Nigerians turned on the Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria over what was deemed to be insensitive statements on the plight of Nigerians in these harsh times.
Mr. Bayo Onanuga had posted on Facebook that the suffering Nigerians referred to wasn’t as bad as they made it seem.
In the post, Onanuga relayed how he had told his daughter on the Virgin Atlantic Flight to London “to find out whether the plane was filled up or going to London near empty judging by the noisy campaign from a section of the country about the ‘hardship’ in our country“, to which his daughter had replied: “daddy, the flight was filled up o”
He then related “how food was cheap everywhere” on his trip to Jos and Bauchi over the weekend.
Nigerians were angry at the post as it seemed to say that things were good in the country and that people were just overreacting.
You can read his post below.
My daughter was on the Virgin Atlantic Flight that took off from Lagos to London today. I asked her to find out whether the plane was filled up or going to London near empty judging by the noisy campaign from a section of the country about the ‘hardship’ in our country.
My daughter sent back this one-line text, after boarding: “daddy, the flight was filled up o”.
This makes me to wonder whether all the seeming orchestrated campaign in the media was not mere propaganda to make the Buhari regime look really bad.
I was in Bauchi and Jos at the weekend, I also found that food was cheap everywhere. In our hotel, we paid about N700 for a plate of semovita, or eba with a choice of cat fish or chicken. On the roadside, I found to my surprise that with just N1000, I bought over 50 oranges, two giant water melon and 10 pieces of sweet potato. I had experienced a similar thing in the market at Abuja, where I found that with N1,400, I could make a big vegetable soup, with tomato, pepper and roasted Titus fish.
Are the media and bloggers really painting a correct image of our country. It’s time for the media to objectively conduct a reality check about our reports, whether we are not over sensationalising so-called hardship that we talked about.
You can see some of the responses he got below.
