Early in the New Year, Personal Assistant to the President on New Media Bashir Ahmad posted a photo of a plate of strawberries on his Twitter account, captioning the picture “This is from Plateau State, Nigeria.” In an administration so bereft of achievements that it would happily claim the movement of the air and the rising of the sun as its own doing, it did not come as much of a surprise to see a presidential aide sharing a photo of something that grew out of the ground as some sort of achievement. This photo however, raised a great deal of controversy.
In the typical manner of Twitter, users quickly performed a reverse image search and discovered that the photo was in fact a stock photograph which had been used in several other places on the internet, including an article in the Indian Express. Bashir Ahmad had been caught lying through his teeth not for the first time, and the predictable pile-on soon followed despite his futile deletion of the tweet.
I myself offered a general opinion to the effect of “I can’t believe we’re supposed to celebrate strawberries as an achievement in 2021,” but on further consideration a new question emerged. Was this merely some more of the now-customary bad faith engagement that the Buhari junta has turned into an art form, or was this in fact, a sign of something much darker and more worrying at the seat of what currently passes for a government in Nigeria?
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Bashir’s strawberry – The ‘Buhari dance’ all over again?
A few weeks ago in this column, I wrote about the need for Nigerian media to resist getting sucked into the ‘Buhari dance’ phenomenon where the ruling junta puts out a message calculated to rile up the literati and get a certain response. While the media and those who read it engage in furious conversations about the message, Buhari and his junta have cover to do something else entirely, which escapes all scrutiny because the public is preoccupied with the ‘Buhari dance.’
On first examination, it could be argued that Bashir Ahmad’s decision to upload a plagiarised photo of a strawberry was yet another example of this unfortunate “Call-and-answer” governance strategy. Tweet something egregiously irritating with the bonus point of it being a falsehood, and revel in the hours of angry engagement that ensue. While the audience screams in righteous indignation, they have little idea that they are in fact being kept in line by being forced to engage on terms that someone else set.
It is a strategy that is well known to any self-respecting internet troll who specialises in outrage trolling. Keep pushing people’s buttons and keep watching them give you the exact reaction that you want, while their attention is kept away from other important things that they could be doing with their time. The problem with that line of thought
in this situation was that on further examination, it does not seem that Bashir Ahmad particularly had something to hide.
Judging from what happened next, it would seem as if he genuinely tried to make a point about strawberry agriculture in Nigeria, only to do the Twitter equivalent of forcefully stepping on a rake. I believe that this is very, very bad news indeed, and here is why.
“No more pretence to governance”
While Bashir Ahmad and his co-travellers in the Buhari junta are no strangers to intentionally provoking controversy as part of a governance strategy that I have previously compared to that of your garden-variety Reddit or Nairaland troll, this case was different. For one thing, the presidential media aide actually deigned to make an explanation for his deleted tweet – something he does not typically do. The explanation in question was as weak as it was noteworthy, and I will explain why shortly.
Tweeted this picture with a caption “This is from Plateau, Nigeria”, some respondents said otherwise, I got the picture from a friend early 2020, who still insisting that he took the photo in PT, anyway, I deleted the tweet. Whether from PT or not, I believe we have best 🍓there. pic.twitter.com/7BbExXgWyf
— Bashir Ahmad (@BashirAhmaad) January 3, 2021
Following his little mea culpa, he then posted a
replacement tweet, this time containing a photo that seemed to more accurately
reference its purported Plateau origins (though its veracity has not been
independently verified).
Plateau, Nigeria has the best strawberry. pic.twitter.com/XkrfrH799S
— Bashir Ahmad (@BashirAhmaad) January 3, 2021
Why are these little details important? I will reference something I read over the weekend, which was written by Dr. Farooq Kperogi. According to Dr. Kperogi who has excellent contacts within the governance structures of Abuja, late Chief of Staff Abba Kyari was the “glue” holding the Buhari presidency together. In his absence he says, Nigeria has since ceased to have an actual, functioning, fit-for-purpose president in any
meaningful sense. In other words, everyone in Aso Rock right now is just ‘winging’ it and making it up as they go along.
Bashir Ahmad needs social media content to put out in support of a fictitious agriculture policy focus that only exists on the pages of newspapers. He will just Google a photo of strawberries and upload it under a caption claiming they came from Plateau State, ergo Major-General Buhari is doing grrrrrreat! When called up on it, he tells a yarn about receiving the photo from a (conveniently anonymous) “friend,” and then doubles down on the falsehood by finding and posting another photo whose veracity cannot be confirmed or denied.
In the same vein, Femi Adesina welcomes in the New Year with a ridiculous exhortation to “wail less,”; Tolu Ogunlesi furiously embarks on the fool’s errand of chasing down his lost social capital by uploading old newspaper screenshots depicting journalists suffering at the hands of his current employers. Lauretta Onochie thankfully does nothing at all, which is where she is most effective and Garba Shehu puts out a disastrous opinion piece riddled with grammatical and syntax errors, which reads like he tapped it out on his phone while suffering through an early morning bowel movement amidst constipation. Here is a paragraph from that piece:
“Military procurements and increasing recruitment will ensure the the (sic) momentum of ridding the Northwestern and North Central States are (sic) equally rid of kidnapping, cattle rustling and banditry.”
Nobody is in charge in Abuja. Nobody is coordinating.
Everything is in chaos as several individuals and interest groups excitedly push every button in sight like monkeys set free on a spaceship. With Major General Buhari clearly no longer being in a state remotely fit for anything approaching even the most incompetent dictatorship, this can only mean one thing – factions and power grabs galore in 2021.
The last word to sum up what is happening in Abuja will be left to Dr. Kperogi who describes it thus:
“The in-fighting will create noticeable cracks in the Buhari group that Osinbajo, Tinubu, and other interest groups would exploit to feather their nests and advance their interests. In other words, in the coming days and months, expect the cessation of any pretence to governance and an unprecedentedly factious, dog-eat-dog, recriminatory fight between competing power blocs.”
Indeed, Dr. Kperogi.
Indeed.
