A President Abroad, By Chris Ngwodo

 

It is true that when you are president, your opponents will search for everything, both serious and spurious, to use against you. But you can also avoid giving the said adversaries ammunition to use. President Muhammadu Buhari’s latest “offence” involves comments he made to The Telegraph asserting that the criminality of “some Nigerians” makes it “difficult for Europeans and Americans to accept them because of the number of Nigerians in different prisons all over the world.” Inevitably, critics have seized upon those words as a self-loathing gaffe.

 

Buhari’s defenders naturally have insisted that the president was simply telling it like it is and point out that he was speaking about “some” rather than “all” Nigerians. That is a fairly academic point but we needn’t get hung up on that. In political communication, what is heard is just as important (and sometimes more so) as what is said. Intelligent politicians are acutely aware of what they are saying and what listeners are hearing. Thus, the real controversy isn’t just over what Buhari said but what his audience heard.

 

In the interview, Colin Freeman, the Telegraph chief foreign correspondent asked Buhari a total of 12 questions. 10 of them had to do with Boko Haram and the terrorist insurgency. Indeed, the tenth question which elicited Buhari’s insight into the criminality of some Nigerians was also a question about Boko Haram.

 

Given the interview’s content, the report of the interview could easily have been titled “Nigeria’s president says Boko Haram on the run” or “Nigerian leader ready to negotiate with terrorists to free abducted school girls” or even “Nigerians fighting for ISIL in Libya and Syria, says country’s president” (Buhari said that Nigerians are fighting for ISIL in Libya although he said he hadn’t seen any confirmed report. He also said Nigerians could be fighting for ISIL in Syria but wasn’t sure. No one, it seems, has even picked up on the president’s ready association of Nigerians with a terror group entirely on the basis of speculation).

 

Instead The Telegraph’s report was headlined “Nigerians’ reputation for crime has made them unwelcome in Britain, says country’s president.” The headline doesn’t bother to qualify itself with by saying “some Nigerians”. The article zeroed in on a generic Nigerian criminality and ignored Nigeria’s progress against Boko Haram which formed the essence of the interview itself. This headline is what The Telegraph heard and what its British audience also heard.

 

Why did The Telegraph do this? Could it be because The Telegraph is a right-wing newspaper, supportive of the Tories and naturally has a conservative position on the immigration debate in Britain? Could it be that such a position necessitated the selection of a fragment from the entire interview that impugns the integrity of Nigerian immigrants not just asylum seekers – a quote gratifyingly supplied by the president of the country with the second-largest population of non-European UK residents after India? It will not be surprising at all if Buhari’s quotes wind up in a future Telegraph editorial supporting tougher restrictions on immigration.

 

Buhari’s argument essentially was that Nigerians should stay back home since their criminal compatriots had already damaged their reputations abroad. In his first address to the nation as head of state in 1984, Buhari famously said, “This generation of Nigerians and indeed future generations have no other country than Nigeria. We shall remain here and salvage it together.”

 

Clearly, this was the patriotic sentiment, he meant to express to The Telegraph. He could have done so without talking down to his compatriots in a foreign land and without feeding racially-charged stereotypes about Nigerians (a self-subverting pronouncement given the official commitment to attracting foreign investors). He could have made a pitch about how much his government is securing Nigeria and promoting opportunities at home for Nigerians. He could have emphasized how much Nigerians in diaspora are contributing to their host countries. In 2012, according to the British National Health Service (NHS), there were 3, 936 Nigerian medical doctors working in the UK – the fifth largest contingent of foreign medical professionals in the country. People of Nigerian descent are among Britain’s high achieving athletes and entertainers. They have served and are also serving as members of parliament, mayors, and police officers.

 

Some observers have pointed out how much Buhari seems relatively loose-lipped, if almost garrulous, with the foreign media and comparatively taciturn with the local media. In view of this, it is worth asking if and how his handlers prep him for these encounters. Is the operative assumption that foreign media have no agenda, no editorial and ideological positions through which to refract Buhari’s comments for their own domestic context and consumption? Is the president simply encouraged to go in guns blazing and shoot from the hip? Can the president be handled?

 

Buhari’s comments didn’t suggest a consciousness of The Telegraph’s ideological posture and what it stands for in the broader immigration debate in Britain. There was no awareness of how much hardworking Nigerians in the diaspora are contributing back home. (In 2012, UK-based Nigerians sent home $7.76 billion in remittances.) There is no sense that there is even an overarching Nigerian position on the immigration debate. Otherwise, President Buhari would be pointing out the incongruity of Western nations demanding open borders in the name of free trade while seeking to restrict the free movement of people. He would have said that according to the logic of globalization you can’t have freedom of movement for capital and not for labour.

 

He would have highlighted the hypocrisy of nations in receiving looted funds while refusing to let in the people stripped of socioeconomic opportunities by that same plunder. He would have said that Western nations can’t bemoan his administration’s limited protectionism, its barring of foreign goods that can only hurt local industries, and at the same time, whine about the flood of migrants (economic refugees) besieging Albion. Were he really pressed, he could even have mentioned the well-known fact within Foreign Service circles that other African nationals frequently claim to be Nigerians when they get into trouble abroad.