I said it before that I actually pity the NSCDC commandant that his TV Interview fumble went viral because none of us is above mistakes. I think we took the joke too far, the man is mediocre, he lies and he is an unrepentant incompetent, true, but should the reporters have magnified all this with the website question? I don't know. Do you think all his ogas at the top did not see all this before he was made a commandant? The man is simply a sympton of what ails the Nigerian bureaucracy, and simply mocking him helps nothing.
There has been some reports that he was suspended, but they are unconfirmed and there are other reports seemingly from the NSCDC that says he hasn't. I read a few posts today that got me thinking of this issue again, the main one being an article on Naijastories in defense of the commandant.
Mr. Obafaiye Shem did not grow up in the internet-age. He never had to google a difficult concept for his assignments. He probably keeps an address book and diary for important places, and if you ask him for the physical address of his office, he most likely knows it. He grew up learning physical addresses, not web addresses. He is no different from today’s children who have stored thousands of web addresses in their memory, yet do not know their house number, and have to make several phone calls when filling their physical address in a form. Maybe we needed this incident to remind us of the technology disconnect – the digital divide that separates cultures, and generations. How many offices in the civil service have computers?