Bayo Onanuga, special adviser to President Bola Tinubu on information and strategy, and Phrank Shaibu, senior special assistant to former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, have engaged in a heated exchange over how vandals of public infrastructure should be punished.
The disagreement followed a post by Onanuga on Sunday in reaction to a video showing damage to an ongoing federal road project. In the post shared on X, the presidential aide called for vandals to be shot.
“Just shoot these unconscionable vandals/thieves on sight. They are the worst species of citizenship,” Onanuga wrote.
Shaibu strongly criticised the statement, describing it as dangerous and inappropriate for a government official.
“As a government spokesman, you cannot call for citizens to be shot on sight. That is not law enforcement; it is lawlessness,” Shaibu said.
He argued that Nigeria is governed by the rule of law and that criminal acts should be handled through arrest, investigation and prosecution, not summary punishment.
“Nigeria is not a killing field. Today it is vandals; tomorrow it could be protesters, critics or anyone who disagrees,” he added.
The exchange later shifted from policy to grammar when Shaibu returned to the post to fault Onanuga’s wording, saying the correct expression is “shoot on sight” rather than “shoot at sight”.
Onanuga responded the following morning with a terse reply, insisting that both expressions were acceptable and telling Shaibu to “upgrade your grammar”.
Shaibu replied with a longer post, rejecting the claim and offering what he described as a grammatical clarification. He argued that “shoot on sight” is a fixed idiomatic expression and not interchangeable with other forms.
“Fixed idioms are not open to distortion or creative rearrangement,” he wrote, adding that using “shoot at sight” amounted to an error rather than a stylistic variation.
The public exchange has drawn reactions online, with many users criticising the call for extrajudicial punishment while others focused on the tone and language used by both aides.
