Metuh lacks decorum, Lai Mohammed says

Pained by the choice of words employed by his counterpart in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olisa Metuh, national publicity secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Lai Mohammed has admonished the PDP’s spokesman to show some decorum in his public statements and avoid the use of trench language in public discourse.

Mohammed in a statement issued in Lagos on Tuesday said Metuh has continued to distract Nigerians from important public discourse by increasingly resorting to the use of putrid language in his press statements.

According to him, this distracts from the message he might want to pass across, while at the same time sending a bad signal to the younger generation of Nigerians who look up to him and other politicians.

”Mr. Metuh, being the spokesman, first for a ruling party and now for the main opposition puts you on the rarefied level of being a role model and a pace setter. You denigrate your office and your party when you use that platform to spew out hate and abusive words.

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“You might choose to be bombastic, sharply critical and even aggressive in your statements, but you do not have to resort to the use of crude language like calling your fellow spokesman a ‘renowned liar,’ a ‘master liar’ or a ‘shameless veteran,’ to make your point. Apart from distracting from the issues at stake, those words reflect more on your personality than on the man you have chosen to skewer, and their vulgarity is stomach-churning,” it said.

The APC said every statement being issued today will become a reference material in the weeks, months and years ahead, hence the need to keep them decent, polished and dignifying, even when they are hard-hitting.

The party said it has chosen to caution the PDP spokesman rather than reply him in kind, hoping he will see the reason for him not to continue on the path of profanity.

”After all, it was American religious leader Spencer W. Kimball who said ‘Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly,”’ it said.

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