In the bid to amplify his strides – imagined, still-in-the-pipeline and real – former President Goodluck Jonathan recruited the services of an American-based Pastor named Reno Omokri to be his Social Media Special Assistant.
Without asking what his job description was, those on the online space quickly gleaned that he was tasked to trend hash tags that promoted his principal’s image. He failed many times on that – as he adopted the tactic of falsehood and immaturity: puerile lies, poorly couched tags and failed polls that even saw the then opposition, and now President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, winning.
He, at many times, brought his pastoral tag to question, especially when he told barefaced lies about the administration’s achievements. And he has not stopped doing that.
As Omokri continues to defend the past administration and try, through misrepresentation of facts and events, to put his principal’s image in good stead, he reminds Nigerians of the pictures of the roads from neighbouring countries that were shared on his trends as roads built by the Jonathan administration; he reminds Nigerians of jobs that his principal claimed to have created, but only a handful had relations that could point at beneficiaries of these jobs.
Reno, in his most recent article: “How APC turned our graduates to bus conductors,” makes a failed attempt to rewrite history. Comments are free, but facts are sacred.
He says in his reflexive lying habit that “it is worthy of note that when Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg visited Nigeria, the first place he chose to visit was the Co-creation Hub (CcHub) a brainchild of the Jonathan administration.” But Tunji Elesho, Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe who founded the Co-creation Hub will strongly disagree with Pastor Omokri.
In an interview Bosun had with The Punch newspaper he said this: “I still have the book in which I started jotting the idea and I met with my co-founder, Femi Longe; we were both privileged to be in London, … we started writing ideas down two or three years before launching in 2010.”
Clearly, Goodluck Jonathan did not conceive the Co-creation Hub, neither did he create it – and it is disrespectful for an acclaimed pastor as Reno to try to convert an idea his principal never birthed as his principal’s.
I do not know if he reads the same Bible as other Christians do. But the Holy book does not mince words when it affirms in Proverbs 12:22: “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.”
It amuses me when he further brandishes the Youwin programs as Jonathan’s tool for job creation. YouWin failed in the mandate it set out to deliver: it did not create real jobs, but rather big boys who could not translate the funds given to them in creating successful enterprises; it did not improve the standard of living of the lives of Nigerians and had no real multiplier effect in that regard.
The current administration has initiated a series of social protection programs that are, indeed, getting Nigerians engaged. The N-Power program, an unprecedented job creation, training and skills acquisition program has recruited its first batch of 200,000 Nigerians out of 500,000. This is just one; yet it surpasses the overall impact of Jonathan’s YouWin. The Buhari administration’s N-power, would not just give monthly allowances to these workers, it will also train them with lifelong skills that would make them employable in their fields of endeavour.
The administration has in the offing four other welfare schemes: the Home Grown School Feeding Programme (with 5.5 million pupils to be targeted); the Conditional Cash Transfer (where 5,000 naira would be given to the poorest Nigerian households monthly); Enterprise and Empowerment Programme and the STEEM Bursary Programme (with 100,000 students to get financial support)
Facts only: only 1% of YouWin applicants received the grants. This is best described as political patronage for the boys as a mere 1,200 Nigerians out of over 200,000 applicants.
With the humongous amount that was available to the previous administration when oil prices soared, more would have been expected. Not to mention the fact that no real infrastructural project was put in place after the administration had earned a whooping 51 Trillion Naira in five years.
Things have changed, and for good. If Reno, in far away America, has not gotten the memo, here is it: the Nigerian people voted out an incompetent and corrupt government for the better. That cannot be changed by half-baked lies and fiction.
. Akanji, a political commentator, writes from Abuja.
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