The presidential spokesman always misses the validity of the points Atiku raises against the Tinubu government. Last Saturday, he missed the morning papers too.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Bayo Onanuga has a seeing problem.
Last month, the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy told Arise Television that he does not see the level of hunger Nigerians are talking about. He reached this finding, by his own account, after interviewing his own domestic staff and admiring a paved road in Ijebu. Nigerians reasonably compressed the remark into its plain meaning: the man says there is no hunger in the land.
On Saturday, the affliction progressed. Mr Onanuga announced on X that almost 18 hours after the rescue of the Oriire pupils and their teachers, Atiku Abubakar had said nothing.
There was only one problem. Atiku’s statement, titled A Nation at War Needs a Commander-in-Chief, Not a Campaigner-in-Chief, had been issued that same Saturday morning and was in The Guardian by five minutes to ten. It welcomed the rescue, praised the gallantry of our troops, and demanded sustained operations until every abducted Nigerian is free. The spokesman either failed to check before typing, or has failed to retract since reading. Neither speaks well of the office.
A man who cannot see hunger will not see a newspaper.
A CATHEDRAL BUILT ON LAND HE NEVER SURVEYED
Let us examine the spokesman’s reasoning process, such as it is.
Step one: assume the opposition said nothing, without checking. Step two: build a theory of motive upon the silence you have assumed. Step three: speculate, without a shred of evidence, that Atiku may be waiting for some bad news to attack the administration.
He moved from a false premise to mind reading in two short paragraphs. Even if Atiku had genuinely said nothing, silence proves no motive. But Atiku had spoken, comprehensively, that very morning. Onanuga built a cathedral of insinuation on land he never surveyed.
And this from a man who once edited newspapers for a living, now armed with the full communication machinery of the Nigerian state. The presidency has a budget for everything except a Google search.
A government secure in its performance does not invent silence where there is a documented public statement.
Those are Atiku’s words in reply, and they will outlive this episode.
THE OBI STANDARD, OR HOW ONANUGA REFUTED HIMSELF
Now to the most delicious paragraph of the spokesman’s post, the one in which he demolishes his own argument. Kudos to Peter Obi, he wrote, for at least speaking and calling for thanksgiving without commending the commander-in-chief.
Read that again. By Onanuga’s own standard, a candidate may celebrate the rescue, thank the security agencies, and decline to praise President Tinubu, and still earn kudos from the Villa.
That is precisely, word for word, what Atiku did. He congratulated the troops in unmistakable terms and declined only to applaud a President who spent the moment on partisan engagements while his spokesman announced the rescue on his behalf.
One standard for Obi, another for Atiku. In logic they call it special pleading. In Ekiti we simply say the man is judging two identical goats by the colour of their owners.
THE VIEW FROM THE VILLA
How does a trained journalist arrive here? I offer a charitable diagnosis: the air conditioning in Aso Rock Villa is simply too efficient. Prolonged exposure to that manicured comfort appears to interfere with two faculties at once, the eyesight and the reasoning.
Outside the Villa gates, the World Food Programme warns that some 34.8 million Nigerians may face crisis levels of food insecurity between July and September this year. Inside the gates, the spokesman’s kitchen is full, his domestic staff are content, and the roads to Ijebu are smooth. The Human Rights Writers Association said it best in its response: Nigerians cannot eat roads.
The Villa should perhaps procure spectacles before it procures more propaganda.
THE LEDGER HE CALLS A WEAPON
Onanuga accuses Atiku of weaponising the Oriire kidnap. Very well. Let us open this weapon and see what is written inside it.
Kuriga, Kaduna, March 2024: gunmen emptied a primary and secondary school of at least 137 pupils, with some reports putting the figure closer to 280. Papiri, Niger State, November 2025: more than 300 students and staff taken from St Mary’s Catholic School, the largest single school abduction since Chibok. Oriire, Oyo, May 2026: 39 pupils and their teachers held for 57 days, and the family of Mr Michael Oyedokun burying a teacher who never came home.
Premium Times counts at least nine mass school abductions involving over 550 students and staff in this administration’s first three years, against a single such incident in the comparable period of the previous government. That is not an opposition talking point. That is the ledger of the Tinubu years, written in the handwriting of other people’s children.
Citing it is not weaponisation. It is the constitutional duty of an opposition. If the facts wound the government, the quarrel is with the facts.
THE VALIDITY HE ALWAYS MISSES
This is Onanuga’s recurring affliction, and it explains every exchange he has ever had with Atiku.
Atiku asks why a rescue announcement was left to a spokesman while the Commander-in-Chief attended to campaign matters. Onanuga answers a question nobody asked about who congratulated whom. Atiku asks when the children of Borno will come home. Onanuga awards kudos and demerits like a headmaster of applause.
He always misses the validity of the point, because engaging the point would require looking at Nigeria as it is. And the view from the Villa, as he has personally testified, does not show hunger. We now know it does not show newspapers either.
So let us leave the spokesman where we found him, in the cool of Aso Rock, kitchen stocked, convoy fuelled, timeline open, squinting at a country he can no longer see. The hunger is invisible to him. The morning papers are invisible to him. Thirty four million Nigerians at the edge of crisis are invisible to him.
Come January 2027, he will discover that they could see him all along.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
12 July 2026
