A professor of journalism at Kennesaw State University in the U.S., Faroog Kperogi, has described the interview President Muhammadu Buhari granted Arise Television as a public relations (PR) stunt disguised as journalistic interview.
In his weekly column, Kperogi said the interview lacked basic follow-up and clarifying questions when the president fails to answer certain questions.
- “The questions were feeble, obvious follow-up prompts were ignored, the questioners were diffident, and the viewer was left scratching their head about what they had just watched. It was the journalistic equivalent of a bad circus,” Kperogi said.
He added: “I am glad famous Punch columnist Sonala Olumhense clinically dissected the interview in his Sunday column and showed what a tragic professional theater the interview was. Even though I was initially inclined to comment on the poor quality of the conduct of the interview, I chose to cut the interviewers some slack because I thought managing to get reclusive and tight-lipped Buhari to talk after nearly six years of ignoring the domestic news media was praiseworthy.”
Kperogi said he decided to critique the interview because of the post-interview column of one of the journalists on the panel, Reuben Abati, who tried to recast what happened.
He said that the eulogistic post-interview column of Abati removed all doubts that Arise TV was merely conscripted as an instrument of presidential propaganda and mind management in the aftermath of the growing global reprobation that Buhari’s ill-thought Twitter ban has activated.
“Now let’s look at the print version of Abati’s presidential propaganda project that he called a column,” Kperogi said, and addede: ” Although the interview was clearly pre-recorded and edited, which gave Buhari more verbal clarity than we have become accustomed to lately, he was still repetitive, cracked the same humorless jokes, avoided questions that required him to demonstrate familiarity with the nitty-gritty of contemporary events like the Twitter ban, and gave and got away with puzzlingly off-center responses to questions he was asked.”
Kperogi said Abati’s post-interview-column wants Nigerians to disbelieve what they saw, that Buhari was “alert, alive, informed, confident, relaxed, witty and capable of disarming humour” during the interview.
He said it was a propaganda taking too far for Abati to impugn the growing evidence that Buhari is held hostage by dementia,
“If Abati has no idea what dementia means, he should look it up on the web. He might learn a thing or two. Dementia doesn’t mean people who suffer it can’t grant an interview. But it means even when they grant one, they can’t answer the questions they’re asked if the questions are very current, as Buhari often does,” he said.