Femi Adesina, special adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari has said that addressing the president by his military rank of Major General is a testimony to free speech and freedom of the press which the administration has pledged to uphold and preserve.
The President’s media aide was reacting to an editorial published by Punch Newspaper in which the paper said it will not look the other way while the Buhari government continues to violate and attack the rights of citizens.
(Read BusinessDay’s editorial In defence of dissent )
Consequently, the paper said as a mark of protest it would prefix Buhari’s name with his rank as “a military dictator in the 80s, Major General, and refer to his administration as a regime until they purge themselves of their insufferable contempt for the rule of law.”
Adesina, however, dismissed the Punch’s resolve in a statement BusinessDay saw.
“Nothing untoward in it,” he said. “It is a rank the President attained by dint of hard work before he retired from the Nigerian army. and today, constitutionally, he is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces.” He referred to addressing the administration as a regime as a “matter of semantics.”
