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Shame and Reproach for Buhari’s Aide, Tolu Ogunlesi After Labelling Nigerians ‘Animals’

Tolu Ogunlesi, a Nigerian presidential aide who handles President Muhammadu Buhari’s social media accounts has drawn the ire of Nigerians on social media after labelling citizens who criticised the President Buhari’s viral photograph with Naomi Campbell as “animals.”

“Naomi Campbell met Nelson Mandela more than once. He hugged her, called her his “honorary granddaughter”. She visits Nigeria for a fashion festival and meets President @MBuhari, and some of you animals are slandering her,” Tolu Ogunlesi said on Twitter Friday, and further emphasised that: “YOU’RE RAVING MAD WITH NOBODY TO TELL YOU”, Mr. Ogunlesi tweeted.

President Buhari on Friday morning met with Ms. Campbell, a British supermodel, on an inspection tour of the Eko Atlantic real estate project in Lagos. The assessment was part of the president’s visit to Lagos for the 66th birthday events of Bola Tinubu.

The State House immediately posted images of President Buhari’s encounter with Ms. Campbell on Twitter at noon Friday, in one of the rarest sightings of a leader widely seen as modest and conservative.

Two hours later, the model, known for her controversial involvements with African rich men, returned the recognition with a tweet, although she ambiguously described it as a “private launch.” She initially said she was invited by President Buhari, but later deleted the tweet after a tweet by Bashir Ahmad, the Personal Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on New Media.

Ms. Campbell’s inconsistency with her deleted tweet only raised more controversy about whether the president knew the model’s history prior to the encounter.

While Ms. Campbell, 47, is based in the UK, she’s known to have been involved with rich men from Africa spanning decades.

In 1997, she met with Charles Taylor, a former Liberian warlord currently serving a long sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity, at a parry organised by former South African President Nelson Mandela.

Taylor allegedly gave Ms. Campbell a bag that contained diamonds worth millions of dollars and believed to have been mined illegally.

When she testified in the trial of Mr. Taylor at the International Criminal Court, Ms Campbell acknowledged receiving “small, dirty-looking stones” from the former Liberian president’s staff.

The testimony earned her a worldwide ridicule.

Also, in recent years, Ms. Campbell has been rumoured to be dating Kola Aluko, a Nigerian oil dealer currently on the run for alleged fraud. The duo had been sighted cruising in Mr Aluko’s luxury yacht as well as on shopping sprees across Europe.

As Premium Times put it, “Ms. Campbell, who later said she was in Nigeria to participate at the Arise Fashion Show in Lagos, became an instant subject of partisan bickering between Mr. Buhari’s critics and supporters, with some opposition voices implying that she might have been paid for her brief appearance and photo op with the president.”

Apparently angered by the criticisms, especially against Ms. Campbell as he later stated, Mr Ogunlesi, 36, posted the controversial tweet shortly after 11:00 p.m. Friday calling Ms. Campbell’s critics “animals”.

When called out by Nigerians on social media for his very poor choice and condescending use of language unbefitting the office of a presidential aide, Mr. Ogunlesi doubled down, waxing linguistical about the dictionary meaning of the word “animal”.

“Synonyms for ‘animal’ include brute, beast, monster, savage, devil, demon, fiend, villain, barbarian, ogre, according to the Oxford Dictionary”, he tweeted.

Ogunlesi’s “animal tweet” was widely panned by social media, with many users, including a serving Senator of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and media mogul Senator Ben Murray Bruce lashing out at the aide for lacking the emotional rectitude expected of a presidential spokesperson.

But as outrage mounted on Saturday morning over his post, Mr. Ogunlesi attempted to retract his indiscretion, but felt short of explicitly apologising.

Mr. Ogunlesi, a journalist and social critic, was named as a special assistant to the president on new media in 2016. He has widely been seen as one of the best hands in the administration, especially given how he had managed to amass top-rated journalistic accolades within a few years in practice, including a CNN Africa Journalist of the Year laurel.

“His work largely entails coordinating government social media accounts and websites for effective and coherent communication strategy. This had seen him escape social media backlash for the most part. But recently, as the administration reels from one scandal to another, opposition voices are exhuming old tweets of Mr. Ogunlesi’s to portray him as a hypocrite”, Premium Times reports.

On Thursday, one of his tweets from 2012 in which he called former President Goodluck Jonathan a despot for the traffic gridlock that occurred when he visited Lagos was unearthed by administration’s critics to demonstrate Mr. Ogunlesi’s double standard.

See more reactions to Mr. Ogunlesi’s tweet:

 

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Copyright 2018 SIGNAL. Permission to use portions of this article is granted provided appropriate credits are given to www.signalng.com and other relevant sources.

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