*Sahara Reporters and PR Management in An Era of Fake News* • Blissful Affairs Online
By Imamudeen Talba
The online platform, Sahara Reporters, describes itself as an online community of international reporters and social advocates dedicated to bringing you commentaries, features, and news reports from a Nigerian-African perspective. The only issue? Sahara Reporters is neither a community nor are its reporters and editors international by the standards they portray.
Rather, what has become increasingly obvious is that Sahara Reporters has become trapped in a miasmic existence, one in which it is no longer certain of its identity. The online publication cannot decide if it is a news platform, a propaganda tool, a terrorist newsletter, an activists’ vent hole, a public relations rag, or a contraption that is vile to the extent of defying classification.
In the mould of this morass, Sahara Reporters added an instalment to the confounding branding it had built for itself when it recently published a story titled “Tinubu’s Presidency Downplays Alleged Links Between Defence Minister Matawalle and Bandits, Says It’s Politics”. The publication should leave one wondering what Sahara Reporters is driving at, but when one recalls the antecedents of this hatchet factory, there is no need to wonder. The essence of the twisted story, the people who wrote it, and the platform on which they anchored it become glaring for all to see.
First, if the framing of this report was an attempt at interpretative journalism, then it fell short because all the story achieved was to highlight the jaundiced views of the platform and its operators. The same story was published by several professional news outlets with headlines that reported that all the allegations of sponsoring banditry levelled against the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, were unfounded. The issue has such uniformity because it was attributed to Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, who spoke in an interview on Arise Television. So, several media organisations monitored the interview but only Sahara Reporters experienced a dramatic downplaying of the subject matter.
Onanuga said, “As far as I know, most of those things are just mere allegations. In one of them, I got something like that and sent it to the NSA and asked: ‘Have you heard about this?’ The NSA said: ‘No. We have probed a lot of those things; they are not true’. People are just bringing out all kinds of fake things and allegations. That is why the man (Matawalle) is still in the cabinet. The president, I’m sure, has heard many stories about him. For him to be there shows that, like I have said, some of those things have been probed; they have been found not to be true. The NSA office has already investigated some of those allegations. They are mere fabrications.”
How did Sahara Reporters conclude that an issue that the Office of the NSA (National Security Adviser) has investigated and found untrue was downplayed? Beyond the financial inducements reportedly given to Sahara Reporters, are there other incentives driving this fanatical obsession that Nigerians and the world need to know about? When will enough be enough for Sahara Reporters? Could this publication be desperate to justify the funding it allegedly received, alongside bandit kingpins, from the Zamfara State Governor, Dauda Lawal?
Another possibility is that the founder and publisher of Sahara Reporters, Omoyele Sowore, who nurses an unhealthy angst against President Bola Tinubu remains on his addictive spree of castigating anything about the president and his government. He apparently is unable to stomach the fact that his habitual featuring on the presidential ballot did not earn him an automatic slot at the table. Sowore, in demonstrating his fixation with forcefully injecting himself into the government has engaged in a series of actions for which he will bag months of custodial sentencing in the jurisdiction from where he pumps his poison into Nigeria.
Further possibilities that must not be ignored is how this latest round of belligerent reporting from Sahara Reporters could be confirmation of a recommitting to the agenda of the Omidyar Network, which once gave the publication $450,000. This network works with some extreme Western interests to effect regime change in countries. Nigeria’s authorities should pay close attention to this possibility because of its import. A so-called news platform that expends this much effort to make successive governments, especially the current government, look bad is unrepentant in running false flag operations that may eventually collapse the country for those funding it.
The last possibility pertains to the share that Sahara Reporters or Sowore got from the N1.3 billion that a document showed Governor Dauda Lawal paid to bandit kingpins and crisis entrepreneurs like Sowore. The supposed arrest of some civil servants for forging that approval has fizzled into the ether, strengthening the position that those arrested were sacrificial lambs whose travails were to cover the misdeed of the higher-ups. So, the publication of the opinionated news story is a stark reminder that those who benefited from the payment must satisfy the terms of their contract. Viz: villify the governor’s opponents while painting him as a saint. This is Sahara Reporters’ idea of managing public relations (PR) for their client, the governor, and fake news is the delivery channel.
Unfortunately, the folks at Sahara Reporters forgot the key lessons of PR Management: sending the right messages to the right place and the right people. This is how to create a stronger brand reputation. But they sent the wrong message to the wrong place and certainly to the wrong people. Instead of attaining a stronger brand reputation, they have further shredded the last strands of believability that their publication has while further denting the image of their client(s).
On the contrary, Matawalle, whom they have done everything to vilify, continues to soar higher in the reckoning of his boss, President Tinubu, and in the eyes of Nigerians. He remained part of the cabinet despite the sustained campaign of calumny against him by the likes of Sahara Reporters and other character assassins, which attests to the value he brings to the cabinet.
Interestingly, Matawalle did not attain the results that impressed the president by engaging in the kind of shallow PR Management Sahara Reporters is running for his detractors. His results are based on action, an essential ingredient of public relations. He has demonstrated, in practical terms, that banditry will be a thing of the past in the northwest, where some politicians have been feeding fat on the blood of Nigerians, which some soulless publications are wallowing and their publishers drinking from.
Talba is a public affairs analyst writing from Kaduna.
