When Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu first summoned me to Alausa in 2003, I arrived with the confidence of a journalist who had covered governance for over a decade. I had, by then, been Sub-Editor at The Guardian, Deputy News Editor at Vanguard, and Group Political Editor at Concord Press. I had interviewed presidents, dissected budgets, and written editorials that governors read on Monday mornings with clenched jaws. I thought I understood the machinery.
I left that first meeting realizing I understood almost nothing.
Governance is not, as many of my colleagues in the press romantically imagine, a matter of press releases and podium performances. It is the daily arithmetic of competing legitimate demands — a market woman in Mile 12 who needs her stall protected from demolition, a graduate in Surulere who needs work, an investor in Victoria Island who needs certainty about land tenure, a widow in Ejigbo who needs the local government to stop rotating her late husband’s file into an endless bureaucratic loop. The Commissioner who forgets any one of these four has already failed. The Commissioner who tries to remember all four at once has begun to learn the job.
The First Lesson: Silence Is a Policy
Under Governor Tinubu, my first three months as Deputy Chief Press Secretary were spent, mostly, listening. He is a man who speaks less than the average Nigerian politician and thinks considerably more. In cabinet meetings that stretched past midnight, I watched him allow arguments to develop, contradictions to expose themselves, ambitions to reveal their true dimensions — and only then would he speak.
I later understood this was not indecision. It was a technology. In a system that rewards noise, silence is the rarest and most powerful form of leadership. The Chief Press Secretary who does not learn when to hold his tongue will spend his career apologizing for words that were not, in truth, his own.
The Second Lesson: Information Is Not the Last Ministry
Under Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, I learned that Information is not the last ministry in the cabinet pecking order — it is the first. Every policy, no matter how well-designed, dies in the space between the government and the governed if that space is not tended by honest communication. My years leading the Ministry of Information and Strategy were an unending exercise in translation: converting the language of policy into the language of the neighbourhood.
When we announced the Land Use Charge reform in 2018, the technical merits of the policy were sound. The political framing was catastrophic. We had assumed that citizens would read our press releases the way legislators read them — with patience, in full, and with the assumption of good faith. Citizens do not read press releases that way. They read the first sentence, the last sentence, and the number in the middle. If those three do not add up to fairness in their kitchen calculations, the policy is dead on arrival.
I still carry that lesson. Every government that expects to be understood must first commit to being understandable.
The Third Lesson: The Podium Is the Least of It
My most important work as Commissioner was not the press briefings I chaired. It was the small conversations that never made the news — the visit to a bereaved journalist’s family in Mushin, the quiet negotiation with a critical editor over dinner in Ikeja, the phone call at 6 a.m. to a young reporter whose story we could have prevented but did not.
The podium is theatre. Governance happens in the wings.
What I Would Tell My Younger Self
If I could return to that first Alausa meeting in 2003, I would carry only one message to the man I was then: Listen more than you write. Write less than you think. Think more than you speak.
Twenty-three years later, I am still learning how to obey that instruction.
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