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My initial reaction, upon reading the reasons offered by former President Olusegun Obasanjo for his sparse reading of Nigerian newspapers was that he had relapsed into his famous or infamous out-of-power disdain and invectives against the Nigerian newspaper press. At a recent award ceremony by the Ogun State government in Abeokuta , Obasanjo had resuscitated his agelong anger at practitioners of the Nigerian press, stating categorically that they are lacking in integrity, while insinuating that what is purveyed about him is fractured truth.
Those two concepts raised by the former president – integrity and truth – have remained the kernel of debates on media practice for as long as the lifespan of our nationhood. Why would somebody who is this strategic to the nation, a two-time ruler of Nigeria, retain such acidic disavowal with a profession as fundamental to national life as journalism? Why would he pillory a profession that has produced great men like Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and so on with such careless boorishness?
This vituperation from Obasanjo, a view that finds synergy in the minds of many public officials at moments of anger or down-to-earth discussions, however, deserves, not a riposte salvo from media practitioners, but an inquest into the press-public interface. That the former president called the integrity of practitioners to question is even a stronger reason for the coroner’s intervention.
The swivel in the use of abusive epithets by Obasanjo for the newspaper press has been mutating from the insulting to the critical. After his departure from Dodan Barracks, the then seat of power in 1979, Obasanjo had stationed a disclaimer at the entrance of his farm at Ota, warning of a sparse thoroughfare therein for both species that have irritancy as their prefixes – journalists and dogs. This time, however, Obasanjo’s phrase-ordering has left the realm of the irritancy of the press to the very constituent of their profession which makes society read them in the first instance – the believability and integrity of their calling
As I said earlier, the initial reaction from us practitioners of the newspaper press would be to skewer the president for a misplaced epithet. Or relapse into a pastime of mutual brickbats that characterized press-Obasanjo exchanges in the eight years of his presidency or its descent in the last few months of his exit from power. This would not be anything new. Apart from the first few months of his civilian presidency when the press took sides with Obasanjo, believing probably that he was a reply to what it had stereotyped as incessant and unceasing Northern Nigerian hegemonic hold on political power, the relationship of both has been very unfriendly.
Between his departure from power in 1979 and the period preceding his wrongful incarceration by the Sani Abacha military government, the press never spared its darts on the General who however received press-civil society’s support during and after his conviction for treason. His perceived role in the transition to civil rule in 1979 convoked a barrage of press odium on his person, leading to reviews, leaders, news stories and analyses of his person in the newspaper press that bordered on the negative. Things came to a head when the highly vilified General had to sue the Nigerian Tribune newspaper for libel and an out-of-court settlement of N10, 000 arrived at in favour of the Owu General (See Obasanjo's Not My Will). So, the journey into this hostile and strained relationship between the General and the press didn’t just start today.
Why would General Obasanjo bother about a seemingly insignificant profession symbolized by, most times, hungry-looking young men and women with scant governmental power, scant money power, but who nevertheless sidle round the corridors of power, peering irritable searchlights into the sacristy of power, as if they own more than the proclivity to embarrass men of authority?
The press, all over the world, is about the most powerful organ you can ever think of.
It has a behemoth-like power to structure perception, a power that is not locale-bound and also serves to transmit information to individuals and locales that are far distant from its immediate environment. As such, many people, including people in power, seek the agency of mass communication to project their visibility, cover what they want covered and project what they want to be seen. Because of this acknowledged wideness of its transmitive capability, the media is able to construct and transmit social reality across landscapes and borders, while also structuring collective perception and being able to construct and legitimate social reality.
Aware of the powerful nature of mass communication and its potentials to penetrate nooks and crannies, politicians are the greatest patrons and users of the media. You will find the opinion of a seemingly inconsequential, seemingly powerless press fellow, written in the dinghy confines of his shack, modulating the views of millions of people and irritatingly sharing the imperial bedrooms and sacristy of powerful men of authority. An American media scholar, while dwelling on this behemoth press power, reasoned that the power of the press is primordial and tyrannical, since it sets the agenda of public discussion, maintaining that the sweeping political power of the media and its ability to determine what people will talk and think about can be likened to an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants and mandarins. People’s lives, careers, marriages, images and future have been destroyed on account of media reportage or mis-reportage.
The centrality of media power in the articulation and proliferation of, sometimes, the narrow beliefs and even interests of a very small clique of editors, reporters, exterior and interior media patrons, is what confers on it this dreadful and dreaded powers. It is why many people tremble by the feet of the press and its patrons. It is further worsened by the fact that, the moment the press profiles your character, transmit such stereotype across borders, it is always very difficult to provide counter-types that would erode earlier projected submissions.
That is why those who understand this tyrannical power of the press, especially politicians, court its patrons like brides, no matter the inconvenience that goes with it and in a third world Nigeria where political power holders’ wardrobes are always fetid and slimy, wise counsel demands this rapport. Thus, it would be convenient to submit that ex-President Obasanjo is not alone in this frustration against the press. The only difference is that, while others bear their heavy press yoke in silence, he on the other hand prefers to externalize the burden.
While Obasanjo was unwittingly giving kudos to the press in that Ota Farm disclaimer that lumped press and dog into an identifiable continuum of an irritably sniffing mammals, his latest typecast should indeed give press practitioners enough reason to be discomfited. Lacking in integrity? The reason is that, it is upon that integrity pedestal that you would find a people’s decision to surrender themselves completely to the judgement of another person or a group like the press, asking it to make meaning of their existence as well as situations around or far away from them.
As press practitioners, we should be truthful to ourselves, there are very fundamental elements of truth in the General’s accusation. Due to individual practitioner’s or group’s interests, barefaced lies and outright untruths have been unleashed on a wide concourse of society by press barons, hiding under the immunity of tyrannical press power. There have been occasions that I was privy to and upon seeing press reportage of them, felt like weeping for fatherland. While we are not talking about genuine off-target speculations or sometimes, human mis or dis-projection of occurrences, but when press barons articulate stories and issues from oesophagus, passion or attachment perspective, then we all need to be wary as a people.
What is rampant nowadays is that, barefaced injuries are inflicted on people in society via press reportage and we all move on as if this disorder is part of our society. It reminds me of the prototype South Africa painted by late anti-apartheid writer, Can Themba, in The Dube Train of a place where people murder selves for sport without disruption being felt in society’s normal moving train. We are fast approaching that same terminus in press-people relations. Already, rather than the discourse: it’s true, haven’t you seen it in the press?, we are fast being dominated by the converse: it’s not true, can’t you see it in the press?
As such, even though laced with unstated disdain and bile against the press, General Obasanjo’s criticism of press practice, rather than nudge us on to skewer him for his famous antipathy against the Nigerian press, ought to be used by us all to critique the fast ebbing kernel of the practice: its believability. Let us return to the agelong sacredness of truth in media reportage. When a story is reported in the media, let us be able to say that, plus or minus human error, its truth outweighs the frailties of the reporter or the foibles of the newsroom. Let us rid the hallowed precinct of the press of infiltration by journalism illiterates who cannot decipher between writing opinion and feature articles, a news story and an opinion, as well as those who write for gastronomical quests. These are those whom we should direct our attacks at, not Obasanjo who was merely mirroring the opinion of thousands of victims of press tyranny.
Let us convoke a sovereign press conference where issues of our sagging credibility would be addressed. The Press Council should transmute from a mere paper organ into one dreaded by an emerging commune of reporters and editors who specialize in trading poisonous beer parlour gossips as truth for the consumption of a wide canvass of society. When a reporter publishes deliberate malicious falsehood, feeding on the vulnerability of his victims, the Council should assume equal dreadfulness like that of Mr. Nuhu Ribadu and invite such for interrogation. The time to do it is now and the people to do it is all, otherwise our situation would be like the proverbial man they came for his neighbour and he went back to sleep, saying they hadn’t afterall come for him; when eventually they came for him, there was no one to raise an alarm.
All said and done, however, the former president was partial for singling out the press in the dearth of integrity that grips the land. The Nigeria he superintended over in the last eight years has witnessed an almost total collapse of such beautiful ones he seeks. Among lawyers, bankers, public office holders, politicians, etc and indeed, the man on the street, the collapse is frightening. Values once held immutable and sacred have all collapsed. The one easy escape is to say that, being what sociologists refer to as macrocosm of the microcosm, the journalist is part of the rot of an Obasanjo Nigeria. Perhaps, if the ex-president had assented to the Freedom of Information bill while in office, we would have been on the way to having such an Obasanjo integrity journalist; otherwise, what he demands is a journalist who writes in Nigeria but lives in Uranus!
*Adedayo, a journalist, writes from the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan
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