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Between Freedom of Information and Witch-Hunt By Jideofor Adibe
The recent call by Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka for President Goodluck Jonathan to test the workability of the recently passed Freedom of Information (FoI) Act generated deserved headlines. Speaking at the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN) Town Hall Meeting on the FoI Act at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, Soyinka reportedly said: “It is not enough for the government to conceal issues of public interest. There is need to put FoI Act to test. One human being was concealed for months and came back to the country and was concealed in the night with the lights put off.” (ThisDay, July 22 2011).
A little disclosure here may not be out of place: I am one of the admirers of Wole Soyinka’s creative genius. I also admire his outspokenness. Spanish writer Camilo José Cela, who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in literature, once said that a writer should be a denunciation of the times in which he or she lives. Soyinka personifies that dictum. Quite often Soyinka’s voice is one of courage, of speaking truth to power, even if his prognoses for identified problems rarely rise above romantic idealisms or mere stringing of flowering phrases whose values start and end with enriching one’s repertoire of quotable quotes.
Professor Wole Soyinka was right when he implied that the activities of some members of the late Umaru Yaradua’s kitchen cabinet– those that came to be labelled as the ‘cabal’ in Yaradua’s last days - were deplorable. I will however respectfully disagree with him that the Freedom of Information Act should be used to find how they smuggled a dying Yaradua from Saudi Arabia to the country, at an inhuman time of the night, with lights switched off, and without the knowledge of the then Acting President Goodluck Jonathan. My personal opinion is that to embark on such ‘inquiry’ will not only be a needless distraction but could also be a misuse of the FoI Act, if not an outright witch-hunt. Given the current crisis in our nation-building project, it will amount to doing the right thing at the wrong time. As we all know, doing the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing to do.
True, the public has a right to know what really happened during those dark days. This is the whole notion of ‘public interest’, a key requirement not only in leaning on the FoI Act to request for information from public bodies but also a veritable defence by media houses against invasion of privacy or defamation proceedings. But what is ‘public interest’ (also known as ‘common well-being’, the ‘common good’ or the ‘general welfare’) is not always clear-cut, especially given the increasing diversity of most societies, not just in class terms, but also in racial, sociological, cultural and regional terms. I do not believe that what is in the interest of the majority constitutes ‘public interest’, especially when it is remembered that the whole notion of human rights is based on protecting the individual from the tyranny of the majority. Democracies also recognise the need to protect the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. So it is not clear-cut that the interests which the ‘cabal’ purported to represent do not deserve protection or form ‘public interest’ to a section of the population. Additionally, ‘public interest’ is usually balanced with other values – privacy, reputation and national security concerns. In our type of societies, there are certain types of information, which the public has a right to know, but which, if brought into the public domain at the wrong time, could exacerbate the crisis of the nation state. Therefore public interest – whatever its purveyor takes it to mean - must also be balanced against the imperative of inter-ethnic/regional harmony. Because President Jonathan, as the Vice President, was on the receiving end of the activities of the ‘cabal’, any attempt to use the FOI Act to bring into the public domain the activities of the ‘cabal’ in the dying days of Yaradua could expose him to charges of witch-hunt or being actuated by express malice.
There is also the issue of common sense. With the last PDP’s acrimonious presidential primaries and the events they spewed as well as the politicisation of the Boko Haram menace, it may be safe to argue that we are facing the worst crisis in our nation-building project since the end of the Civil war in 1970. In a situation like this, my personal opinion is that emphasis should be on healing the wounds and pacifying various aggrieved factions of the elites – and not doing the right thing at the wrong time. There is a time for everything under the sun. A good deed done at the wrong time will become a bad act. Flowers sown where they are not wanted will become weeds. Acts that could be construed as triumphalism rarely takes any politician or section of it very far in our political history. What will the knowledge of how the ‘cabal’ smuggled a dying Yaradua into the country serve us at this time? I actually believe that Jonathan has so far handled the issue of Yaradua and the cabal with wisdom. The ‘cabal’, as reprehensible as what its members did were, were not the first faction of the Nigerian elite to defend an ethnic/regional interest in a way that manifestly undermines the nation’s constitution or makes mockery of our collective intelligence. This is obviously not a case for impunity, but just to put it in perspective.
Reminiscences on the ‘good ol’ days’
Reading an article by Wole Olaoye ‘Falling quality of leaders’ (Daily Trust, June 27, 2011), I cannot but remember the words of the American journalist and columnist Franklin Pierce Adams when he said: ‘Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory’. In the said article, Wole bemoaned the quality of the present crop of leaders and declared: “The only time we ever had leaders of Triple-A grading was in the First Republic; the survivors of the era (Zik, Awo, Aminu Kano) still kept their halo and were rewarded electorally by the people…. There are no thinkers any more. You can’t even find one golden voice”. Really?
I always feel amused by certain uncritical romanticisation of our First Republic politicians. For instance, if, as Wole postulated, there are no thinkers any more among today’s leadership, what do you say of the likes of Ngozi Iweala, Chukwuma Soludo, and Professor Ibrahim Gambari? I think the capabilities of the politicians of the First Republic are often exaggerated because they were around when the level of literacy was very low and so it was easy to venerate them as sort of oracles (the Zik ekwugo phenomenon – Zik has said therefore it must be right). If the First Republic politicians were as astute as we often ascribe to them, how come that ethnicity, thuggery, violence and strife were endemic in their dispensation?
My personal opinion is that if the present crop of leaders appear less capable, it is most likely because our times have moved from the era of uncritical veneration of leaders to judging them by global standards of excellence.
In the same vein, I am not sure that our current politicians, as corrupt as many of them are – are worse than many of the politicians of the First Republic. When I look at the material acquisitions of some of the First Republic politicians it is difficult to believe they accumulated such wealth from their legitimate earnings. Again when you consider the modest resources available to them at that time, and how much many of them are suspected to have stolen from that public pool, it is not clear to me that the present crop of leaders, relative to the resources available to them, are stealing more. Additionally, it is unclear the role played by improvements in reporting methods for corruption in the current era (emergence of the internet, weblogs, more educated people and recently the passage of the Freedom of Information Act) in perceptions that the current crop of leaders are stupendously corrupt. This is of course not an excuse for the current crop of leaders that pilfer public resources. Corruption is corruption, and no matter the scale, must be condemned. |