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Right-Of Reply To Mohammed Haruna’s Jonathan Ishaku’s Misreprentations By Jonathan Ishaku The following is a right of reply I wrote to Mohammed Haruna after his response to an earlier rejoinder I had written to his syndicated article on the recent Jos Crisis. My first article was just to contribute my perspective to issues he tried to raise in his column. But right from the outset it was treated with disdain; there appeared to have been some underhanded maneuvers to suppress the rejoinder. When it was finally published it was after 21 days and it occupied inside pages of the Daily Trust and published on Friday which is a half working day in the North. But Haruna’s rejoinder was syndicated conspicuously on the back pages of the Daily Trust and The Nation (a paper which didn’t publish my rejoinder to it). It may interest readers to know that the rejoinder I have written as right-of-reply to correct Haruna’s wrongful charge of ethnic hatred against me in his rejoinder has not been published three weeks after it was dispatched to the two newspapers and Mallam Haruna himself. As a principle I abhor rejoinders which absolutely sidetrack issues of public interest and merely massage the egos of its writers; I have called this a tyranny by the media as it tends to undermine the public’s right to form independent opinion on public issues by way of seemingly media arm-twisting. But right of reply is not only contained in the code of journalistic practice issued by the Nigeria Press Council but is now widely regarded as an appropriate form of ethical conduct. Now I intend to petition the Nigeria Press Council over this denial of right of reply. This is because I now have great fear that the reason why our members in the National Assembly have been dragging their feet over the passage of the Freedom of Information Bill may not be unrelated to fears by the public over the unethical practice of journalism in this country. If a veteran journalist like myself could be so blatantly refused access by an “offending” media to correct a falsehood published in it newspaper, what chances does a public official wrongfully accused by a newspaper have in getting access to set records right? I am an ardent supporter of the FOI Bill but I have a responsibility to point out how we ourselves endanger our professional practice. I am aware that Haruna also syndicates his column on your website and going by NPC procedure for complaint I am supposed to alert you of my move and to give you a copy of right-of-reply. I hereby attach my rejoinder to Haruna’s JONATHAN ISHAKU’MISREPRESENTATIONS. Regards, Jonathan Ishaku ++++++++ HARUNA’S APOLOGIA By Jonathan Ishaku
I am delighted that Mohammed Haruna is fair minded to have “allowed” the publication of my rejoinder to his December 3, 2008 column with the title THE MEDIA AND THE GENOCIDE IN JOS at all; even though it came 21 days after his own; even though he had, in the meantime, gone ahead to publish a sequel to his initial column; even though my response was tugged in the remote inside the pages of the Daily Trust; even though his response was at his usual conspicuous back page; even though his response enjoyed an additional appearance in The Nation, which didn’t publish my riposte…
Lest the reader forgets, the initial reason for Haruna’s article, aside the “anti-Christian drivel” was to point out the bias of the media in reporting the crisis that broke out in Jos on November 28, 2008. One of the principles of media fairness is what we call right-of-reply which imposes an obligation on the media to publish contrary views to those espoused by its writers or contributors. Embedded in this principle is the need not only to give timely opportunity to respondents but also to give equal visibility and prominence to such views. The treatment given to my rejoinder falls far below the requirement of fair hearing. Whether it was deliberate or not, Haruna really needs to work hard on his new career as a media ombudsman in order to be credible. The Standard carried the rejoinder on December 12, as rightly observed by Haruna, but it was after it became apparent that the two newspapers for which he syndicates his column may not publish it; if it is that publication in the Standard that eventually gingered Haruna or the editors of Daily Trust to publish my rejoinder then doing so achieved its purpose.
In my article I stated that Haruna, given his antecedent as an ethno-religious jingoist, is not qualified to sermonize on media fairness. Indeed I cited his reprehensible role in the 1987 Kafanchan religious riots and his biased attack on the Presidential ambition of Prof. Jerry Gana as evidences of his soiled hands. With regards to the Jos crisis, I challenged him to engage in a frontal argument rather than the red herring of maligning the Plateau State Governor, Da Jonah Jang, on the basis of an interview he granted a newspaper eight years ago.
It is interesting that in his response to my rejoinder, Haruna, once again, cleverly side-tracked all the issues raised by the Jos crisis. I have therefore been very hesitant in writing again; I am reluctant in engaging in mere sophistry. Given the great challenge we collectively face with the frequency of ethno-religious in this country, it is my belief that any media argumentation that does not help in advancing solutions to the crisis is sterile and counter-productive; a cruel entertainment fit only for the credulous. More so, I hate rejoinders that tend to insist on one’s point of view; it is a disguised form of tyranny which erodes the public’s right to form independent opinion.
My only purpose here, therefore, is to point out to the likes of Haruna that journalists have a greater responsibility in stemming the madness that seems to have overtaken this country whereby, at the slightest provocation, neighbors would start slaughtering themselves, than the habitual game of blame sharing. However, I shall first attend to some mischievous slanting of my position by Haruna.
Haruna wrote that: “Ishaku then concluded his piece with a remark which shocked me for the level of personal animosity towards me and a hatred for the Hausa that he must be have harboured deep down his heart all these years.” He then went ahead to quote the proof of this in my article, when I wrote: “This is a man who took Professor Jerry Gana, his fellow Nupe man, to the cleaners for daring to contest the nation’s presidency. The professor’s sin in the eyes of Haruna is that he is a Northern Christian. Had Haruna also been a Hausa (all thanks to the thoughtful father who has ensured that his Nupe identity will never be in doubt), we wonder how further up the notch he would have carried his anti-Middle Belt battle.”
To this I retort: Fiddlesticks! In my rejoinder I drew attention to Haruna’s resort to sloppy logic when he misled the public to believe that Governor Jang masterminded the crisis because of his hatred for the Hausa and Muslims and also that the governor still rues his retirement from the Airforce 18 years ago. I said that Haruna was too intelligent not to recognize this line of argument as sloppy and fraudulent especially against the background of the Jos crisis which was clearly premeditated by criminal elements intended upon plunging the state into crisis with the help of foreign mercenaries.
Now it seems I was too generous with my estimation of him; I never could imagine that he would twist such a straightforward paragraph, quoted above, to ascribe to me a mind-set I do not possess. There is nothing in this text to deduce or infer hatred for the Hausa or indeed any ethnic group. And I challenge him to come up with the textual analysis of this quotation to prove his inferred innuendo. He certainly can never do so because he is obviously confused as to the actual meaning of the text.
The very next paragraph demonstrates his confusion. He writes: “When a person resorts to abuse it is a sure sign that he knows deep down his argument cannot stand close scrutiny.” Now, come on, what are we expected to make of this? Is he saying that the paragraph conveyed hatred (an attitude) or an abuse (a deed)? He is being ambivalent. Write what you mean, mean what you write (incidentally, the title of my forthcoming book). This shift of premises is disingenuous and I find it unacceptable.
But Haruna’s purpose in making this wild allegation of hatred is not lost on me. It is this same allegation that he initially made against Governor Jang when he ascribed to him “deep hatred for the Hausa/Fulani who are predominantly Muslim” in order to hold (the governor) responsible for what he insubstantially termed “genocide” in Jos. It is a deliberate but cheap ploy to demonize the targets of his venomous pen and instigate opprobrium against them.
Although Haruna promised his readers that he would refute my charge that he is a religious bigot on account of his unprofessional role when he was managing director of the New Nigeria and his bias comments on Prof. Gana, he did nothing of the sort; rather he proceeded to confirm what I wrote.
On the Gana issue, which occupied a better half of his write-up, he merely recited what he had written in a two-part rejoinder to Reverend Father Matthew Hassan Kukah when the later had leveled similar allegations of religious bigotism against him in 2006. I am yet to fathom how Haruna could assume that by re-producing his argument in his rejoinder Father Kukah he has sufficiently responded to my own charge.
Haruna’s rejoinder to the priest was titled “Father Kukah’s Misrepresentations.” Now, it is “Jonathan Ishaku’s Misrepresentations.” Shouldn’t it worry Haruna, as a commentator, that he is being misunderstood or misrepresented by a section of his readers? It only means that he is doing something which confounds a section of his readers. Any serious writer would have taken that as a cue to improve his or her communication skills. But if Haruna is lumping me together with the priest for the reason that we both belong to the Christian faith and therefore, a response to one serves the other, then it should be clear enough to him that he needs to acquire inter-communal communication skills in order to be a fair commentator of public affairs in our plural society that includes Christians and people of other faiths than his.
On the issue of his authorization for publication in the New Nigerian newspaper of the inflammatory advertorial by the so-called “Council of Ulama” in 1987, Haruna did not deny it.
He says: “Ishaku was right that I authorized the publication of the controversial advert but then it was no more incendiary than advertisements and statements that Christian organizations had issued which had been carried by other newspapers including the Standard.”
This tit-for-tat approach, which Haruna appears to be justifying, is a curious invention in the journalism profession; perhaps it is so taught in Columbia School of Journalism. But I know that even as children it was drummed into our heads that two wrongs did not make a right. I can’t imagine a so-called professional journalist defending a wrong on the basis that others were also doing it. The idea is simply appalling especially from somebody charged with running a Federal media organization in a diverse ethnic and religious entity as Nigeria.
This type of reasoning belongs to the lunatic fringe; it is what has helped fueled religious crises in Nigeria – this tit-for-tat. Or as the current musical rave, P-Square, sings: You-do-me, I-do-you, God no go vex. This is a formula for national catastrophe. Is he suggesting, for example, that once hoodlums unleash their bedlam in Kano, a city with an unenviable history of religious motivated killings and intolerance in Nigeria, then reprisal killings of fellow citizens in other Nigerian cities is justified?
For the record, we remember that Christians and non-Hausa have been killed in Kano in the past couple of decades on the flimsiest excuses. It is as if the people take their cue from Kano State government’s zero-tolerance to other religions than Islam. The government regularly demolishes Christian churches with impunity (for example, between April 8 and 22, 2002 seven churches were demolished by the state government, earlier in the same year 122 Christian schools were shut down by government for not including Islamic religious studies in their curriculum; Christian religious studies is banned in government-run schools in Kano State), riots have broken out in Kano in protest against visiting Christian preachers (1982, 1991), Christians in Kano have been slaughtered on the pretext of protest against American bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq (2001, 2003: in the 2001 episode 600 Christians were reportedly killed, 350 missing and five churches burned. Source: New York Times), Christians were murdered and their property destroyed in Kano by rioters protesting the staging of a Miss World beauty pageant in Abuja (November 2002), and Christians and non-Hausa were killed in their hundreds in the city by rioters protesting a newspaper cartoon published in far away Denmark (March 2006).
If Christians in other parts of Nigeria had reacted with mutual killings of Muslims and Hausa at each of these genocidal riotings in Kano, I doubt whether we will still have a country called Nigeria today. I am aware that there is a groundswell of opinion that the only deterrence to the Kano menace is reprisal action. This is the type of perverted logic Haruna wants to use to justify his indiscretion of publishing the provocative advertorial in 1987. But then the charge that the Standard was doing so is a lie, else the scrupulous Haruna, to whom no quotation or published document, goes unnoticed would have copiously reproduced his evidence. Secondly, if we are to believe his fabrication that for his efforts he cooled his feet at the State Security Service (SSS) dungeon for four days, I wonder how the Standard, estranged as it were from the centre of power, would have survived the military onslaught had it even wanted to dare.
In the published version of my rejoinder in the Daily Trust the following paragraphed was yanked off. In it I stated as follows: “However, as I made to go, Mamman drew me aside and whispered to me that I should not allow any publication from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in my newspaper. Miffed at this, I reminded him that we at the Standard had amply demonstrated in our reportage that we were not anybody’s megaphone and that our editorial policy was based on the principles of justice, equality and national unity. He retorted that he only wanted to caution me.”
Was this paragraph edited out to allow Haruna make the point that Christian organizations were publishing similarly incendiary “advertisements and statements” in the Standard?
On the contention that he did not benefit from the outrage he caused by this unprofessional conduct in form of membership of the Federal Military Government delegation to Hajj, Haruna did not provide adequate rebuttal apart from claiming that he was detained by the SSS. Since he spent only four days in detention the public would want to know what happened thereafter: Did he go to Hajj that year or not? Who footed his bills?
On the issue of Innocent Oparadike’s ouster from the New Nigeria shortly after the Dodon Barracks meeting, I never said it was because he was Igbo or Christian. Haruna should watch his presumptions and extrapolations. This is what I said: “But to our bewilderment, however, a couple of weeks after that meeting, Mohammed Haruna was named a member of the Federal Government delegation to that year’s Hajj to Saudi Arabia. A few months later both Mr. Oparadike and I have been sacked as editors of our various newspapers. The import was clear; people like Mohammed were never acting alone; they are the cat’s-paw of powerful interests behind ethno-religious crises in Nigeria.”
I wonder why Haruna took the pen to write a rebuttal only to end up agreeing with me. Was it just out of love for polemics? But like I have said the challenge facing journalists in our country today is far more urgent than just providing polemical entertainment. Journalists ought to seriously think about proffering solutions to the many problems that bedevil this nation, most especially the recurrent incidence of ethno-religious strife.
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