The linguistic violence and verbal primitivism, presidential spokesman, Reuben Abati inflicted on the English language in his belated effort to berate online news media reporting on President Goodluck Jonathan’s recent visit to London was most unedifying and did nothing other than vilify the President whose image he was claiming to defend. In his response to online media reports attributing Jonathan’s health indisposition to a drinking spree and other Bacchanalian eccentricities that reportedly marked the President’s 56th birthday celebrations in London, Abati resorted to callous, vituperative invectives and casting banal aspersions on online media. His language was absolutely indecorous and stripped his message of any significance. This is especially remarkable given that Abati not only has a degree in Theatre Arts, he has been a celebrated government critic to whom much has been given; and from whom, much is expected.
Jonathan reportedly took ill with acute abdominal pains, shortly after arriving for a business meeting in the UK, the initial session of which he could not attend. The President surfaced Friday morning to address an early session of the conference, but failed to attend a scheduled evening event with the Nigerian community. Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the UK, Dalhatu Tafida, instead addressed the community on the President’s behalf. Because of the malaise, the original return trip to Abuja, scheduled for Saturday, was cancelled to enable Mr. President to have enough rest. Having rested all through Saturday at the Continental Hotel, Park Lane, London, a stone throw from the Hilton Hotel venue of Friday’s cancelled meeting, the President returned home Sunday.
In a series of press statements, Abati thanked Nigerians and the mainstream media for solidarity and objective reporting of the President’s health challenge in London. But in an unnecessary ejaculation of bile and vitriol, he condemned what he referred to as “irresponsible” and “unprofessional” antics of “certain fringe elements” within the social media, who reported falsehood in an attempt to “impugn” the character and integrity of President Jonathan. “We, however, condemn the utterly irresponsible, deplorable, highly unprofessional and unethical antics of certain fringe elements operating in the nebulous sphere of cyberspace, who persist in seizing every opportunity to unjustifiably malign and impugn the character and integrity of the elected leader of their country,” Abati pontificated.
Continuing his semantic vitriolic, Abati said it was “very regrettable” that “Sahara Reporters and some other reckless, lawless, impudent and unpatriotic internet-based media chose to assault the sensibilities of all decent Nigerians again with their entirely fictional, malicious, hate-driven and scurrilous distortion of the facts of the President’s indisposition. He stressed that the suggestion by Sahara Reporters that President Jonathan took ill following a “heavy birthday party thrown to celebrate the President’s 56th birthday at his Presidential suite in the InterContinental Hotel in London” is “fictional nonsense.” Habba!
Describing the online media sarcastically as “unregulated as they are,” Abati warned that “Sahara Reporters and their ilk are not beyond the bounds of legal action for libel and willful defamation of the character and reputation of a President who has courageously stepped forward to serve his country. They know very well that they can never substantiate or prove the constant false allegations and innuendoes they publish for the sole purpose of negatively portraying President Jonathan and his administration. Their incessant claim of a bibulous President is pure fiction and blackmail, and the product of malicious imagination. We warn that our forbearance of their disrespectful caricaturing of the President is not limitless. The Presidency will like to reiterate the trite point that no human being is beyond health challenges irrespective of their station in life. Sadly, this commonplace fact appears to be beyond the understanding of the publishers of Sahara Reporters who seem to have lost all sense of propriety, decency and human compassion.”
Nigerian media pundits have been justifiably outraged by such unpresidential use of language by the president’s spokesperson. Honestly, the President cannot call on citizens to assist the government to build a more prosperous nation by being peaceful, tolerant and supportive of his policies, while at the same time the public space is being irreverently smeared by a constant barrage of indecorous verbiage coming from his office. Presidential advisers have been known to be so over-bearing and needlessly violently voluble in delivering their reactions, that they ornate their comments with insulting and provocative grandiloquence where golden silence or at least, courtesy and decorum would do.
It is disappointing that Abati could not resist the temptation of turning his position into a bully pulpit for spewing condescending invectives and misguided utterances. This emblemizes poor public relations and crisis management at its worst. By his perfunctory overreaction and lack of decorum, Abati is guiltier of the same undignified behavior and impropriety of speech, which he accuses the online news media. His verbal violence far outrivals in rawness and impropriety that of Sahara Reporters. This is unbecoming of someone who needs no reminder that public decorum entails appropriate use of language exemplified by civility and courtesy; knowing what to say, where to say it and how to say it.
Abati’s ignorance that online media are “unregulated” cannot be a license for him to remind the world that, in today’s beleaguered Nigeria, power, privileges and talking down on people have become the scandalous perquisites of office. Only recently, former FCT minister and current deputy secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nasir el-Rufai, was called a “serial liar”, after el-Rufai castigated the President, in equally unkind words, for reveling in ethnicity and religious politics. Also, in the altercation between the President’s office and APC interim chairman, Abati derisively told Chief Bisi Akande, to respect his age after Akande said Jonathan “has reduced governance to kindergarten level.” Before this, Ijaw elder, Edwin Clark, and militant leader Asari Dokubo, spewed provocative and debasing comments that offended public sensibilities, threatening chaos if Jonathan is not given a second term. Presidential advisers like Ahmad Gulak and other administration officials have been on record mouthing vitriol.
Which begs the question: do these people have any sense of shame? People like Abati who have made the public space their turf for social engagement should endeavor to respect the offices and official positions they occupy by setting standards for decorous comportment. If anything, Abati could have simply stated his own facts about the President’s indisposition without ensnaring himself in a mesh of irreconcilable contradictions, given the amount of champagne and whiskey that the hotel supplied to the President’s suite. Abati’s bellicose and semantically violent ranting indicates that the online news media may indeed be justified in their reporting since he himself provided no evidence to contradict the facts about the President’s birthday bash as reported. So in spite of his patronizing sermonizing that online news media are out to impugn the integrity and character of the President, the tepidity of Abati’s defense functioned to strengthen the case of the online news media he set out to castigate. That is what happens when you’re wittingly dishonest or outright intellectually incompetent.
