A human right lawyer has warned Minister of Information ,Alhaji Lai Mohammed watch what he says and stop the use of abusive languages in passing on his message.
Barr Ebun Olu Adegboruwa made this assertion in a press release he pushed to newsmen.
Read fill details.
"I have read,
with much concern, the statement of the Honourable Minister of Information and
Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in response to the call by the opposition
Peoples’ Democratic Party, for the President, Gen Muhammadu Buhari, to resign,
given the economic recession that Nigeria is currently facing.
In his said
response, which is being celebrated by his admirers as ‘taking PDP to the
cleaners’, Alhaji Mohammed described the entire PDP members as “shameless
irritants’, and proceeded to sermonize and indeed terrorize the
opposition, with his pen and tongue. First, I have no sympathy for the PDP or
any past government official, that is now the subject of public opprobrium,
given the mindless revelations of some horrendous embezzlement of public funds,
during that inglorious era.
In this regard, no word can be too harsh to
describe the lawlessness of the past regime, in relation to the distasteful
management of our common patrimony. My concern however, is whether the
Honourable Minister of Information, should be the appropriate channel for this
exercise.
In the days
leading to the 2015 general elections, Alhaji Lai Mohammed held sway as the
bride of the media, given his characteristic bombardments of the ruling PDP
government then. And it was through those gallant efforts, that Nigerians were
daily assessing the Jonathan regime. But the campaigns are now over and Alhaji
Lai Mohammed has now been elevated to reap the fruits of his ‘labour’, with his
appointment as the Honourable Minister of Information and Culture.
Legally
speaking, the scope of the responsibilities of the Minister of Information and
Culture can be gleaned from the agencies and parastatals under the Ministry,
such as the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria and indeed the Nigerian
Broadcasting Commission. These agencies regulate the activities of the media
generally. In their guidelines, media owners are to avoid employing any
language that may communicate abuse, vulgarism, nudity, obscenity, violence,
religious fanaticism or indeed ethnic divide.
In its
proper definition, a ‘shameless’ person is one who is insensible to disgrace,
who is so crudely raw, as to absorb all rubbish. An ‘irritant’ is an annoying
and unpleasant fellow, who causes undue excitement or aggro, constituting a
headache and thus, a total nuisance. All members of the PDP cannot be deserving
of these excoriating epithets.
By the
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Alhaji Lai Mohammed is a
public officer, presently paid and sustained in office, with the tax payers’
money, including those of the PDP, that he has wantonly descended upon. The
machinery of the dissemination of his abusive statement, was through the public
purse, and that, in a time of recession.
It is
totally undesirable and manifestly uncharitable, for a public officer, to
employ state resources, to engage in abuses and official indecency. Indeed,
Nigeria cannot afford public officers, who lord it over the very people that
they are paid to serve. Yes, it was within the province of the All Progressive
Congress, to take on the PDP, word for word and language for language, in
respect of any political verbiage.
However, we cannot have Alhaji Lai Mohammed
as a propagandist in the opposition and now an abuser in government. That
should not happen.
If the
minister who is at the head of promoting decency in the public space, is
himself engaged in the use of foul and indecent languages, then what should the
media do? What should the civil servants under him do? And to think that the
Honourable Minister has just launched a national programme of national
orientation, in which he is advocating for ‘change’ and he himself has not seen
the need to change from the vituperous spokesperson of the APC, into
temperate and modest federal minister, thus reflecting the sober mood of our
national economy, than to be regaling us daily with bogus and outlandish
Babanrigas and ministerial life of luxury and then turn around to ask the
people for patience, to endure poverty and suffering.
What
Nigerians should be hearing from the Honourable Minister, is programmes of the
government aimed at prospering the economy, the mode in which the money
recovered through the anti-corruption campaign is being utilized, why
electricity supply is now dwindling in the wake of the coming dry season and
expected heat, why airlines are closing shops and throwing the transport sector
into huge crisis, why citizens are dying daily on most of our roads which have
been largely abandoned, why the government has not been able to fulfil most of
its campaign promises upon its ascension into power since 2015, several other
questions begging for answers.
Alhaji
Mohammed has carved a peculiar niche for himself in the course of his national
assignments in his days as the opposition spokesperson. He should leverage on
that to create an enduring legacy of tolerance, that would reflect his new role
as a federal minister and a public officer and allow his party, the APC, to
appoint his replacement, that will carry on the business of propaganda, if
still that will still be necessary, in our time now.'
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Politics