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EndSARS: I Have Been Receiving Death Threats- Femi Adesina Laments

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5 years ago

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Femi Adeshina has revealed how he has been receiving death threats and curses following his perceived gesture against ENDSARS protest
News Rain Nigeria reports that special adviser to the president on media and publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, has confirmed that he has been receiving death threats and curses for his perceived gesture against ENDSARS protest.

EndSARS: I Have Been Receiving Death Threats- Femi Adesina

Femi Adeshina on Thursday, October 15th, 2020, through his social media, shared a lengthy article with the title ” An Enemy of People”, saying he never advised President Muhammad Buhari to ignore the ongoing #ENDSARS protests.
Adeshina claimed that a video in which he spoke on the RevolutionNow protest which happened two months ago was doctored to perfected that he was addressing the ENDSARS protests.
Femi Adeshina further noted that he was not even given a chance to respond to the claims, he wrote on his social media status as thus: ”All hell broke loose online, with people mouthing maledictions and curses against me. Well, such things have ways of returning to the sender, so it didn’t bother me. A curse shall not alight without a cause, says that Book of Books.
”I am happy that Channels Television was professional enough to issue a prompt clarification. It published that what was being made to look like a fresh interview had been done well over two months earlier. Thanks.
”Those who wanted to believe the television station did. While a large number chose not to and bombarded my phone lines with curses, expletives, and messages from the pit of hell. Well, if anybody chooses to belong to that nether region, it’s a matter of choice.
”Talking of bombardment of my phone lines, it had begun on Sunday. A hateful mind had published my two numbers on Twitter, urging people to troll me. They called till the phone batteries went dead. Mum was the word from me. “He was reviled, but responded not,” that is what the Good Book said of my master, the one I try to pattern my life after. So, I said not a word to any of the callers.
Adeshina added that: ”The moment you get appointed into a government position, you are poised to become an enemy of the people.
”Now, why do I think people try to demonize those in government and bring them down? Many reasons. Evil hearts. The heart of man is evil and desperately wicked. If you are in any form of an elevated position, they would love to see you fall. Man is in a fallen state, and the more they see you bite the dust, the happier they are.
”As spokesman to the President, they have told themselves you were lying before you opened your mouth to talk. Ask them to mention one lie told to them in five years, and they then begin to look like fools, people with addled minds.
” For well over one week, the polity has been suffused with what President Muhammadu Buhari describes as “genuine concerns and agitations by Nigerians about the excessive use of force and in some cases extra-judicial killings and wrongful conduct by men of the Nigeria Police Force.”
And in that period of time too, I have had strident efforts being made to position me as an enemy of the people. Very serious efforts by mean people, who are simply out to generate hatred and animus against other people, for no other reason than Luciferous and pernicious feeling of smug satisfaction.
As a year two undergraduate at the then University of Ife in 1982, one of the texts recommended for us in English Literature class was Enemy of the Public by the Norwegian writer, Henrik Ibsen.
I remember traveling from Ile-Ife then to the popular Odusote Bookstores in Ibadan to procure the book, along with some other recommended texts.
The term Enemy of the People originated in Roman times as hostis publicus, which if translated directly means, ‘public enemy,’ someone acting against the larger group, indeed, against society.
Get appointed to serve in an elevated public position in Nigeria, and you automatically face some odium, nay opprobrium. He has joined those who have come to steal our money. He has come to earn a fat salary. He is going to be taken care of from the public treasury, while we have to slave and toil before we earn a living.
He will be talking to us from a high horse, haughty and huffing, while we look like grasshoppers before him.
They never care what you were, and where you were coming from. Whether you came down several notches in your income in order to serve your country does not matter to them. Did you lobby for the job or not, it does not matter.
The first salvo came on Sunday from a suicide fake journalist who plies his trade with an online rag called Peoples Gazette. He published that President Muhammadu Buhari was to have approved the dissolution of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) the previous Friday, but had been prevailed upon not to do so by his spokesman, Femi Adesina. That happens to be me, and the information was coming to me like a piece of virulent, hateful news.
Again, the hatchet job masquerading as a news item, added that I convinced the President not to ever surrender the sovereignty of government to ‘Twitter warriors,’ whatever that means.
Further, it said because of my anti-people convictions, I had issued a statement against the EndSARS protesters, which had received wide condemnation from the general public.
Several falsities stood out from the supposed news story. One, what the reporter claimed never happened.
That I prevailed on President Buhari not to scrap SARS must have existed only in his fecund but diseased imagination. What truth did that information rest on? None. Was I or anybody else spoken with to authenticate the supposed information? Not at all. It clearly failed the test of objectivity, which every good news story must pass.
Then, the report said I had issued a statement against EndSARS protests, which had received wide condemnation. Where, when, how? By that date, I had not said a word, either privately or publicly against the public marches. Any decent journalist would have checked, and quoted the date and content of such a statement if it ever existed.
But the journalist from hell simply published lies against me, not obeying dictates of the noble profession. And because we are in the age of the digital media, characterized by riot and recklessness, people began to share the evil, fake story. The plot to turn me into an enemy of the people was in full motion. Adeshina stated.
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