By Mohammed Bello Doka
Welcome back, survivors — souls who still chew on satire because swallowing the government’s version of reality would choke us to death. It’s Sarcastic Sunday, your weekly dose of political CPR, administered with a sardonic syringe. I am Mohammed Bello Doka. Today we study a curious species: the Data Boy — part court jester, part paid parrot, fully invested in polishing the very chains that gag him.
Picture this: prisoners in chains, footsore and famished, yet clapping like choirboys because their captor tosses them a crumb or two. They call it charity. We call it arithmetic: one crumb = continued servitude; ten crumbs = political permanence for the captor. Friedrich Nietzsche warned us about puppets mistaking their strings for wings. Plato warned us about prisoners mistaking shadows for truth. Nigeria? We do both, then trend the hashtags.
Enter the latest act in this national pantomime: APC National Youth Leader Dayo Isreal’s open recruitment for Special Assistants on Propaganda — yes, that official-sounding, oxymoronic job title. Special. Assistants. On. Propaganda. As if ‘propaganda’ only sounds rude when shouted from a gutter, but tidy up the phrase and add a capital letter and voilà — it becomes respectable work. They even talk about a “Positive Propaganda Unit.” Positive propaganda. Can someone tell the dictionary to take a sabbatical? This is the rhetorical equivalent of labelling a robbery “targeted philanthropy.”
If you’ve been saying the government has abandoned governance for spin, lies and deceit, congratulations — Dayo’s job advert is the government’s own admission letter. When the state begins to recruit full-time soldiers whose primary vocation is manufacturing consent, you don’t have a communications problem; you have a policy deficit. When your public office looks less like a policy workshop and more like an advertising agency for denial, governance has packed its bags and left a paid hashtag in its place.
Let’s be clear about the anatomy of this propaganda industry. It has two tiers:
- The Fat Cats — elite operators who cash in billions under “media strategy.” They sit in air-conditioned rooms, sign invoices, and parachute into the sunset while their names remain mysteriously absent from the receipts. They don’t tweet much; they outsource outrage.
- The Stipend Soldiers — the hashtag infantry. Paid crumbs. Tasked to flood timelines, hound dissenters, and gaslight the grieving. They defend hunger with slogans and brand hardship as “adjustment.” They are the ones who, for a pittance, will call a professor “irrelevant,” dismiss a SAN as “a noise-maker,” and reduce a former governor to a meme.
And yet — here is the most deliciously tragic part — most of these soldiers know the truth. They smell the rot. They queue for the same fuel, buy the same overpriced rice, count the same empty naira promises. But hunger has a loud voice and moral clarity is expensive. So they sing. They trash the very people who could actually steer the country toward something other than rubble. They insult the teachers, lawyers, and administrators who built institutions, all because a stipended tweet tastes better than no food at all.
Remember my harmless Facebook post the other week? I wrote: “Dear Bulaberians, may God rule your life the way Tinubu is ruling Nigeria…” — a prayer disguised as barbed comedy. The stipend soldiers exploded, sliding into my inbox like offended demons. They called me evil, a witch, a saboteur. Just a moment but why the rage? Because the truth hurts, especially when it’s wrapped in a joke that hits the dinner table. They couldn’t answer why wishing someone “Tinubu’s governance” reads like a curse. Instead, they barked. Because the crumbs were at risk.
Which brings us to the Billion-Naira Question (the one the government will never answer in a press release): If everything is indeed stable — if the Naira is strong, if the markets hum, if Nigerians are not hungry — why buy an army of influencers, why fund a “Positive Propaganda Unit,” why recruit Special Assistants on Propaganda? If the truth is on your side, why rent a louder lie? The sensible answer — the one basic human logic offers — is that propaganda is not a supplement to governance: it’s a replacement for it.
The propaganda apparatus exists because power fears reality. It must plaster over failure with louder, shinier stories. It hires men and women to manufacture applause because applause looks like consent and consent looks like legitimacy. Meanwhile the men who earn millions from “strategy” and the children who eat the crumbs both play roles in the same theatre: one writes the script, the other shouts the lines. Both perform while the country burns in the wings.
Do not confuse volume for victory. A million tweets do not equal a million jobs. A trending hashtag cannot feed a family. A well-produced video does not replace medicine on a hospital shelf. Yet the regime prefers to pay for illusions because illusions are controllable: they can be scheduled, targeted, and retweeted. Governance — real governance — is messy, requires trade-offs, and sometimes produces inconvenient data. Propaganda? That’s clean, repeatable, and profitable.
So we watch, bemused and enraged, as the Data Boys parade like generals in borrowed uniforms. They clap for the crumbs. They call destiny helpers irrelevant. They praise the very policies that hollow out their future. And they do it knowing full well each day that if the music stops, hunger speaks louder than ideology.
But dear Data Boys, have you paused to ask yourselves why your lives haven’t changed, even after all the hashtags, clapbacks, and midnight insults you hurl at elder statesmen? The truth is simple: you are the first casualties of your own propaganda.
The men you defend send their children to Harvard while you’re left struggling to pay for JAMB forms. They buy mansions in Dubai while you hustle for transport fare. They eat in Abuja’s finest restaurants while you defend hunger on Twitter with empty stomachs.
And now, to crown the absurdity, Dayo Israel is busy recruiting “Special Assistants on Propaganda.” Can you see the oxymoron? Your government has officially abandoned governance for propaganda. They don’t even hide it anymore — they have reduced Nigeria’s future to a full-time ministry of spin, lies, and hashtags.
So, I ask you: how long will you keep mocking those who could have been your destiny helpers? How long will you clap for your own chains and mistake crumbs for blessings? When history is written, you won’t be remembered as heroes — only as the pawns who danced while their masters looted.
That is the audacity — and tragedy — of a Data Boy.