PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

In defense of Father Kukah

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Last month Reverend Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, the Co-Secretary of the just concluded National Political Reform Conference, the NPRC, came under a most vicious and personal attack from self-styled prince, Smart Adeyemi, the President of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, the NUJ.  Adeyemi’s grouse against Kukah was that the revered father had criticized the quality of the media coverage of the NPRC and had specifically accused the NUJ president of jettisoning his responsibility of speaking for Nigerian reporters as their representative at the NPRC and, instead, chose to become an ethnic champion.

 

Kukah, said Adeyemi, in an interview in the Saturday Independent of July 30, was “reckless and arrogant” in his criticisms.  “Rev. Father Kukah,” he said, “should be told he is not in a position, in the first place, to assess Nigerian journalists…The Nigerian media made Rev. Father Kukah who he is today.”

 

Not content with accusing Kukah of biting the media fingers that fed him, Adeyemi proceeded to charge him with betraying his church and his God in carrying out his responsibility as Co-Secretary of the NPRC.  “On the issue of Resource Control and State creation which I spearheaded,” Adeyemi said, “I think Reverend Father Kukah should be re-examined by the Catholic Secretariat in Nigeria if he is still having the spirit of God and the anointing of a reverend father.  A reverend father is supposed to be in the vanguard of the oppressed, of those held captive.”

 

By working against oppressed Nigerians, said Adeyemi, “I felt that Reverend Father Kukah has betrayed the Church of God.  Father Kukah has betrayed God.

 

For all these supposed crimes Adeyemi demanded that Kukah apologize to journalists or be ostracized and that it was, in any case, time “for Nigerian journalists to cut Rev. Father Kukah to size.”

 

I am a Nigerian journalist but before I and other fellow journalists agree to heed Adeyemi’s call to black out Kukah from our newspaper pages and from our airwaves and television screens, we would need to do at least two things.  First, we should examine the merit of his charges against Kukah.  Second, we should reestablish whether in going to equity, Adeyemi has done so with clean hands.

 

The NUJ president says Kukah is unqualified, in the first place, to assess the Nigerian media, and, second, that in doing so, he was “reckless and arrogant.”  Adeyemi did not specify what it takes to qualify as a media critic but it is safe to assume he believes only a media expert is so qualified.  Clearly he assumes that as a priest, Kukah cannot be a media expert.  Just as clearly this assumption is wrong since priesthood and journalism are not mutually exclusive, the one being a calling, and the other a profession.

 

In any case, if wars, as some wise saw once said, are too important to be left to generals alone, the mass media, as the main theatre of the wars of words, are too important to be left to reporters, editors and publishers alone.  Every minute, hour and day of our lives, we see the world largely through the prisms of the mass media and therefore whether we are media experts or not, we are collectively and severally entitled to our views of the mass media.

 

The question is was Kukah “reckless and arrogant” in his criticism of the media coverage of the NPRC?  Here again, I disagree with the NUJ president.  Wrong, perhaps, but certainly not reckless and arrogant.  Kukah was wrong to say the reporters who covered the NPRC were junior reporters.  Perhaps some were, but most were experienced enough.

 

At any rate, the main problem f the media coverage of the Conference , I believe, was  attitude, not experience.  Even then the greater blame was with editors and publishers than with the reporters.  Invariably the reporters took their cues from their editors and publishers who, in turn, had their minds pretty well made up on the issues before the Conference.

 

It is apparent from Kukah’s criticism of the media that he felt frustrated about the media’s distortion of the big picture of the Conference in which delegates agreed, more or less, on 185 issues out of 187 and even on the two where there were divisions, the democratic principle of the majority having their way while the minority have their say, was adhered to.  True the minority did walk out of the Conference on the grounds that they were not allowed their say, but the fact was that they walked out only after, not before, they had voted on an issue that they considered central to their existence, namely “Resource Control.”

 

That the media seemed to dismiss the Conference as a failure because of the boycott by a minority was clearly due less to the experience of the reporters that covered it than the attitudes and the politics of those who owned or controlled the media. To the extent that  the distortion  of the big  picture of the Conference by the media was frustrating.  Kukah, as its Co-Secretary, can hardly be accused of recklessness and arrogance in his criticisms of the media.

 

And now to the second set of Adeyemi’s charges against Kukah.  First, he says Kukah has been a friend of every government in power since military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, from the mid-eighties.  This is true, but I fail to see how being a friend of every government in power is, in itself, a crime.  After all there are friends and there are friends.  True friends never close their eyes, ears and mouths to any wrong by a government.  If Adeyemi is honest with himself, he will be the first to admit that even the most casual content analysis of the Nigerian media would show that being friends with every government in power since he burst into the media scene in the mid-eighties has never kept Kukah from seeing, hearing and speaking wrong of a government where there was a wrong to be seen, heard or spoken against.

 

Second, Adeyemi accused Kukah of single-handedly manipulating the Conference.  This charge is even more outrageous than the first.  Adeyemi’s sole evidence was that Kukah was fond of whispering instructions to the Conference Chairman, Justice Niki Tobi, at critical moments of its proceedings.  More specifically he accused Kukah of whispering to the Chairman not to recognize him when he attempted to move a counter-motion to the proposal for a 17% derivation formula for oil against the demand for 25% by the South-South delegates.

 

“When I moved my countermotion on the floor of the house and the chairman wanted to recognize me” Adeyemi said, “Rev. Father Kukah whispered to him and said he shouldn’t recognize me because he knew the implication of what I wanted to do.”

 

What he wanted to do, said the NUJ president, was to call for a division, which he said, would have forced an adjournment that would have given him the opportunity to rally the delegates of the South-West, South-East and the Middle Belt to the cause of the South-South.

 

At least three things can be said about these claims without any fear of contradictions.  First, either Adeyemi possesses a pair of extra-ordinarily sensitive ears or he, somehow had the high table wired to have heard Kukah’s conspiratorial whispers into the chairman’s ears from the floor of the house.  Second, Adeyemi’s claim that Kukah manipulated the chairman, in the absence of any firm evidence, is an insult to the intelligence, experience and integrity of the Supreme Court judge.  Third, Adeyemi must have suffered from some grand delusions to have imagined that he, alone, was capable of changing the course of the Conference, but for Kukah’s alleged manipulative powers.  If he needed any evidence that he deluded himself, he should read Professor Itse Sagay’s interview in The Guardian of July 25.  In that interview, Sagay, one of the most outspoken delegates from the South-South, was unequivocal in his condemnation of the South-West, the geo-political zone Adeyemi chose in explicably – he is from Kogi in North-Central zone – to identify with, for its role in defeating the demands of the South-South for Resource Control.

 

“The South-West”, Sagay said, “betrayed the South-South.  There is no question about that.  It was clear, deliberate betrayal.  South-East was weak, their heart was with the South-South, but they could not carry out the plan or agreement…But the South-West played games with us.”

 

There were, he said, exceptions in this alleged grand deception by the South-West, including “people like Smart Adeyemi, Senator Femi Okunrounmu,, Dr. Tunji Otegbeye etc, but the bulk of the South-West went there to fool us.”

 

Not only is Sagay’s interview proof positive that Adeyemi suffered from a grand delusion, it was also proof that Kukah was right to have accused the NUJ president of jettisoning his primary responsibility of speaking for Nigerian journalists at the Conference and instead turned himself into an ethnic champion.  Here it is interactive that the representatives of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria and the Nigerian Guild of Editor eschewed the kind of partisanship at the Conference Adeyemi chose for himself.

 

No body denies Adeyemi his right to identify with any sectional interests he chooses, but that right cannot override the interests he was nominated to represent at the Conference.  Certainly it was stretching things a bit for him to  have  assumed that what was good for the section he chose to  identify  with, was necessarily good for all Nigerian reporters.

 

In any case even though Adeyemi has a right to identify with any sectional interest he chooses, it was, as I said, somewhat inexplicable that he would chose the South-West, rather than the North-Central, a.k.a., Middle-Belt, simply because he is Yoruba.

 

 But perhaps there is an explanation for this seemingly inexplicable act.  In the Daily Trust of June 2, some “concerned NUJ members” signed an advertisement which accused Adeyemi of using the murderous thugs of the Oodua Peoples Congress,OPC, under Gani Adams to try and suppress opposition to his alleged attempts to extend his tenure which will soon expire.

 

If this alleged attempt sounds familiar to you, it is because it is.  When President Olusegun Obasanjo first announced his intention to organize the National Conference, it was greeted with widespread skepticism, if not outright cynicism.  Many, including this reporter, feared that his main motive was to legitimize a hidden agenda to perpetuate his rule and to change our constitution after his image as a dictator and a self-proclaimed born-again Christian.  This was why some of us expressed alarm at the regional and sectarian lopsidedness of the membership and leadership of the Conference.

 

As if to prove the skeptics right, some of the president’s men at the Conference, notably Professor Jerry Gana, his political adviser, Mr. Kanu Agabi, his adviser on ethics, and Mr. Greg Mbadiwe, one of the innumerable nondescript presidential assistants, tried either to sneak in a dubious draft constitution into the Conference or openly called for amendments that would extend the president’s tenure by at least two years.  Thanks to the vigilance of some delegates and thanks also to the fidelity of Tobi and Kukah to the rules of procedure of the Conference, the attempts and calls were roundely defeated.

 

And so if the Conference was a failure a tall –which it was not given its unanimity on the vast majority of the issues before it and given also its rejection of any attempt at presidential manipulation – Adeyemi should have laid the blame at the doors of anyone but Kukah or, for that matter Tobi.  Their conduct throughout the Conference was proof positive that it is possible for Nigerians to rise above region and religion in discharging their public trust where there is the will and there is public vigilance.

 

NOTE

This column will be away for the rest of this month and will return early September, in sha Allah.