Bayo Onanuga, special adviser on information and strategy to President Bola Tinubu, and Phrank Shaibu, senior special assistant to Atiku Abubakar, have engaged in a heated exchange over punishment for vandals.
On Sunday, Onanuga called for vandals of public
infrastructure to be shot on sight.
The presidential made the statement in a post on X on
Sunday, while reacting to a video showing damage to an ongoing federal road
project.
“Just shoot these unconscionable vandals/thieves at sight.
They are worst species of citizenships,” he wrote.
But Shaibu disagreed with Onanuga’s point of view.
“As a government spokesman, you cannot call for citizens to
be ‘shot at sight.’ That is not law enforcement, it is lawlessness,” Shaibu
said.
“Anyone who talks like this has no business in public
office.”
Shaibu said Nigeria “is not a killing field” and argued that
crimes should be addressed through “arrest, investigation, and the courts”.
“Today it is ‘vandals.’ Tomorrow it could be protesters,
critics, or anyone who disagrees,” he said.
Later on Sunday night, Shaibu returned to the post to
criticise Onanuga’s grammar, saying the correct expression was “shoot on sight”
and not “shoot at sight”.
At 9:12 am on Monday, Onanuga replied: “Foolish boy. Both
usages are correct. Upgrade your grammar”.
Shaibu responded with a lengthy post disputing the claim and
offering what he described as a grammatical clarification.
“As a teacher, I will not answer insult with insult. I am
here to teach you, not to bully you; I was not trained that way,” he wrote.
“Now to the issue at hand: ‘shoot on sight’ is a fixed
idiom. Fixed idioms are not open to distortion or creative rearrangement.
“‘Shoot at sight’ … is a manifestation of weak heads,” he
wrote, describing such expressions as an error rather than stylistic variants.
“It therefore smacks of wretched illiteracy to argue that
such expressions can be used interchangeably,” Shaibu added.
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