By O’seun Ogunseitan
Those bent on misleading Nigerians that today’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ordered a luxury ‘Presidential Yacht’, will not tell the world that retired Gen Olusegun Obasanjo who knew of the existence of the Yacht even as military President decades earlier, ordered the Navy to convert the Yacht to a Special Naval Gun Boat after he became civilian President in 1999.
Some 20 years ago, the Nigerian Navy successfully converted the old ‘Presidential Yacht’ to a Special Gun Boat.
The Yacht was bought decades earlier, back in the days when coastal Lagos Island, served as Nigeria’s capital, for civilians and military leaders. It is that Special Gun Boat that the 2023 Budget still rightly or wrongly referred to as a ‘Presidential Yacht’ for that was what it was before it was converted to a Navy Gun Boat.
The Nigerian Navy had since under President Jonathan desired to replace the ‘Special Gun Boat’ they created from the old ‘Presidential Yacht’. Interested officials apparently succeeded in smuggling the item in again under President Buhari and just at the twilight of the Buhari administration, ordered and actually got the boat delivered shortly after the Tinubu administration came into office, albeit without all due and necessary approvals.
Honest media men, not just critical of the Tinubu administration but truly interested in the facts and nothing but the truth, not lies garnished as truths, would have found this truth much earlier and published it as the truth of the matter. Doing this would have properly informed Nigerians and helped to mobilise the citizenry to support true change in our governance systems, rather than mere distraction for the Tinubu-administration.
There is now the need for a new majority of vocal Nigerians to rise to equally vocally combat a numerical minority of Nigerians who are seemingly in a vocal majority today and waging evil media wars deliberately primed to seriously mislead Nigerians to create and build animosity against the Tinubu administration. They are hiding their disinformation and misinformation efforts in the guise of patriotism.
This vocal minority group are seemingly exploiting the information gap created by the abolition of the teaching of history in Nigerian schools for their selfish interests. They are bent on welling up negative public opinion against the Tinubu administration knowing that the lack of any publicly accessible records or history of any of our institutions, makes their misinformation and disinformation efforts easier.
Please feel free to share this post to combat those obviously now using deliberate misinformation to wage disinformation wars against Nigeria thinking they are merely waging war against President Tinubu. They forget that Nigeria and whatever we make of it will outlive the Tinubu administration.
