PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Iredia’s apologia

kudugana@yahoo.com

Tonnie O. Iredia, the Director-General of Nigerian Television Authority, needs little or no introduction to the reader. Once upon a time, he ran POINTBLANK, a Q. and A. programme on the station which was our equivalent of BBC’s HARDTALK and CNN’s Larry King Live, if not for the brevity and incisiveness of his questions – they tended to be somewhat verbous – certainly for ruffling the feathers of his subjects. In time the programme made NTA’s management somewhat nervous, and presumably for fear that Iredia would eventually land the station in big trouble by one day asking some big shot the unaskable, the programme was pulled off the air. Iredia was then bundled away to the National Orientation Agency (NOA) as its director-general (DG). His sojourn at this rather amorphous arm of the Federal Ministry of Information, appeared to have had a sobering effect on his radicalism; by the time he was brought back to replace the beauty-pagent-organiser-turned-broadcaster boss of the NTA, Mr. Ben Murray Bruce, Iradia could see, hear or speak no wrong of government. It was a classic case of the reorienter becoming the reoriented.

Over two weeks ago, Iredia seized the opportunity of the first of the annual memorial lectures instituted by friends, colleagues and proteges of the late Alhaji Kere Ahmed at the NTA, to explain to the world why he could no longer see, hear or speak any wrong of government.

The topic of Iredia’s lecture delivered in Minna, the adopted home of late Uncle Kere – he was originally from Bida – on December 6, was “The Media in a multi-ethnic Nigeria.” As was to be expected of a seasoned broadcaster, the NTA DG was at his eloquent best in his delivery, so eloquent indeed that General Ibrahim Babangida, the chairman of the occasion, led the audience to give him a standing ovation.

However, the points he scored by his eloquence were, I am afraid, more than countered by the overall defect in the substance of the paper and, in particular, by his pettiness in singling out a critic of his record at NTA for a vicious counter-attack. Worse, rather than restrict his counter-attack to his critic, he extended it to questioning the quality of education provided by Ahmadu Bello University , where his critic teaches.

Iredia started his paper on the valid premise that the mass media cannot function in the same way in all societies, even though their roles of informing, educating and entertaining the public are the same for all societies. As he said, societies and countries differ in their cultures, culture-mix, levels of free speech and the strength and efficiency of their institutions, among other factors that affect how the mass media function.

More specifically, said Iredia, the media in Nigeria cannot function and should not be expected to function, like the media in the United States , even though the two countries are similar in their heterogeneity and political system. The media in Nigeria , for example, cannot, he said, “undertake the American type of political opinion polls during election.” This, he said, was because while Americans will accept results that contradict opinion polls, Nigerians will not. Nigerians, instead, would, to use his own words, “join in the burning of houses and other destructive tendencies if the candidate that was shown to be leading through an opinion poll does not emerge as the winner of the election. If certain sections of the Nigerian media do not therefore undertake political opinion polls, they are not cowardly but merely sensitive to their environment.”

What Iredia was saying here clearly is that those sections of the media that do conduct opinion polls on elections are insensitive to their environment. It is hard, if not impossible, to see how this position can be accepted as valid.

Iredia’s caution about polls is obviously based on the assumption that Nigerians, by instinct, are irrational and riotous. True, Nigerians, as human beings, can be victims of the herd mentality which, in turn, can lead to unthinking reactions to events. However, it takes a perception of injustice, whether such a perception is right or wrong, for even the most irrational crowd to resort to violence. If therefore Nigerians are inclined to riot over election results in contrast to Americans, it is not because Nigerians are any more irrational or riotous than the Americans. No. It is simply because Americans have had good cause to believe that on ballance their electoral system is free and fair – at least until the penultimate presidential election which was clearly decided, no by the voters, but by a patently partisan Supreme Court and by an even more partisan and dubious executive in the State of Florida, where candidate George Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, was governor.

This development, as we all know, led to near riots in Florida . Since then, it has undermined the credibility of the American electoral system to the extent that outsiders have started wondering if Americans have the moral right any longer to preach democracy to anyone.

Yes, the management of NTA may shun opinion polls about elections, but it should not use its perception of the disposition of Nigerians as an excuse. It is not.

Second, Iredia says because the country’s unity is fragile and because its socio-economy and politics are underdeveloped, the Nigerian media cannot afford to be “confrontational and anti-government” if they have the interests of Nigerians at heart. Agreed, being confrontational and anti-government just for the hell of it or just to be seen as a hero is wrong. But as Iredia knows very well as an old hand in journalism, friction between journalists and government officials is simply inevitable; Governments, even so-called democratic ones, regard secrecy as essential to their proper functioning. Journalists, on the other hand, function to get information out.

In this clash of functions, the media, by definition, is on a higher moral ground since governments are supposed to be accountable to the people and you cannot be accountable if you are not open and transparent. It is therefore wrong to condemn the mass media as being confrontational and anti-government simply because they ask awkward  questions or allow others to ask questions about government decisions, policies and programmes.

And not even Iredia, in his new-found role of defending government, right or wrong, can deny that the decisions, policies and programmes of the current administration, like those of previous ones, have raised far more awkward questions about, than provided answers to, Nigeria ’s problems. As he himself said in his lecture, “After 90 years of existence as a country, the situation (of corruption and unaccountability) has not improved. There are still fears now as to whether the nation can exist as one.”

What critics of his management of NTA are saying is that it has shirked its professional responsibility of asking those questions itself and of allowing others so inclined to do so. And nowhere is this abdication so glaring as in NTA’s flagship, the Network News, which is watched by millions of Nigerians.

Iredia is right to accuse the Nigerian media of being fickle, in other words, of not staying long enough with a story until its logical conclusion. He is also right to accuse the media of not holding the people to their civic responsibilities at the same time that the media try to hold governments accountable to the people. But the solution does not, and cannot, lie in seeing, hearing or speaking no wrong of governments.

Not only was Iredia’s apologia defective in substance, it was, as I said at the beginning of the article, also petty for singling out of one of NTA’s critics for a particularly vicious attack. “Only a few weeks back,” said Iredia, “a writer in the Daily Trust Newspaper who claimed to be a mass communication lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University did what the public may see as a good piece on the NTA but it was completely devoid of any academic value or media knowledge.”

The writer was Farooq A. Kperogi, a former staff of the Trust and now a lecturer at ABU’s Mass Communications Department. In replying to Kperogi’s criticism of the NTA in the Trust of November 15, Iredia tried to make a strawman of the lecturer, the easier to ridicule and demolish his (i.e. Kperogi’s) arguments. The mass communications lecturer, Iredia said, not only knows nothing about the electronic media, he “used the article to call on all to discountenance ethics in the media.”

Nothing Iredia, I am sure, knows very well, could be further from the truth. He knows that not even the worst propagandist could say people should disregard ethics. Such a propagandist may not practice what he preaches, but he will still pretend or claim he is guided by the truth.

Kperogi was undeniably very hard on Iredia’s NTA. “Iredia,” said Kperogi in his article, “makes the most point with arrogant and omniscient airs, that most people who criticize the NTA’s jaundiced coverage of national issues do so out of ignorance of the broadcasting code. I plead guilty to this charge. I don’t have the foggiest idea what Iredia’s broadcasting means, and I am glad I don’t know it. I will, in fact, discourage my students from knowing it. It’s the death knell of professional, responsible, fair-minded journalism…. It’s a celebration of falsehoold, of inanity, of mendacity and of professional death.”

These are harsh words that are likely to get almost anybody’s dander up. The mark of leadership, however, lies in refusing to be provoked into the kind of angry retort that can only expose one to even more ridicule, as was clearly the case with Iredia. A sober reading of Kperogi’s harsh words shows clearly that he was using sarcasm to ridicule Iredia. For the NTA DG to take those words at their literal meaning and proceed from there to claim that his critics “now openly deride the ethics of the profession,” and to even ask the National University Commission to take the article in question into consideration in reviewing the accreditation of ABU’s Mass Communications Department, was not only petty, it called into question Iredia’s grasp of the English Language.

The NTA’s DG has every right to chose his job over his professional integrity, but in doing so he should not take the intelligence of the rest of us for granted.