Information and Culture Minister Lai Mohammed has said his ministry is incapacitated in the war against fake news, disinformation and hate speech currently ravaging Nigeria.
Mohammed, who spoke at the 2023 budget defence session his ministry and its relevant agencies had with the Senate Committee on Information, noted that the recent terror alert raised in Nigeria by the United States of America (U.S.A), the United Kingdom (UK) and others, gave the nation’s economy devastating blow.
The minister told the committee that his ministry required adequate funding to fight fake news, disinformation and hate speech, such as the terror alert raised in Nigeria.
“If there is any ministry that should be adequately funded and not suffer from yearly budget cuts, it is the Information Ministry.
“The terror alert raised by America and some other countries against Nigeria, though debunked, but not properly done in terms of putting things in proper context in preventing wrong perception from becoming the reality.
“The ministry is even more incapacitated from discharging its basic functions of getting Nigerians informed at all times as regards the position of government on burning issues through yearly budgetary cuts.
“Distinguished senators, I’m extremely sad as far as yearly budgetary cuts are concerned, because it is getting worse and worse by the day.
“A worrisome example of this is that while the Information Ministry was given N2.5 billion for capital expenditure in 2022, one-third of it, which is N869 million, is earmarked for similar purpose in the 2023 fiscal year.
“This, to us in the ministry, is very depressing because it seems as if it is the main agency bearing the burden of cash crunch being faced by government,” he said.
But Committee Chairman Danladi Sankara told the minister that yearly budget cuts is not limited to Information Ministry but to all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) generally since capital vote component of the Federal budget itself dropped from N2.5 trillion to N1 trillion.
A member of the committee, Ibrahim Abdullahi Danbaba, assured the minister that budgetary votes would be made available for the ministry on advocacy for the 2023 general election.