The founding Editor in Chief of The News magazine and current MD of News Agency of Nigeria, Bayo Onanuga, incurred some Nigerians’ wrath over a Facebook post yesterday.
Onanuga, in the said post, had said that talks about the hardship being experienced by Nigerians under President Muhammadu Buhari were exaggerated. Which didn’t go down well with many. And immediately, a great majority of them responded, calling him names and also wondering why all of a sudden he’s composing sweet songs for Buhari’s choir and orchestra.
The respected journalist, obviously shocked by their outburst, had to take to his FB almost immediately to clarify his initial post.
Below, however, is the post what started it all:
My daughter was on the Virgin Atlantic Flight that took off from Lagos to London today. I asked her to find out whether the plane was filled up or going to London near empty judging by the noisy campaign from a section of the country about the ‘hardship’ in our country.
My daughter sent back this one-line text, after boarding: “daddy, the flight was filled up o”.
This makes me to wonder whether all the seeming orchestrated campaign in the media was not mere propaganda to make the Buhari regime look really bad.
I was in Bauchi and Jos at the weekend, I also found that food was cheap everywhere. In our hotel, we paid about N700 for a plate of semovita, or eba with a choice of cat fish or chicken. On the roadside, I found to my surprise that with just N1000, I bought over 50 oranges, two giant water melon and 10 pieces of sweet potato. I had experienced a similar thing in the market at Abuja, where I found that with N1,400, I could make a big vegetable soup, with tomato, pepper and roasted Titus fish.
Are the media and bloggers really painting a correct image of our country. It’s time for the media to objectively conduct a reality check about our reports, whether we are not over sensationalising so-called hardship that we talked about.