By Abimbola Adelakun
Lately, Facebook memories brought to my attention a November 1, 2015, post by Femi Adesina, media aide to late Muhammadu Buhari, in which he took issue with then the Peoples Democratic Party’s spokesman, Olisa Metuh, who had accused the President of “demarketing Nigeria”. Adesina had insisted, “President Buhari will not, in the guise of marketing the country, refrain from telling Nigerians and the world, the emerging truths about the abject state in which years of plundering by a PDP leadership has left the Nigerian treasury and economy.” He framed Buhari’s blunt description of the state of the country as “truth speaking”, an act of integrity by a man who will not tuck painful reality away under the folds of political correctness. That might not be the origin of “demarketing Nigeria”, but in the past decade, the term has become quite sexy. This week, it was even weaponised to silence those who observed how the lopsidedness of Nigerian life and social regulation contributed to a car crash involving famous boxer Anthony Joshua, and which, unfortunately, claimed the lives of two of his companions.
In my undergraduate advertising class, “demarketing” was a business strategy typically employed by firms to discourage demand for their products when they are unable or unwilling to supply them. Now, Nigerians understand it as presenting an unflattering image of their country on social media. It has reached the point that almost all gripes—whether motivated by partisanship or legitimate—are now classified as “demarketing Nigeria” as if our messy relationship with a country is analogous to product consumption. Our psyche has been so run through by marketing dynamics that we think of our civic roles like business relations and insist everyone across the value chain conducts themselves in ways that make shopping decisions easier for buyers with purchasing power. Failure to conform to the brand image gets us labelled with the scarlet letters of anti-patriotism.
If there is anything that Adesina’s post reveals, it is that some people think badmouthing Nigeria should be their exclusive privilege. While Buhari flaunted his self-righteousness all over the place, as if he himself operated at a higher level of virtue than the country he allegedly led, demarketing Nigeria was a matter of forthrightness. The same APC partisans who hailed him for his candour when he was saying “my-people-are-useless-my-people-are-senseless-my-people-are-indiscipline” are now uneasy when their opponents use similar rhetoric. What changed? In 2015, Buhari’s running down during his foreign trips was necessary to properly bury the PDP, a formidable opponent that had lost an incumbent election. Cataloguing PDP’s sins strengthened their moral position. Today, the same kind of talk rubs raw against their blistered skin because they realise that not much has changed since when everything wrong with the country could be blamed on “16 years of the PDP”.
Nigerians who throw a fit over the country’s demarketing seem to think the phenomenon is exceptional to us. A CEO tweeted that Nigerians in the USA lose benefits to Ghana and Kenya because they frequently badmouth their country, and Americans, who are generally patriotic, are drawn to similar expressions in them and thus ignore Nigeria. But that is an example of seeing only what you want to see because you do not change your blinders. Nigerians might be highly critical of their country, but they are also its avid promoters. How else could aspects of our culture (such as Afrobeats) have become popular abroad if not for Nigerians’ massive, unabashed promotion? Nigerians have been so brazenly nepotistic about promoting their country that other African countries generally resent us.