Bayo Onanuga’s ad hominem fallacy: No matter how hard Onanuga tries to obfuscate the issues by avoiding the central question raised by Obi, which is whether a leader who campaigned on specific promises should be held accountable when those promises remain largely unfulfilled, the joke is on President Tinubu, and no one else. All said and done, Onanuga’s red herring is sheer obscurantism, the real definition of childishness.
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
I was saddened watching Mr. Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, discuss the state of the nation on Arise Television on Tuesday. To be fair, he is the president’s spokesperson and his job entails defending the indefensible. I don’t envy him because it is a near impossible job to defend the Tinubu administration without looking like a clown. But he has not helped matters. Onanuga has acquired a rather unfortunate beyond the pale reputation of being insensitive to the plight of ordinary Nigerians whenever he finds himself on the corridors of power, an attitude he exhibited grotesquely during the interview.
Nigerians may have forgotten how barely four months after he was appointed Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) by President Muhammadu Buhari in May 2016, Onanuga, a veteran journalist, went on a social media rant accusing the Nigerian media of “over-sensationalisation,” and deliberateness in discrediting the Buhari government.
Just as he did two days ago, he insisted in the September 6, 2016 Facebook post that reports in the media about hardship were “mere propaganda” orchestrated by those who lost the 2015 election.
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“I was in Bauchi and Jos at the weekend, I also found that food was cheap everywhere,” he wrote. “In our hotel, we paid about N700 for a plate of semovita, or eba with a choice of catfish or chicken. On the roadside, I found to my surprise that with just N1,000, I bought over 50 oranges, two giant water melon and 10 pieces of sweet potato. I had experienced a similar thing in the market at Abuja, where I found that with N1,400, I could make a big vegetable soup, with tomato, pepper and roasted Titus fish.”
And the sucker punch: “Are the media and bloggers really painting a correct image of our country? It’s time for the media to objectively conduct a reality check about our reports, whether we are not over sensationalising so-called hardship that we talked about.”
That was at a time when Nigerians were reeling from the disastrous Buhari administration. To him, the excruciatingly hard lived experiences of the people was “so-called” – an illusion and a figment of their imagination.
He didn’t stop there. “My daughter was on the Virgin Atlantic flight that took off from Lagos to London today. I asked her to find out whether the plane was filled up or going to London near empty judging by the noisy campaign from a section of the country about the ‘hardship’ in our country. My daughter sent back this one-line text, after boarding: “daddy, the flight was filled up o. This makes me to wonder whether all the seeming orchestrated campaign in the media was not mere propaganda to make the Buhari regime look really bad,” he wrote mockingly. Of course, that was an unconscionable dig at folks complaining about hardship, which was real.
So, his answers to Charles Aniagolu’s questions on Tuesday were true to character. His Ijebu kinsmen are not complaining having tasted the goodness of Tinubu’s regime, he claims.
He taunts Nigerians still complaining of hunger despite Tinubu’s fabled unprecedented feat of turning around the country’s parlous lot in so short a time.
“We have been pigeon-holed into certain assumptions. It is like in the early days of this government, the president went to Lagos, I think he was coming from Central Mosque and somebody did a voice over – ebi ń pa wá o – which means “we are hungry.” And since then, people have been saying, we are hungry,” he said in a very matter-of-fact way with a straight face. But he was lying.
The presidential spokesperson says that was a hoax because his personal staff say otherwise. “I am a Nigerian, I have people working for me privately. I don’t see the level of hunger you people are talking about.”
Wondering what those who are complaining of hardship are talking about, Onanuga said: “People are praising this president. It is the opposition that is maligning him.”
It didn’t matter to him that an estimated 139 million Nigerians, about 63% of the country’s population, are currently classified as multidimensionally poor, compared to 87 million in 2023 when Tinubu assumed office, according to figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), not opposition. Even reports by the World Bank that is sympathetic to the administration affirm that poverty has significantly increased under Tinubu’s watch.
Of course, Aniagolu, also a Nigerian, wouldn’t let him get away with such hogwash. He reminded him that while the government admonishes longsuffering citizens to tighten their belts, government officials are loosening theirs.
Onanuga’s riposte was as egregious as it was harebrained: “That is not totally true. Let me just tell you a story. Today, after a meeting, I spoke with the Minister of Finance. It will shock people that some ministers, some of them spoke during the last budget exercise that they didn’t receive capital money… some of them, because they came into office to serve, are using their personal funds to run. Some of them are not collecting government money.”
Incredible! Nigerians are, indeed, shocked that ministers are using their personal resources to run the business of the Nigerian state and it beggars belief that the presidential spokesperson sees that as a credit to the government, assuming it is true.
An obviously flustered Aniagolu asked what he meant by ministers “using their personal funds to run,” to which Onanuga responded, “I mean to run their official work.”
It is quite revealing that the irony was lost on him that in a government that claims to be awash with money, budgets are not funded and ministers run the ministries with their personal funds.
Now, I was saddened despite the fact that I didn’t expect anything different from Onanuga because if this is the quality of advice Tinubu gets from his aides – people telling him what a great leader he is, how he has made Nigeria an Eldorado – then, this country is done for.
The Arise TV interview is coming on the heels of Onanuga’s ad hominem attack on Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Party (NDC) in the 2027 elections following his call on Tinubu to resign on account of his incompetence and cluelessness.
Citing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to step down amid public anger over a sluggish economy, a worsening cost-of-living crisis, and a failure to honour key electoral commitments as a model of political accountability, Obi called on President Tinubu to do likewise.
Such a gesture, he said, would not only help in enthroning a political culture rooted in accountability and responsibility, but also “send a powerful message that public office is a sacred trust, not an entitlement, and help build a society in which future leaders understand that failure carries consequences.”
He was spot on. Elsewhere, leadership is neither about office nor tenure but promise and delivery. But an irascible administration fired back, dismissing Obi’s call as “childish, hollow and an unworthy distraction.”
The presidency said the call was not only misplaced but also reflects “a selective and distorted view of Nigeria’s realities since 2023” and reminded Nigerians that the country runs a presidential system, where the president is elected to a fixed four-year term.
It was an ad hominem fallacy, which, rather than address the substance of Obi’s submission, tried to discredit his argument by personally attacking his character and motive.
But by so doing, Onanuga laid bare his ignorance. First, it is not true that in a presidential system of government, presidents don’t reign. Chapter 8, Part 2, Section 306 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) which deals with the issue of resignations states: “… any person who is appointed, elected, or otherwise selected to any office established by this Constitution may resign from that office by writing under his hand addressed to the authority or person by whom he was appointed, elected or selected.” It went further to state that “The notice of resignation of the President and of the Vice-President shall respectively be addressed to the President of the Senate and to the President.”
In any case, while it is trite to say that resignation of presidents is always rare and dramatic, history is replete with such moments. Former U.S. President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 due to the Watergate Scandal, becoming the first and only U.S. president to do so. In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos stepped down in 1986. Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello resigned in 1992 in the middle of an impeachment trial and Alberto Fujimori of Peru, in 2000, resigned via fax from Japan after a widespread corruption scandal undermined his administration. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peru did likewise in 2018. Needless to say that this list is not exhaustive.
Again, if it is puerile to call for the resignation of a president, then Tinubu is the prefect in that juvenile class.
Why?
Because he also told President Goodluck Jonathan to resign. Speaking at a rally in Ilorin, Kwara State, on Wednesday, November 5, 2014 in his capacity as the APC National Leader, Tinubu claimed that Jonathan’s administration lacked the wherewithal to tackle the country’s security challenges and urged him to quit office.
So, if the call was not childish then, what makes it so today? Calls for accountability cannot be noble under Jonathan and childish under Tinubu. That smacks of hypocrisy, the hallmark of the Tinubu administration. Or was Nigeria a parliamentarian state under Jonathan?
No matter how hard Onanuga tries to obfuscate the issues by avoiding the central question raised by Obi, which is whether a leader who campaigned on specific promises should be held accountable when those promises remain largely unfulfilled, the joke is on President Tinubu, and no one else. All said and done, Onanuga’s red herring is sheer obscurantism, the real definition of childishness.
