Manipulators of public perception: Between Olisa Metuh and Lai Mohammed

Metu who was called to the bar in 1988, contested and won election as an Ex-Officio member of the PDP’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in 1999 during the party’s first National Convention. Being one of the youngest officers to be elected into the party’s highest ruling organ, he was subsequently made the first Youth Leader […]

Metu who was called to the bar in 1988, contested and won election as an Ex-Officio member of the PDP’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in 1999 during the party’s first National Convention. Being one of the youngest officers to be elected into the party’s highest ruling organ, he was subsequently made the first Youth Leader of the party for the Southeast zone.  Since 1999, Metu has worked in different capacities in the party and was in 2008 elected as the National Vice Chairman of the Party for Southeast zone and later became PDP’s Publicity Secretary.
Alhaji Lai Mohammed, a lawyer and co-founded the law firm, Edu & Mohammed, has been a Director of Afromedia PLC since May 2011. He is also a fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR).  He worked as a Public Relations Officer for almost 10 years with the Nigerian Airports Authority, now Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN). Lai Mohamed, a writer in his own rights, was Chief of Staff to Bola Tinubu when he was Governor of Lagos State. He resigned to contest for the Governorship election in Kwara State but was unsuccessful. He later emerged as the Publicity Secretary of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria – one of the parties that merged to form the APC. Lai Mohammed d is currently the APC’s Interim Publicity Secretary.
Both  now and when he did the job for ACN, Lai Mohammed was seen as an enfant terrible, taking the fight all the time to the PDP while defending his party with a combination of logic, filibustering and slanted truths.  For instance when about 185 people were killed in Baga, Bornu State, by terrorists suspected to be Boko Haram members in April 2013, Lai Mohammed said the killing could constitute crimes against humanity which deserved to attract the attention of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and that the federal government could be culpable for being unwilling or unable to prosecute those involved.  To say that Lai Mohammed has been a thorn in the flesh of both PDP and the federal government is to be charitable with words.
Until he became his party’s publicity secretary Metuh was not known in the journalistic or literary world.  He came into his current job as PDP’s Publicity Secretary with a particular predilection for bombastic rhetoric that was for the most part ineffective. His profile shot up recently when he dismissed the manifesto unveiled early this month by the All Progressives Congress (APC), as a product of ‘Janjaweed ideology’. “When last year in its first official outing, the leaders of the APC said terrorism in Nigeria would disappear within 100days of APC leadership, Nigerians did ask if they knew the characters in crime and their sponsors, APC gave silence as an answer while Nigerians kept wondering.”, Metu was quoted as saying. Though Janjaweed is used to refer to the militia groups that operate in Darfur, Western Sudan, and eastern Chad, it was obvious Metu wanted an easy-to-remember onomatopoeic word that could be used to tie APC to Boko Haram.  
It should be borne in mind that propaganda – the deliberate spreading of information, ideas, or rumours in an effort to either help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, or nation – is the kernel of party politics and often the central job description of a party’s Publicity Secretary. Propaganda is usually associated with lies or half-truths – though this is not always the case.  In fact, some of the most successful propagandas are based on the truth, though that truth may be hidden behind the propagandist’s particular slant or style of delivery.
If a  propagandist is someone who makes a living attempting to persuade others to their cause, perspective or perceptions and refuses to consider contrary perspectives or viewpoints as valid or worthy of consideration, then both Metuh and Lai Mohamed qualify as propagandists.
With the race for 2015 already in full swing, we have to pay special attention to these two propagandists and their strategies: How have they sought to market their parties? How do they define their rivals? And what are their strategies for damage control?
Defining their opponents: Campaigns usually try to aggressively negatively define their opponents through the use of simple words, phrases or imageries in a bid to put them on the defensive. For instance during the 2008 presidential campaigns in the USA, Obama constantly reminded voters that a vote for his then rival, John McCain, would be ‘four more years’ for the then hugely unpopular George W Bush.  Again when Jonathan was seeking the PDP’s presidential party nomination in 2010, his strategists tried to define his opponent Atiku Abubakar by almost always wrapping ‘corruption’ or ‘desperate for power’ in most messages they sent out about him, hoping that the labels would stick.  Atiku strategists themselves sought to wrap their criticisms of Jonathan and his policies in such labels as ‘incompetence’ or ‘not to be trusted.’
When therefore Metuh called APC’s manifesto a product of Janjaweed ideology, he was trying to create a Soyinkarist imagery of a party which would conjure in people’s imaginations the imageries of Boko Haram and the horrors of death the name evokes in popular imagination. Here Metu was borrowing from the politics of language where the creation of scaremongering imagery could be used to prevent people from identifying with a particular party or label. For instance to accuse a regime of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction – as George W Bush accused the late Saddam Hussein – would conjure in people’s imagination imageries of  impending Armageddon.
But has Metuh’s imagery gone too far? If Nigerians believe that the Janjaweed imagery was merely an association with insurgents, not Muslims, and if PDP could make the label stick, it could hurt the APC. However, if Muslims see the attempt to create an association between APC and Boko Haram as a slight on them by innuendo, it could alienate some Muslim supporters of the party.   Metuh’s labelling could therefore cut both ways.
How do the parties define themselves? Another area we should pay attention is how the parties define themselves. For instance from the time he formally declared his interest in the 2011 presidential race, the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) Campaign  built the thrust of its political marketing on a ‘moving train’ narrative – basically that everyone was queuing up to join its bandwagon. It constantly rolled out a wave of endorsements, some apparently contrived, to support this story line. Jonathan was also marketed as being divinely ordained to rule – and therefore likely bring good luck to Nigerians, if elected.
Ahead of 2015, PDP has made feeble attempts to define itself as the only party that is truly national and does not rely on the charisma of one or two founders. It seems however to have abandoned this narrative since APC became a national party, and with that a new swagger.
When five disaffected PDP governors in the defunct New PDP decamped to the APC, there was a feeble attempt by Lai Mohamed and others in the party to create the ‘moving train’ narrative for APC – that is, that there was a stampede to join the party.  That narrative however seems to have been abandoned since Bamangar Tukur stepped aside as the party’s national chairman.  PDP also tried to contrive defections from APC to the party to show that the APC’s moving train was just driving on false wheels. In essence, it is still not clear what the two parties stand for or how they define themselves – apart from the desire to remain in power or unseat the other.
Exploiting gaffes:  For instance the GEJ Cam-paign in 2011 in exploited a statement made by Atiku during a stakeholders’ conference on December 15, 2010 where he quoted Frantz Fanon’s warning that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. The Jonathan Campaign deliberately omitted the part of the speech where Atiku said that such a violent change was not what the country needed at that time, and instead twisted the message to imply that he was preaching violence.
We have seen both Metuh and Lai Mohamed twist and take statements out of context in attempt to put the other on the defensive and gain political mileage. Metu did this in trying to tie APC to Boko Haram. In turn a spokesman for Buhari reminded Metu that the former NSA, Late Gen Andrew Azazi, was unequivocal in his assertion that the power play in the PDP was a major reason for the Boko Haram insurgency. They also reminded him that a confessional statement to the SS by one of the PDP stalwarts that the contact with Boko Haram was with the imprimatur of the VP Namadi Sambo!
Damage Control: In campaigns, mistakes are inevitable just as embarrassing documents docking up are always a given. Most campaigns have damage control strategies for such eventualities.  We have to closely watch APC damage control strategies for some of the crises and violence that have gripped the party in the South West. We also have to closely monitor how Olisa Metuh controls the damage done by Sanusi’s allegations of missing $20bn oil money and attempts to label the Jonathan administration as corruption-friendly.