Mele Kyari’s Data Boys and Dan Kunle

  By Farooq A. Kperogi For our every-last-Saturday-of-the-month “Diaspora Dialogues” podcast on April 26 on the topic “Kyari Out, Ojulari In...

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

For our every-last-Saturday-of-the-month “Diaspora Dialogues” podcast on April 26 on the topic “Kyari Out, Ojulari In: Politics and Corruption in NNPC,” my colleagues—Dr. Osmund Agbo in Houston, Texas, and Professor Moses Ochonu in Nashville, Tennessee—and I invited revered oil industry expert Mr. Dan Kunle as our guest.

He helped us (and the thousands of people who watched our show) to navigate the complex contours of the politics, operational uniqueness, financial indiscretions, and enduring transparency deficit of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC).

But during the show, we noticed an unusually disproportionate, seemingly synchronized, and obviously induced volume of comments both in Zoom and on my Facebook page (where the podcast was livestreamed) extolling Kyari’s virtues, hyping his putative managerial acumen, and celebrating his supposedly magisterial strategic successes as NNPC’s Group Chief Executive Officer.

If the well-choreographed cascade of comments merely stopped at the unnaturally cloying veneration of Kyari, we would simply have laughed and said some people were earning their keep. But they went beyond that. They also poured scorn, coarse invective, and toxic rhetorical venom on Mr. Dan Kunle, a calm, conciliatory, compulsively polite, mild-mannered, and even-tempered gentleman’s gentleman. 

After the show, I told my colleagues that our promo probably attracted the attention of Mele Kyari (or his minders) who sent hordes of well-oiled social media trolls to invade us and try to influence our show’s tenor and flow with tendentious questions and comments. 

They agreed that I might be on to something because since our show began in 2024, we never had an experience quite like what we witnessed on April 26. But it was still at the level of suspicion, well-justified suspicion. 

My hunch was confirmed when, a day after our show, an evidently paid but intensely malicious and mendacious, not to mention substance-free, “news story” appeared in many major Nigerian newspapers besmirching Dan Kunle’s reputation, misrepresenting what he said during our show, and amplifying the intentionally propagandistic comments that members of the Kyari troll factory left on my Facebook page.

“Mele Kyari: Nigerians Slam Dan Kunle Over Call for Private Takeover of Oil Sector,” reads a headline from the Vanguard.  The headline in the Independent is similar: “Nigerians Berate Analyst Dan Kunle Over Call for Private Takeover of Oil Sector.” Blueprint Newspaper’s headline is a slight variation of the same theme: “Kunle: Nigerians Berate Analyst Over Call for Private Takeover of Oil Sector.”

Several other well-known and not-too-well-known news sites published the story. The content is exactly the same, from the lead to the last paragraph. Only the headlines are modified marginally. 

Some news sites, rather scandalously, used their reporters’ bylines for what is clearly native advertising (as we call paid content that mimics the forms, presentation, and frozen stylistic choices of news stories) — malicious, unethical native advertising, I might add. 

Although I earn a living studying, researching, teaching, and writing about issues like this, I confess that this nadir of journalistic depravity and dark, social-media-enabled mind management is a new frontier even for me. 

I am aware that data boyhood, that is, the mobilization of conscienceless, unprincipled, and cash-strapped social media denizens with internet data—and a stipend—to venerate politicians (and other image-conscious public figures) and smear their critics on social media is now a growing, well-oiled industry in Nigeria. 

I was, after all, a victim of the paid and pointed projectiles of minions of the Buhari Media Center during Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office.

But I didn’t know that there is now a symbiotic synchrony between data boys on social media and crafty, if inept, PR experts who deploy the half-cooked bunkum of data boys as raw materials to manufacture sponsored news stories in legitimate news outlets, which the data boys them amplify again on social media in a dance of idiocy sanctified by falsehood.

That is spin doctoring taken to a new level. It is disappointingly unethical perception mercenariness. It’s scorn-worthy narrative illusionism. And the news media that participate in this giant scam, this enterprise of fact twisting and professional gaslighting, should be ashamed of themselves.

 How can any professionally competent, self-respecting news editor approve the publication of a piece of sponsored wish-wash by an outside group as “news” and even go so far as to attach a reporter’s byline to that?  That is journalistic self-annihilation. I am certain that this isn’t the first time that has happened. 

We disagreed with several things Mr. Kunle said during the show (such as his defense of subsidy removal or even his occasional over-the-top commendation of President Bola Tinubu) but he did provide much-needed education on the issues and possibilities of the oil sector during the show.

He laid bare, with remarkable clarity, impressive empirical fidelity, and granular specifics, the grand deception of revived refineries. Kyari’s people hired a private jet, according to credible media reports, to convey paid-for journalists to the site of the “blending” refinery to tour the so-called rehabilitated refinery in a sophisticated propaganda charade designed to deceive the nation.

Mr. Kunle pointed out that the price of the rehabilitation of refineries went up from $400 million during Goodluck Jonathan’s time to $1.5 billion a couple of years later during Buhari’s time and has now probably climbed to above $2 billion because of run-on costs. This is a national heist of historical proportions.

He made other scandalous revelations, such as the fact that our oil production, despite claims of opening up new fields, has dipped to about 1.6-7 million barrels a day, and that Kyari and his boys were not serious about reforming NNPC or even doing the groundwork necessary for taking NNPC public through an IPO.

But the story that was packaged by Kyari’s boys and fraudulently published as a recap of the show is neither faithful to the issues discussed in the show nor to even the sponsored criticisms of Mr. Kunle by the Kyari data boys on our show. 

The headline accuses Kunle of advocating monopoly in the oil and gas sector and of encouraging the sale of refineries to private investors. He articulated no such positions. Clearly, the aim of the story, especially the lead, is to associate Kunle with those two positions, which get Nigerians emotionally worked up and to which the propagandists know Nigerians are opposed. 

Sale of national patrimonies like our refineries to private individuals is a legitimate ground for angst. So is the advocacy for anti-competitive practices in the oil and gas industry. Kyari’s spin doctors manufactured those lies against Mr. Kunle in hopes that no one will bother to verify their accuracy—and in the service of destroying the credibility of the well-made case he articulated against Kyari’s profligacy and opacity, which Mr. Kunle was careful to say was not limited to Kyari.

The coordinated smear campaign against Dan Kunle exposes two things: Mele Kyari’s vulnerability to rigorous scrutiny and the frighteningly deteriorated state of journalistic ethics and public discourse in Nigeria. The symbiotic collusion between so-called data boys, spin doctors, and ostensibly respectable media organizations points to an emerging culture of misinformation and perception manipulation that threatens democratic accountability and informed citizen engagement.

When journalism descends into the depths of paid propaganda, the casualty is not just the reputation of individuals unfairly maligned; it is the very heart of democratic society itself. 

Nigerians must remain vigilant and discerning and refuse to be swayed by the cynical manipulations of those who would substitute truth with lies, substance with sensationalism, and critical debate with orchestrated smear campaigns.