Ajuri Ngelale, senior special assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on public affairs, says world democracies must actively defend each other against fake news and coordinated attacks.
Ngelale, who is the Assistant Principal Spokesperson of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), spoke on Thursday while addressing the press at the Voice of America Headquarters in Washington D.C.
According to him, “the disintermediation of news dissemination via western-based social media companies has sacrificed truth and informed voter decision-making on the altar of profit for western tech companies in a manner that cyclically fuels the erosion of liberal democracy with the resurgence of totalitarian appeal and hostile takeovers by power-hungry militaries in less developed nations.”
The SSA to the President further explained that with three military coups supplanting democracies in West Africa in the last three years alone, advanced democracies must be mindful not to play into the hands of “global faux-populists by advancing evidence-bereft claims of electoral malfeasance and abstract suggestions of human rights abuses against strong democracies like Nigeria which operate in democratically-challenged regions.”
Daily Trust reports that Ngelale alongside Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed and other top government officials are in Washington to engage with international media organizations and think tanks on the just-concluded 2023 polls.
They have so far engaged respectively with the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine.
