A policy and governance analyst, Professor Okey Ikechukwu has submitted that the decision of President Bola Tinubu to have more than one spokesperson is not sending the right message to Nigerians regarding government communication.
He decried a situation where the spokespersons may say different things or have different opinions about a particular matter, and Nigerians would then have to listen to different persons before understanding the government’s position on a matter.
Speaking during an interview with Arise News on Wednesday, Professor Ikechukwu submitted that having more than one spokesperson is a stain on the perception of national communication.
According to him, Nigerians don’t understand what makes it necessary for President Tinubu to have many people as spokespeople when they are addressing the same public.
In his words, “First of all the question of optics, if you have a company and the company has five spokespersons, a company that’s sending one product into the market, what would they all be saying?
“Whereas you can’t deny the right of the President to appoint so many people, you can’t deny the right of the president to say these are the official spokespersons for the presidency, the observer has a right to wonder… what makes it necessary to have so many people? That’s the part I don’t understand.
“Would they be addressing different public? It’s the same public and if what we’ve seen so far is anything to go by, what one sees is that one person or the other has something to say about the government and goes on with it; another comes with a noted contradiction, so there’s given concerns about the presumed.
“What is to be gained by this? That’s what I don’t understand but I think there’s a plus in the redesignation.
“Okay, by that redesignation, you then say this one is only communicating policy, but that would create for me the trouble of having to listen to several people before understanding what the government is doing on any particular issue.”