in a speech he delivered in 2003, thumping his chest like a matador, he boasted against the opposition that he would rule like a “Black Hitler, tenfold.” Under him, the Zimbabwean dollar became one of the most worthless in the world as he printed the currency at will, forcing inflation to jump to 231 million percent in 2008.
Rawlings, a Flight Lieutenant of the Ghana Air Force, on the reverse, hijacked power in Ghana in 1979 as a bloodthirsty despot. Rawlings amazingly transited into a benevolent democrat and by the 1990s, had become the IMF and World Bank’s poster boy for good governance, tremendously and positively transforming the Ghanaian economy. The comment of Innocent Madawo, a Zimbabwean journalist and Toronto Sun newspaper columnist, about the Zimbabwean Minister of information, is where I begin my comparative analysis of Nigeria’s Mohammed and Moyo. Madawo said of Moyo: “…a lot are embarrassed that they ever knew him.” Same with Mohammed.
I have bumped into Mohammed about twice, once as Chief of Staff to the Lagos State governor and another time at the Agodi, Ibadan Secretariat sometime in 2011 and I can say that Mohammed cut the visor of a man who could not hurt a ly. Soft-spoken but a man you would goof tremendously if you ever set store by his cranial endowment, he looked like your avuncular neighbour next door. To now imagine that such a man could transmute into and carelessly walk into a Moyo hall of infamy, to many who knew him, is one of the mutative wonders of political power.
A lot has been said of Muhammed’s embarrassing assaults on the sanctity of truth and his weaponization of untruth as an instrument of the management of government information. He has made himself the proverbial man who hangs on his waist a belt made of grains of corns who invariably gets embarrassingly scampered after by a colony of chickens.
In his years as Minister, Mohammed has negatively defined the boundary of operations of an information minister to include deodorizing the excrement of the man in power. He blatantly dresses the government’s failure in a garment of honour and turns upon their heads obvious realities in the polity, just to suit the whims of the people hating, the animal-loving government of Buhari. He has effectively used magical realism and voodoo as a tool of communicating government activities. His notoriety for blatant contradictions became manifest during the EndSARS protests, especially over its casualty figure as he sought to criminalize CNN’s report on Buhari’s decision to borrow a leaf from South Africa’s Soweto massacre.
Mohammed received flaks across the board recently when, in a press interview where he attempted to criminalize Twitter’s yanking off of President Muhammadu Buhari’s genocidal quips, he equated Nigerian president’s outlawry with Nnamdi Kanu’s deranged tweets and sought same treatment for both by Twitter. Last week, while speaking on an adio Nigeria programme, he claimed that Twitter and its founder, Jack Dorsey, were liable for losses that Nigeria suffered during the protests, alleging that Dorsey, through Bitcoins, raised funds in sponsorship of the protests and his Twitter platform fuelled the crisis. At that point, you begin to wonder if indeed Mohammed was ever at the Nigerian Law School. How can Twitter, either vicariously or otherwise, suffer any liability in a Lekki toll gate civil, lawful protest that, all over the world, is held to be a fundamental human right? He has been exhibiting huge appetite to swallow Twitter up and let out its excrement inside a pit latrine.
I do not know if Mohammed realises that, as the Yoruba say, the yearly masquerade festival, with its feast of plenty and brawns, no matter how long the frills take, always comes to an end. The son of the Chief Masquerade will thus have to resume his patronage of akara – bean cake – seller at the market square. The muscle-flexing and intoxicating wine of power will by then have melted into nothingness.
Today, Mohammed’s predecessors in miswielding of raw power – Mugabe, Moyo, Abacha and many more – have become footages in history. At the end of their tour of coercive power usage and stomping on the people’s right to express themselves, Buhari will conveniently mesh into his conservative Hausa–Fulani society which will garland him as a hero; so will Garba Shehu and other hirelings. Where will Mohammed hide his untruthful face in a very critical, very unsparing Yoruba society? What will be said of him when historiographers and historians are compiling 21st-century diary of infamy?
Credit: Festus Adedayo