I finally had the leisure this weekend to read, one after another, the essays that followed the Catholic Bishops’ visit to the Presidential Villa. I read Temitope Ajayi, Sunday Dare, Bayo Onanuga and Sam Omatseye, not as a partisan seeking ammunition, but as a Nigerian interested in how power explains itself when challenged. The sequence was revealing: four pieces, one political weather system, and an oddly similar instinct, defend first; interrogate later.
The dispute is simple enough. The Catholic Bishops visited President Bola Tinubu, presented their assessment of Nigeria’s condition, and Cardinal John Onaiyekan later discussed the encounter publicly. That became the spark. What followed was a festival of rebuttal. Yet beneath the quarrel lies a larger question: what happens when communication or media aides treat criticism as an attack rather than information about how government is experienced?
The Mirror and The Mask
Ajayi argues that the Bishops were unfair because they emphasised hardship while overlooking achievements. That is a legitimate challenge, but only if applied symmetrically. If their catalogue of problems can be called incomplete, so can government’s catalogue of achievements. A government cannot answer poverty merely by listing projects, just as a Bishop cannot prove national collapse by listing grievances. Both require evidence, measurement and context. A serious public communicator must therefore distinguish between a claim being inconvenient and a claim being incorrect. That distinction is the difference between persuasion and propaganda.
A new hospital is an input; a functioning hospital is an outcome. A student loan is a financial instrument; it is not evidence, by itself, of improved learning or employability. Higher FAAC allocations are fiscal flows; they become development only when translated into better services and productive capacity. Likewise, declining inflation is welcome, but a slower rise in prices does not restore purchasing power already lost.
Ajayi’s argument that the President possesses intelligence unavailable to Bishops is true in one narrow sense and weak in another. Governments have classified information; citizens have lived experience. Both facts can coexist. The wise administrator reconciles them. The poor communicator chooses one and calls the other ignorance.
When Numbers Become Ammunition
Onanuga’s intervention is more elaborate, and therefore deserves more scrutiny. His central proposition is that the economy has moved from crisis toward stabilisation. That may be defensible. But stabilisation is not transformation, and transformation is not welfare. A patient whose fever falls from forty degrees to thirty-eight has improved; he has not necessarily recovered.
GDP, debt ratios, reserves, inflation, credit ratings, oil revenues and investment figures therefore require interpretation. GDP can rise while households become poorer. Reserves can strengthen while firms face expensive credit. Credit ratings can improve while unemployment remains painful. Stock-market gains can enrich investors without materially improving informal workers.
Onanuga is right that debt-to-GDP alone cannot determine fiscal sustainability. But a moderate ratio cannot settle the question either. Revenue mobilisation, debt-service costs, maturity structure, interest rates, exchange-rate exposure and the productivity of borrowed funds matter. Context is the difference between arithmetic and economics.
His treatment of subsidy removal similarly confuses fiscal relief with social welfare. Removing a costly subsidy may correct a distortion; it can also impose distributional pain. The serious question is whether savings became productive investment and effective social protection. In public policy, intentions matter, but consequences matter more. The economist asks, “Who paid, who gained, by how much, and over what period?”
The Politics of Selective Memory
Sunday Dare’s contribution is less an economic argument than a collection of rebuttal points. Army divisions, proposed state police, university stability, student loans and presidential optimism are presented as though mentioning them answers the Bishops. It does not.
Creating a military division is not defeating insecurity. Proposing state police is not establishing effective policing. Preventing university strikes is commendable, but quality, financing and relevance remain separate questions. Student loans widen access to finance; they do not automatically make education affordable, nor create jobs for graduates.
Dare’s framing also carries confirmation bias: evidence supporting government is foregrounded; inconvenient evidence becomes political noise. There is attribution bias too: critics are assigned political motives while official claims receive patriotic motives. Yet, he forgot that, motives are not outcomes. The proper question remains: what does the evidence show? The state is not a family compound; its accounts must withstand hostile questions.
The Cassock and The Constitution
