IN NIGERIA ANYONE WITH A PHONE AND DATA IS A JOURNALIST- Lai Mohammed.

Nigeria's Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, is not finding the activities of  social media funny ,he accused the social media of making the job of  government’s media representatives very difficult.

The minister said this in  a statement made available to news men by Segun Adeyemi, his  special adviser on media and publicity, in his words the
challenges faced daily by the perception managers have been exacerbated by the Social Media. Today, the challenges have defied everything the practitioner may have been taught about perception management, public relations and all.

Today, anyone with a phone and data is a journalist, a blogger, owner of an online publication, an opinion moulder, etc. And they do all this simply because they can. No regulations, no sanctions. The spokesperson is at their mercy. Regrettably, they have a fanatic followership in the largely uninformed masses, whose experience over the years has primed them not to trust government and public office holders.

“The masses are daily served incredible menu and unbelievable tales which they swallow hook, line and sinker. How else can you explain that people will believe and circulate a fake report that the Minister of Information and Culture; that is yours truly, has 1.2 billion dollars in his imaginary bank account? Let’s examine this for a moment. 1.2 billion dollars is about 400 billion Naira. The entire yearly budget of the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I preside, is under 15 billion Naira, and these include salaries, overhead and capital projects. Assuming, without conceding, that the Minister somehow manages to transfer the entire budget into his personal account, it will take 25 years for him to amass 400 billion Naira. Yet, this disinformation was lapped up by the public”.

The minister who once described the social media as a nightmare  alleged that the stated problem is caused mainly by the activities of the opposition whom he defined as a set of uncontrollable people.

“The perception manager today is engaged in an unending war with an opposition that is amorphously defined, an opposition who never sleeps, an opposition that has no rules of engagement, an opposition that has power without responsibility or control, one whose objective is not to inform, educate or provide constructive criticism but to set their own agenda from their own ethnic, religious, ideological and economic perspective, irrespective of what the challenges of government are”." media representatives in government parastatals must rise up to the challenge by adhering to the principles of accountability in information dissemination" He submitted. .

Photo:Lai Mohammed (c) Dailytrust.