Politics
Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, former chairman, National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, has said the federal government “is always attacking media houses that are not singing praises for them.” He also said that the presidency “is the chief purveyor of fake news and falsehood in the country.”
In an exclusive interview with Realnews, Odinkalu said, “This Buhari government only likes media that sings its praises. When you don’t do that, you are liable to be excluded or they call you names like fake and all that. In reality, they are the people who habitually sell falsehood to the public in the name of government information and the biggest culprits are the Minister of Information himself as well as the communications and media team in the Presidency.”
According to him, “It is difficult to take them seriously when they huff and puff in complaints against the media. You can see how they are doling out calibrated disinformation about this virus. We are told the number of people who have tested positive but not the number of people tested. When you ask about that you are excluded from their briefings or they pluck numbers from the sky and tell you it is “nearly”, “about”, “close to” or some similar inanity.”
Odinkalu noted that human rights protection deteriorated under this administration. “I will rather prefer not to mention the regime and human rights in the same sentence. To be fair to them, they have been quite unapologetically voluble at all levels about their lack of respect for human rights. The President himself articulated it in his doctrine which he laid before the Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association in August 2018, to the effect that national security trumps rule of law and human rights.
“The first victims of that attitude are the media and human rights advocates. You can see that in the massive uptick in the violations of the rights of media practitioners since this regime came to power in 2015. They have de-centralised despotism to the point where local government chairmen feel a need to harangue and oppress people for social media posts.
“Governors across party lines easily disappear and abduct those whom they don’t like and traffic them across state borders for show trials, using police and security assets that they have purchased for peanuts.
“The courts and judges are so intimidated, they are unwilling or unable to provide effective supervision or remedies against these abuses. It’s a bit of an Animal Farm really,” he said.
– Apr. 13, 2020 @ 18:39 GMT |
Tags: Presidency is chief purveyor of falsehood – Odinkalu
