See What Happened To The Person That Leaked President Buhari’s Speech

The person who the leaked the President’s draft speech hours to his last COVID-19 pandemic nationwide broadcast, has been caught.

Special adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on media and publicity, Femi Adesina, made this known in a piece titled “Enemy of the state”.

Buhari had addressed the nation on Monday, extending the lockdown in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun by a week.

But a version of the president’s speech, full of errors circulated on social media at least four hours before the president eventually read what was different in some ways from the draft.

Adesina said the individual who leaked the memo is an enemy within and also an enemy of the state had been traced and is now “paying for his evil action”.

Extracts from his Piece titled “Enemy of the state”.

President Muhammadu Buhari was to broadcast to the country by 8 p.m, to give an update on the battle against COVID-19, and what becomes of the lockdown that had lasted four weeks, particularly in the Federal Capital Territory, Lagos and Ogun States. Kano was also a point of heavy interest, with the strange deaths ravaging the state. Was it COVID-19 or not?

“As the country waited for the President with great expectations, a purported copy of the broadcast began to circulate on social media from about 4 p.m. Whodunnit?

“I took a look at the circulating document, and within one minute, I knew that it was a rogue copy.

“What immediately gave it away was the paragraphing. It was completely different from the one I had been part of producing, and which had been recorded for broadcast by the President.

“Another tell-tale to the dubiousness of the document was the date it gave. It said the lockdown in the affected states and the FCT would be eased from May 2, while the authentic copy bore May 4.

“There were some other discrepancies. Paragraphs that had been excised from the final copy were still intact, and the document was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, which you would rarely find in a presidential broadcast, which would have passed through a number of select and trusted hands.

“I made a few phone calls to those of us involved with the script, right from origination, which was from outside the Presidency, to final editing, which I did, and the conclusion was easy to reach.

“Somebody had spirited out the original draft, which had gone through many stages of fine-tuning in terms of content and language, and thinking that it was a world exclusive in terms of artifice and underhand action, he fed it into the social media.

“Who would do such a thing, except an Enemy of the State, someone who wants to ridicule the government, cause utmost confusion in the polity, and smirk his lips in malevolent pleasure, as the government, and possibly the media handlers of the President were flagellated, and taken to the cleaners.