Statement from the Villa (Aso Rock)
Our
attention has been drawn to a piece published on April 12, 2016, in The
Telegraph (London) paper, by one Con Coughlin (identified as 'Defence Editor'),
and titled, ‘Nigeria using UK aid to persecute president's political foes
rather to fight Boko Haram.’
The piece
is not only full of factual inaccuracies, it also betrays a shocking ignorance
of Nigeria and the country’s ongoing war against terrorism.
Mr
Coughlin’s editorial tactic is to quote unnamed “senior officials” and “Western
diplomats” and “Western officials” and “political opponents” making fact-free
and unfounded statements. It also appears that he sought out only those
opinions which suited and reinforced his disgracefully false headline. Nowhere
in the piece is there anything that suggests he attempted to contact the
Nigerian government for its own side of the story.
Coughlin
writes that “American officials are also angry that $2.1 billion of aid given
to the Nigerian military to tackle Boko Haram has not been properly accounted
for.”
It does not
occur to him that the $2.1 billion he refers to was budgeted for and wholly
spent by the government that President Buhari and his party defeated in the
March 2015 presidential elections, and that one of President Buhari’s
priorities has been investigating the misuse of those funds.
It also
does not appear to occur to Mr. Coughlin that the “political opponents” he is
falsely accusing President Buhari of “targeting” and "persecuting"
are actually on trial on account of how they spent the $2.1 billion in question.
Mr. Coughlin is equally unaware of the fact that the investigating panel set up
by Mr. Buhari to probe the $2.1 billion recently published a preliminary report
that confirmed that much of that money was indeed looted or mis-spent by the
accused persons, and that the government has started to recover the funds.
Coughlin
accuses President Buhari's government of attempting to cover-up the abductions
of 400 women and children "abducted last year by militants from the
Nigerian town of Damasak."
This is absolutely
untrue. The Damasak abductions he’s referring to, which were recently widely
reported, took place, not “last year” as he says, but in late 2014, well before
Mr. Buhari was elected President of Nigeria. (And, by the way, President Buhari
came to power on May 29, 2015, not July, as Coughlin reports).
A simple
search by Mr. Coughlin of his paper’s archives would have revealed these facts.
A simple fact-check by his copy-editors would have spared the Telegraph the
embarrassment of publishing this drivel.
There are
several other inaccuracies and baseless statements in the piece, but Mr.
Coughlin is too enamoured of his anonymous sources to realise they might be
misleading him, or be as ignorant about the situation as he is. The suggestion
that Boko Haram is going "from strength to strength" is an eminently
laughable one; not even Nigeria's opposition party would make such an absurd
claim.
Since
President Buhari took office, schools in Borno State, shut for more than one
year under the previous government, have reopened. The same applies to the
airport in Maiduguri, shut down in December 2013 after a devastating Boko Haram
attack on the nearby Air Force Base.
Thousands
of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have now started returning home. Last
Sunday, El-Kanemi Warriors Football Club played its first game in its home base
of Maiduguri in more than two seasons. Until now they had been forced to play
home games outside the region, on account of security concerns. There are
several more examples of how the people of the region are finally getting a
chance to rebuild their lives, as the Nigerian Armed Forces and a Multinational
Joint Task Force continue their work of routing the terrorists.
Mr.
Coughlin not only sounds like a spokesperson for the very people whose
corruption and mismanagement allowed Boko Haram to bring Nigeria to its knees –
and whose disastrous legacy President Buhari has spent the last one year
redeeming Nigeria from – he is also guilty of failing to observe the most basic
rules of responsible journalism.
Mr
Coughlin needs a refresher course on responsible journalism as much as he needs
a crash course on Nigeria. Until he submits himself to these, we’re afraid he
will continue to embarrass not only himself, but also the revered British media
institution that is the Telegraph.
Garba
Shehu
Senior Special Assistant to the President
(Media & Publicity)
April 13, 2016
