Who Killed the Narrative? The Peril of Disjointed Communication

By Ishola N. Ayodele fimc-CMC

"Communication is not talking, it is the sharing of meaning" Ishola Ayodele

The Corpse at the Scene

On April 21st 2026, the administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu initiated what should have been a routine act of governance: a cabinet reshuffle. Two ministers Wale Edun and Ahmed Dangiwa exited. The script was familiar: announce, dignify, transition, move on. But what unfolded was not a reshuffle, it was a rupture and within the space of a single news cycle, the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu turned the media space upside-down. The weapon was not a policy failure, nor a fiscal scandal, but a disjointed press release.

The official announcement, issued from the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), spoke of “improved efficiency.”

Then came the media’s counter-frame: “sacked.”

Then insiders whispered of “performance failures” according to an exclusive report by the Cable.

Finally, on the 22^nd of April, 2026 a desperate counter-narrative from the Presidency says: “They resigned.”

The exit of ministers Wale Edun and Ahmed Dangiwa was not a tragedy of governance; it was a tragedy of narrative as a result of a failure of meaning management.

The great sociologist Erving Goffman captured it perfectly in his 1974 classic ‘Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience’ when he said, “When the frame of an event is disputed, the event itself ceases to have a stable reality.”

In this chaos, a single, critical question was murdered: What is the truth?

The echo of the self-inflicted shot is still reverberating through the halls of the State House. We must now conduct the autopsy of a communication suicide, for as the Yoruba elders says, “Bi ko ba ni idi, Obinrin kii je ikumolu” (My Apologies to the non-yoruba readers, I don’t know how to translate this without diminishing its meaning). Let us examine the corpse.

The Anatomy of a Self-Inflicted Crisis

The crisis was not external. No opposition party manufactured it. No journalist uncovered a smoking gun. The government, in a feat of spectacular institutional ineptitude, weaponized its own communication apparatus against its own credibility. This is what crisis communication scholar W. Timothy Coombs (2012) classifies as a preventable crisis cluster, a category where the organization is attributed the highest level of responsibility because the event was born of internal error, not external malice.

But we must go deeper than Coombs. This was a failure of epistemic authority, the government’s sacred right to be the sole originator of truth about its own actions. When the SGF says one thing, the media reports another, and the Presidency claims a third, the citizen does not just doubt the reshuffle; they doubt the very machinery of state. The pattern becomes the message. And the pattern reads: Chaos.

Research in crisis communication consistently finds that truthful, transparent, and on‑topic responses protect credibility and reputation, whereas evasive, deceptive, or manipulative narratives tend to backfire, increasing blame and reputational harm. (See, Ulmer, Sellnow, & Seeger, 2018; Fearn-Banks, 2016; Kim, Avery, & Lariscy, 2009)

The Five Fatal Wounds

Wound 1: The SGF’s Fatal Explanation.
The SGF statement did not announce a decision; it opened a debate. It justified the reshuffle via “governance performance.” Why is this fatal? Because, as Robert Greene dictates in his ‘The 48 Laws of Power,’ “Always say less than necessary.”
The psychological mechanism here is over-justification. Long explanation does not close questions; it multiplies them by inviting scrutiny, triggering counter-narratives, and legitimizing suspicion.

All ministers and other political appointees of the government function under the authority of the President, who possesses the constitutional prerogative to either retain or remove any of them at his sole discretion. Once the FG starts explaining and giving counter-narrative, it is an admittance that their action requires defense. Hence, the Presidency loses its authority and also the authorship of its own narrative.

In African wisdom, it is said that, “The mouth that runs too fast arrives before the truth.” And when it does, it meets doubt waiting patiently (my own words).

Wound 2: The Missing Choreography.
There was no evidence of a harmonized departure script. No alignment on whether this was resignation or removal. No negotiated dignity (like in the case of Ajuri Ngelale). No narrative choreography. The result was predictable: competing interpretations filled the vacuum.

In elite political management, exits are never spontaneous. They are staged realities just as Shakespeare wrote in ‘As You Like It,’ “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

For instance, after Ajuri Ngelale fell out with the administration of Bola Tinubu, the dominant media narrative framed his departure as a resignation, citing family health concerns. However, many understood it as an honourable exit rather than a purely voluntary decision.

But when the lead actor calls it a “sack” while the director insists it’s a “resignation,” as seen in the Wale Edun / Ahmed Dangiwa episode; the stage collapses, the audience glimpses the mechanics, and belief dissolves.

Wound 3: The Government That Spoke in Tongues. Three voices emerged:

SGF: implied removal

Media: declared sack

Presidency: insisted resignation

Three voices. Three realities. One government. The state could not agree on what had just occurred.
This is a classic case of failure in COORDINATION. And as Henry Mintzberg explains in his 1979 ‘The Structuring of Organizations,’ coordination is not administrative, it is existential.

Consequently, when coordination fails, institutions do not merely become inefficient, they become unreal in the eyes of their audience.

In effective government communication, “One Government, One Voice” is not a PR slogan. It is a sovereignty claim.

When it gets to the stage that the Yorubas say, “Ìwọ kàn náà ló ń lọ sí Ọ̀yọ́, ló ń ti Ọ̀yọ́ bọ̀” (literally, you are the person claiming to be travelling Oyo and returning from Oyo at the same time). This event cannot occur simultaneously, the speaker has exposed himself as a purveyor of contradiction. At this point, everything previously said loses all meaning, and anything said thereafter will be received with nothing but suspicion (a pinch of salt).

Wound 4: Reactive, Not Proactive.
The “resignation” narrative arrived after the “sack” headline had colonized the public mind. Just as Daniel Kahneman had predicted in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow,’ System 1 (the fast, intuitive brain) is a cognitive imperialist. It seizes the first frame and fortifies it against all subsequent correction. Hence, by the time the “resignation” narrative emerged, the “sack” narrative had already taken root. What followed was not communication, it was reaction.

This is what agenda-setting theory warns against: when institutions fail to define the narrative early, they are forced into a defensive posture, responding to frames they did not create.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is instructive here. BP did not lose the crisis because of the spill alone, it lost because it was late to define the story. By the time it spoke, the narrative space was occupied.

This is why I always tell my clients that communication is like cement, it sets quickly and correction requires demolition. Hence, by the time the Tinubu administration’s “resignation” got to the media space the “sack” frame was already set. The cement had hardened.

Wound 5: The Headline as Destiny.
“Tinubu sacks Edun.” Six words. A completed drama.
The corrective frame “Edun resigned” is not a correction; it is a footnote. In the modern information ecology, as Marshall McLuhan prophesied, “The medium is the message.” But in political warfare, the headline is the truth. Everything else is legal argument.

The Psychology of Disbelief (Why We Stopped Listening)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, writes, “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” The public does not automatically doubt the government. It loses certainty in the government’s competence to narrate reality.

Once the Tinubu administration contradicted itself, it triggered three psychological mechanisms:

1. Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957): This states that the mind cannot hold two contrasting ideas at the same time. The mind resolves this by rejecting the new incoming idea a phenomenon Psychologists refer to as the ‘Comfort Zone.’

The public cannot hold “government is efficient” and “government can’t agree on its own actions” in their heads simultaneously. They resolve the dissonance by discarding “government is efficient.”

2. Belief Perseverance & Continued Influence Effect (Anderson, 1980; Johnson & Seifert, 1994): This states that once a belief forms, it persists even after disconfirmation; corrections are encoded, but the initial misinformation continues to govern judgment.

Once the "sack" narrative formed a coherent causal structure, the public's mind treated the subsequent "resignation" claim not as correction but as contradiction. The mind does not discard a belief merely because its source is discredited; it perseveres. The resignation narrative was cognitively encoded, but the sack narrative continued to govern interpretation. The correction arrived; the initial frame never left.

3. The Deep Frame: As George Lakoff argues in Don’t Think of an Elephant, facts are not processed neutrally. They are filtered through deep, unconscious frames.

The government’s contradictory statements did not create a new doubt; it reinforced existing biases and perceptions.

This validation of pre-existing frames can lead to heightened skepticism and mistrust, as individuals interpret the information through their established viewpoints.

Consequently, the effectiveness of communication is undermined, as facts become entangled with emotional and cognitive biases.

The Verdict: Narrative Displacement

The Tinubu administration did not merely experience a reshuffle. It experienced Narrative Displacement – the moment when the state’s account of itself is evicted from public consciousness and replaced by an account authored by others (the media, the opposition, the cynical citizen on WhatsApp).

As Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “Power is exercised through discourse.” When you lose control of the discourse, you do not just lose a news cycle; you lose the very substrate of power.

And this brings us to the final, terrifying lesson: Governance dies first in interpretation.

The administration will survive. New ministers will be appointed. But every future statement will now be read through the cracked lens of this failure. “Is this the real story,” the citizen will ask, “or will there be a correction in three hours?”

Conclusion: The Lion Has a Broken Pen

We return to my favourite African proverb as regard managing meaning in communication: “Until the lion learns to write its own story, every account of the forest will glorify the hunter.”

But this case study reveals a more tragic corollary: If the lion writes the story with a broken pen, in two different scripts on the same page, the forest will not glorify the hunter. The forest will simply conclude the lion is illiterate and has no business being king.

The Edun/Dangiwa exit is not a PR lesson. It is a warning from the oracles. Every institution that believes communication is secondary to action is already a corpse. It simply hasn't received its own headline yet.

The final question is not who killed the narrative. It is whether the government has the humility and the wisdom to stop pulling the trigger on itself.

Please share your thought with me.

Ishola, N. Ayodele is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC), a distinguished and multiple award-winning strategic communication expert who specializes in ‘Message Engineering’. He helps Organizations, Brands and Leaders Communicate in a way that yields the desired outcome. He is the author of the seminal work, 'PR Case Studies; Mastering the Trade,' and Dean, the School of Impactful Communication (TSIC). He can be reached via ishopr2015@gmail.com or 08077932282.

References

References

Coombs, W. T. (2012). Ongoing crisis communication: Planning, managing, and responding (3rd ed.). Sage Publications.

Edelman. (2024). Edelman trust barometer 2024. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2024/trust-barometer

Fearn-Banks, K. (2016). Crisis communications: A casebook approach (5th ed.). Routledge.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.

Johnson, H. M., & Seifert, C. M. (1994). Sources of the continued influence effect: When misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(6), 1420–1436. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.20.6.1420

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kim, S., Avery, E. J., & Lariscy, R. W. (2009). Are crisis communicators practicing what we preach? An evaluation of crisis response strategies recommended by SCCT. Journal of Public Relations Research, 21(4), 446–476. https://doi.org/10.1080/10627260902966400

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.

Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations. Prentice-Hall.

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