I was with a few editors the other day and they expressed surprise at the acuity of the president in his first media chat of his reign. I expressed surprise at their surprise. Didn’t they know him, I wondered? Why would they expect anything less? One of them said, he acquitted himself better than the campaign, asserting that candidate Bola Tinubu was not coherent during the stumps. The gathering was not for that purpose, but my only response was that they were looking at his campaign from the wrong lens, so they saw the wrong thing. They saw and heard what they wanted to see and hear. In literary circles, it is called hermeneutics, the theory of reader-response.
What was more coherent than “emilokan”? What was better phrasing than the “church rat and poisoned holy communion,” or the idea of “recharging Lake Chad?” Was he not the one who said he would bring headmaster Cardoso to help revive the economy? Or was he not the first of the four to promise to collapse the exchange rate regimes and remove fuel subsidies?
Anyway, those who thought he was afraid of the chat, should be afraid no more. I read and watched a lot of comments about the outing. The contrarian voice said, the media team picked tame and suppliant journalists. Maybe they wanted gangsters as questioners. They asked very good questions, but such interviews cannot by any means exhaust all issues. No interviews of that calibre ever do. If any of them thought they could rattle the man, they were probably not prepared enough. The man is a soldier of wit, and can outmanoeuvre many a fighter as we saw. But what has been missing in all the comments so far is that President Tinubu did not fill the studio with the glum spirit of combat. It was a president of sunny face, cheery in spite of the gloom of the hour. He cheered to all the questions. Even when it called for sobriety, he spiced it with an optimistic tone. His spirit was saying, the moment must be biting, but let us look beyond the painful now. American President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt who led his country through a war and depression on his wheelchair, had said, “the only thing to fear is fear itself.” It was in a time when people woke up to see their pockets dry, and men fell off roofs in suicide. It was like the words of the New Testament about fear coming over people because of the evil to come. President Roosevelt gave them so much cheer that the historian Doris Kearn Goodwin recalls the story of the man who said his roof had caved in, his wife had left him, he had no money in the bank and his dog had run away but he was happy because Roosevelt was president and would save the economy.
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Tinubu may not have FDR’s eloquence but he evinced his spirit. Roosevelt, though, did not confront the sort of fractious malice we have today in Nigeria. Never mind an opposition figure dismissed his economic policy then known as The New Deal as the “raw deal.”
No doubt, it was a sober media chat, but it is credit to the president, he lifted the gloom rather than bow to it. Even the phrase, “I doff my hat to him,” about FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, was nifty. The discussion on the tax bill was anticipated, but he was at once firm and conciliatory. He minced no words, though, about the thrust of the bill as “pro-poor.” As Reuben Abati noted, the president displayed a mastery of subject. At times, it seemed to me he had rattled his interlocutors, so much so, that their follow-up questions seemed tame.
I would have expected, as some had observed, for the president to speak more about the suffering and his sympathy. But the nature of the exchange was less about emotions than logic. He had to justify fuel subsidy, collapse of exchange rate, tax bill, his ministers, war on corruption, the flights of inflation, mushroom of ministers, etc. On the cost of governance, I thought they could have asked him how much it cost government and whether cost of maintaining that many ministers was worth the investment. I think, they might have gotten better insight on the thinking of the man. I think the subjected spews much ignorance. Many do not know that more ministers do not mean more ministries. No new civil servants were hired or new infrastructures. They have to share the available resources.
He, however, challenged them on anyone who was not performing, and it took a while for Abati to rib Wike, and the president lectured Nigerians on their disdain for order and compliances. A few days later, there was Wike and his sons in a photo-op with the president. When was the last time a president challenged a cast of high-profile editors and broadcasters and they were caught almost with no words dribbling off their lips?
