Crises Presidency and the Media

Muhammad Al-Ghazali

“What is happening now, as unpleasant as it may be, is that the PDP led-government of President Olusegun Obasanjo is bold and courageous enough to be involved in a comprehensive process of self-correction in which no one is spared. This historic moment should be saluted by all who wish Nigeria well.” -Ojo Madueke, PDP Secretary General

If the president’s light-fingered cousin Makunjuoala, Olabode George, along with Chris Uba, were not free men today, then the unwarranted assault on our intelligence quoted above would have made some sense. But Ojo Madueke apparently must be an extraterrestrial in a unique way. He also doubles as one of the president’s valets in the PDP, and, on account of the unprecedented injury being inflicted on the polity today by tango between the president and his vice; the way the PDP has responded to the crises, far from being courageous or salutary, is indicative of the total absence of credibility on the part of our leaders today. The current efforts of the Obasanjo administration to pass itself for what it is not, is equally a pathetic manifestation of the total depravity in the thinking and morality of our leaders, who have chosen to behave as clowns even if the generality of Nigerians can no longer see any humour in their circus show of shame.

The net effect, I dare to add, is that as things stand today, the institution of the presidency has never been more diminished in stature and prestige. Along the way, Nigerians were not only being taken for absolute idiots, our leaders have also demystified their offices in the eyes of the world. But the greater tragedy is that Nigeria, on account of our size and resources and overwhelming potentials, remains the last hope for the black race to salvage something out of a world scientific advancement had long reduced to a village saturated by naked greed, injustice, unfair and uneven trade resulting from the ravages of unbridled globalization, for which Nigeria, like much of the developing world, remain non-starters.

Instead of our leaders to harness our God-given resources to uplift the nation from the misery of archaic and dilapidated infrastructure, hunger, disease and unemployment, they have decided to play on the legendary gullibility of the average Nigerian to further polarize the nation along its predictable fault lines. The tragedy is that there is the potent possibility that not for the last time, our long suffering masses who, sadly, also constitute a sizeable portion of Franz Fanon’s notion of the very wretched of the earth, would be left to bear the full brunt of the naked tango for power between two over-pampered Goliaths, who betrayed them at the polls in 2003, and would, given the slightest chance, do the same again in 2007.

Far, from correcting itself, or strengthen democracy which it continues to mock and abuse with reckless impunity, what the ruling PDP government has done since its own version of the ‘night of the long knives’, when it purged its ranks of its last remaining men of honour and integrity, was to reduce the nation to a banana republic, in which the president’s massive ego was messaged with comical exhilaration, even as Nigerians watched with consternation as the likes of Chris Uba and Olabode George, both of whom should be in the warm embrace of the law, assume the status of saints who, sadly, are also jostling to decide our future!

It is only in a PDP-led government of Nigeria where a sitting president, could clandestinely acquire millions of shares in the contraption called Transcorp, which proceeded to gobble-up state enterprises on preferential basis, only for his agents to look us straight in the face and proclaim that we had no right to question the obvious case of abuse of office or conflicting interests. It is also only in a nation like Nigeria, where the National Assembly could wantonly fail to investigate such monumental abuse of executive privilege, even as some of its members continue to betray the characteristics of high profile prostitutes, whose sole business, against our collective wishes, appears to be the health of their bank accounts.

Not even the past military administrations put together were reckless enough to mock our intelligence with such contemptuous impunity. For instance, when Murtala Muhammad became Head of State he had the grace and honour to quickly forfeited all questionable assets in his possession to the government as soon as he was sworn in. Similarly, of all the noise in the media and seamless allegations of impropriety, so far, nothing has been pinned on IBB so far, while Abacha, in spite of himself, at least saved us from any ridiculous pretensions to piety or saintliness.

But of greater worry to me is the reaction of Nigerians to the latest crises rocking the very foundations of the presidency. I had earlier hinted at the high gullibility of Nigerians who seem to believe anything depending on their medium of information. That attitude, unfortunately, explained why in our chequered history since independence, several politicians like the late Ahmadu Bello and the Tafawa Balewa, not to mention the recent example Umaru Dikko, all of whom posterity proceeded to absolve of their alleged crimes, were nevertheless tried and convicted for corruption by the media when they were in power!

Indeed the media is crucial as we come to terms with the sordid events in the presidency today. Now, there is no suggestion here that either Atiku or Obasanjo is on the same moral pedestal with either Ahmadu Bello or Tafawa Balewa, but it seems to me that the media is yet to rid itself from the mistakes of the past when it allowed pettiness and prejudices to compromise the ethics of the profession. That tendency, it must be added, invited the first military coup in 1966 and eventually truncated the second republic. For instance, last week ThisDay newspaper carried bold headlines with photos of four cheques allegedly cashed by Atiku from the contentious Marine Float Account, only to proclaim that it was suspending the practice when the VP’s camp responded in kind with the release of even more damaging fourteen copies of cheques they alleged linked the president and the PDP to the same account.

The question is why the newspaper did not deem the publication of copies of the initial cheques which tended to damage the VP’s case improper in the first place. Was it because it did not anticipate the potency of the damaging information available to the Atiku camp? We may never know the reason for the editorial volte-face, but like some of our lawmakers who have chosen to redefine the oldest profession in the world, the media owes a duty to Nigerians to uphold the truth at all times to ensure balance and equity in the dissemination of information.

Whether we accept it or not, the media has a gigantic role to play ahead of 2007, which, assuming we avoid the mistakes of the past, will witness our first transition from one civilian administration to the other. The media can either decide to take sides with the long suffering Nigerian people, or risk the contemptuous verdict of history in the service of unquestionably the most discredited politicians to ever pollute our political space. For example, I expected the media to take advantage of the on-going revelations from the operations of the Marine Float Account to do an incisive inquest into the identity of those who benefited from the huge sums withdrawn from it to no avail. So far we have only heard from Samuel Ogbemudia, who claimed the forty million Naira he collected were expended on party activities, but that, am afraid, should not be the end of the story.

We need to know the nature of party activities involved to warrant the huge withdrawals and subsequent expenditure. Were INEC officials or even law enforcement agents compromised in the process? Were the payments receipted? What about campaign funding in general? Do we have sufficient laws to regulate campaign funding? Were any laws broken? In the United States for instance, there are strict laws on campaign funding borne out of the desire to prevent the gangsters or external powers from hijacking the government. But while the current crises suggests that our government has been hijacked by crooks, it is also obvious that we have no proper laws in place on campaign funding, or if they exist, they must be clearly deficient, which explains the preponderance of Godfathers and characters such as Chris Uba. These, certainly, are posers which should concern the media, even if, as we already know from the antecedents of the hunters and the hunted in this instance, they curiously escaped the deserved attention of the EFCC.

These, are the issues, which should concern the media in no small respect, if only it were aware of its responsibilities to civil society. Sadly, the current crises, suggests that the media has also become the principal casualty of Obasanjo’s desperate divide and rule strategy. It has allowed itself to be compromised and effectively politicised, which a dangerous thing for any society, given our history of post-humus vindication of supposed political felons like Balewa. If you believed most commentators, we should simply accept the reports of the EFCC, and the Kangaroo panel, which rubber stamped it, and put the noose around the neck of the VP.

But that tendency is flawed in many respects because it ignores other fundamental issues which borders on the legitimacy of the government itself. Indeed, I have been petrified at the inability or disinclination of the media to seize the opportunity provided by the current revelations to unravel the mystery –if at all it could be called that- surrounding the 2003 elections. In that respect, and quite pitifully, the media stands condemned as accomplices to our collective shame. Beyond any reasonable doubt, what the battle between Atiku and Obasanjo has proved is that their presidency is founded on sleaze. That, quite unfortunately should not be acceptable to any reasonable Nigerian, least of all the media, even in a rotten republic such as ours.