The recent appearance of President Muhammadu Buhari on Upfront, an Aljazeera chamber of mental torture for public and political figures, was a risky gamble. And with all at stake, it was a miscalculation by his media advisers and handlers.
Like many Nigerians, I feared President’s encounter with the anchor, Mehdi Hasan, a journalist often praised for his audacious grilling of mighty and even notorious political figures.
I like the journalist for his guts, but he’s unapologetically obnoxious and, in many of his sessions I’ve watched, he came out as absolutely rude, manipulating his ineloquent and camera-shy guests.
I feared he would exhibit similar style of questioning guests, approaching them like an interrogator assessing a dull offender, in his first with our President.
But that encounter was well-managed; it further restated the President’s impressive self-esteem and his amazing composure – even asking the overbearing young man seeking to intensify his pressure “Will you let me finish, please?” – would definitely promote a perception of Nigeria as a nation under a responsibly wise and conscientious human being.
Even where you dissent with the President’s responses, especially his insistence that he’s unaware of documented human rights violations beyond newspaper reports, you’ve to agree that the interview would’ve been a global disaster if it were former President Goodluck Jonathan on that hot seat.
Many of us lauded the media outing despite some slips and half-truths in the President’s responses partly because of his disposition, and how he resisted being made a subject of embarrassing international jest and viral social media memes by a journalist who has a reputation for achieving. And quite easily.
The response to the claims of violations of human rights by the Nigerian troops was one of the President’s half-truths, because he was in the news during the Jonathan days as a critic of the military’s highhandedness in the fight against terror.
In one of his typically distorted and sensationalized statements before his election, Buhari’s call for tact and caution in the fight against terror was mistaken for a sympathy for the Boko Haram by the adversarial media that had tried so hard to portray the man as provincial extremist.
Whoever follows the happenings in the northeast Nigeria, and especially the origin and terror of the Boko Haram would testify to the avoidable security lapses and recklessness that resulted into the disaster that has now turned the country into a pitiable laboratory of human sufferings.
Another gaffe of the President was his defence of the tactic employed by the troops in defeating the insurgents, and flushing them out of their strongholds. He said that the troops have succeeded in cornering Boko Haram to their strongholds, and that they’d be flushed out when the rain starts in December. That’s a riddle some of us are yet to crack, because that’s about the Harmattan period.
My sympathy for the President was a subjective identification of his “questioner”, Mehdi Hasan, as a bully capable of humiliating him and present him, and the nation too, as another of black man’s disgrace.
And if Mehdi had done his research well before the interview, he wouldn’t known that the President was not only aware of the highhandedness of the military in their counterterrorism, but was even a critic of the trend before his election. We must also he grateful that Hasan had no meteorologic knowledge of Nigeria to see through the President’s claim of rain on December. I trust Hasan to look the President of the most populous black nation in the eyes and call him by what he’s done: a liar.
While some of us may still choose to praise Buhari’s majestic disposition in his responses to Mehdi, ignoring the half-truths and lies expressed to escape the journalist’s obnoxious grilling, we must all note that deception, which is the firewall of politics and diplomatic relations, doesn’t salvage a nation at crossroads. May God save us from us!
