Jaafar Jaafar, the much trumpeted “investigative” journalist who picks handouts from sponsors to smear their opponents online is at it again. I am actually not a friend of this journalistic misfit on the social media, nor a fan or follower of his junk publication he call Daily Nigerian.
I am therefore not a frequent follower of his write ups. I usually stumble on them by accident when they are shared by those who are my facebook friends or those I follow on facebook. I just stumbled on one of these vituperations of Jaafar as shared by a facebook friend.
The article took a sweeping deride on President Muhammadu Buhari and his Cabinet. Now, I have no reason to defend the actions or inactions of the Buhari Cabinet. They can defend themselves or simply ignore the ranting of this writer.
But I feel obliged to respond to anything unfairly said about the President because I believe in him. Jaafar said the President failed to change his Ministers due to his allergy to change. I wonder how people follow and hail such a writer when his arguments such as this one remain pedestrian.
President Muhammadu Buhari is nearly 80 years old, but I’ve seen in him a person who adapts to change more quickly than mates of his own children. It is the change that made him compromise some of his beliefs to emerge the President of Nigeria.
In fact, it is the love for change that made him to sign the first ever bill tagged, “not too young to run”. But Jaafar seems to have been boxed in the selfish idea of changing political office holders so that many more people can “come and chop” before the tenure ends.
That is what Jaafar used to. Those who contributed to the formation of the govt either themselves or their lackeys get their turn to lick a little from the dropping honey of public funds. Unfortunately, PMB is not that type of leader. And people like Jaafar cannot understand.
He continued throughout his empty piece to call the President incompetent. Instead of supplying us with facts to prove President’s incompetence, he ended up citing a story narrated to him by “a friend” from the Villa that PMB thinks everything that reaches his table is meant for signing!
I am not surprised however, at this empty approach by Jaafar because I believed long ago that the guy is a fake. The Ganduje saga that gave him undue popularity was similar as there was no iota of investigation in the damning videos he released as they prove to be handouts given o him by another “friend” whom I want to belief refers to Ganduje’s political opponents.
Jaafar is not investigative at all, he is nothing but a handout journalist. He accuses the President of incompetence without citing a single proof other than popular, pedestrian allegations. If indeed, every document before the President’s table was meant for signing, how did he reject several presentations by the National Assembly who tried to hoodwink him into signing cunning and suspicious bills into law; such as the amended electoral?
At a point in time, a budget, heavily padded, was rejected more than once from the table of the President until the anomalies were corrected.
Jaafar actually pointed out a report by Amnesty International where he said a report indicated that between 2016 and 2018, 3641 persons perished in farmer / herder clashes in Nigeria. That is what he called the President’s incompetence.; if communal or religious crisis that engulfed a society is a sign of incompetence, most leaders of the World before and now, are incompetent.
Competence is measured by the actions taken in which case, PMB is a hero. The Boko Haram insurgency mercilessly took away over 20,000 lives before he came on board, but a year and half later, Boko Haram no longer had the capability of bombing anyone again.
Even the farmer/herder clashes were effectively contained. The banditry and kidnappings in the North West are being effectively tackled today with the Military’s “operation diran mikiya” and the Police’s operation “puff udder”.
Moreover, reports by the Amnesty International is not to be trusted in that manner since they normally use deductions, mostly from reports by the Nigerian media, most them concocted by fake guys such as Jaafar.
In deriding the President’s decision not to sack any member of his cabinet, Jaafar drew the Sri Lankan example. This example is not original to Jaafar; many others have pointed to it in a similar manner before Jaafar did.
However, the Sri Lankan President sacked his defence Minister for two reasons. One is because that is what the international community expected him to do since it is their own tradition (but hardly a solution to the problem).
Secondly, there was no love lost between the two. The President was tolerating the defence Minister for political reasons, and he was looking for an excuse to cut him down. The Minister shot himself in the foot when he deliberately sat on intelligence information, keeping the President in the dark, probably not knowing the devastation of the attack, which was actually a coordinated one, could be that big.
By and large, I read some of these reports by people like Jaafar and cannot convince myself that their reports are not products of paid hatchet job. If Jaafar wants us to take him serious, he must be the real investigative journalist he claims to be by supplying us with incontrovertible facts on any of his allegations.
If others want to believe him and praise him for his junks and his products of handouts, then I am not one of them. To me the guy is fake and a contractor.
He adds no value to investigative journalism, really; he only adds shame to those who actually engage in journalism of fairness, decorum and purpose.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
