I watched Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo’s two recent television interviews with absolute bewilderment. And if the situation in Nigeria was not so grim currently, one would laugh at the minister’s posturing during these conversations.
For starters, his appointment as a spokesperson for the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu/Kashim Shettima campaign council is confounding.
Keyamo is the junior minister for labour and employment, which is an all-time important portfolio anywhere in the world. It is more so in Nigeria, which is currently ravaged by all forms of unemployment, serial industrial actions and brain drain challenges. Unless the minister is as redundant as he makes the Office of the Vice President look in recent arguments, how does he plan to hold these two roles together without dropping the ball?
Spokesman-ship for a presidential campaign is a critical role requiring round-the-clock intellectual and emotional vigour. Without this, the holder of the office will succumb to cheap sentiments and become a cry-baby running after trifles. He or she will ultimately lose the plot and the grand opportunity to persuade. So, how does a minister of the federal republic, who should attend cabinet meetings and lead policies for national re-emergence, play these two roles effectively?
Even if we would not have this predictable role conflict, there is the question of how ethical it is for a minister, appointed to serve all Nigerians regardless of what they represent, to take this new role. It is untidy that successive governments in Nigeria mix public office with partisanship. This abuses the sensitivities of millions of Nigerians who don’t belong to political parties but fund public offices.
Beyond Keyamo’s qualifications, however, is his disposition and the responses that he gave to two key questions.
From the outset of these interviews, Keyamo came about with the usual arrogance of office that you find in the average Nigerian leader. If as untoward as it is, Nigerians have come to terms with arrogant political officeholders, the spokesperson for a political campaign impairs his message when he fails the humility test.
The politics of elections is such that a majority of the voters have already made up their minds about whom they will vote for. So, a spokesperson’s principal job is to convince undecided voters. Now, it is preposterous to imagine that you can come to these people with the superiority that Mr Keyamo displayed in the said interviews. If you do, you will be de-marketing rather than selling your candidate.
Even if things were all rosy for Nigerians, citizens would evaluate the government in power during elections. They also react to social issues of the day. People will appraise you and ask questions that may irritate you. In this unavoidable reality, a spokesperson must remain calm and collected, and explain what the extant government is doing and what the candidate plans to do, meekly.
He must persuade citizens that government see things from their perspectives and cannot afford to dismiss every point raised as mere “opposition” rhetoric. Only a minority of Nigerians have party affiliations, so spokespersons must speak to Nigerians like someone concerned about their future, rather than trivialising every question by attaching political sentiments that profile a critical person as a disgruntled political opponent. This is regardless of what your party may have achieved. You owe the people this as their servant and someone seeking their votes.
But then, can we say that Nigerians are happy currently? Are things the best they could be? Has this regime lived up to the expectations it raised in people during its campaign?
This leads us to Keyamo’s reactions to two of the issues raised in the interviews. The first is the embarrassing industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities. After throwing in details of how far the government has gone to negotiate with the union, Keyamo did two things: He tried to reduce the ASUU struggle to a selfish fight for survival and then appealed to parents to “beg” the lecturers.
There are too many things wrong with his take here. To give the faintest hint that a government, elected to solve problems, is helpless, steals hope from the people. It also detracts from that government’s legitimacy. It is, therefore, irresponsible to invite parents (who are victims of Nigeria’s plaque of misgovernance), to solve a problem that is a referendum on the capacity of the government to deliver a worthwhile future to Nigerians.
This call on parents also validates the widely held view that the government has reduced public universities to the exclusive territory of the poor. Or would the rich, who can send their children to private universities or fly them to prestigious foreign universities, join the colony of “begging parents” that the minister is convening?
In inviting Nigerians to see university lecturers as a selfish, insatiable lot, he said that the government spends N412bn (according to him more than half of the overhead on education) and that ASUU is now making demands that will cost N1.2tn, without considering government’s many other responsibilities. This is laughable considering that this same government (buckling under the burden of too many demands from ASUU) approved nine new federal universities just a few months back. So, how does it want to fund these new institutions?
Keyamo was not also entirely upfront about the reasons for the ASUU strike. More than just issues of subsistence, as he painted, the union is talking about the standard of Nigerian universities. ASUU complains that the university system cannot compete globally and that this is not because of a lack of human capital but the country’s failure to plan! This position is hard to contradict. Would Keyamo proudly send his child to Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, where he graduated 30 years ago? solicitors
Concerning insecurity, the tendency of government functionaries to insult Nigerians’ intelligence by manipulating facts is exhausting. When they claim they have solved the problem of Boko Haram, you marvel, because it doesn’t look like that. What has happened is that, while the fire got too hot in the North-East, these guys moved to other parts of the country. The government itself has attributed three recent events (the Kuje Prison break; the attack on St. Francis Catholic Church, Owo and the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna bound train) to the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, a Boko Haram offshoot. This situation without the national security apparatus foreseeing it. Yet, Nigerians should be grateful for this?
Keyamo claimed that the regime had solved the farmer herders’ crisis. This is also debatable. While reports of incidents have decreased considerably, some of the violence in Zamfara, Kaduna and Benue states resulted from disagreements between farmers and herders. But even if the government has resolved these, the level of insecurity Nigeria has witnessed in the past couple of weeks is unprecedented, and any attempt to suggest otherwise would amount to lying to and insulting the intelligence of those you get paid to serve. A report published by The PUNCH in June showed that 3,478 people had been killed in violent attacks while 2,256 others were abducted across the country between December 2021 to June 15, 2022. Regardless, government people want to argue that Nigerians are safer than at some other time. How is that even relevant in the circumstance?
–Twitter: @niranadedokun