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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Official media and Nigeria’s Black Sunday
The Chinese have a somewhat strange way of cursing an enemy: “May you live in interesting times,” they would say. Since the beginning of the last quarter of this year, Nigerians have indeed been living in interesting times, as if cursed by God Himself. First, we had the embarrassing spectacle of our President engaging in an open spat with his deputy over the 2007 presidential elections, a spat which has since degenerated into open warfare. After that came the equally embarrassing arrest in London of Diprieye Alamasiegha, the Bayelsa State governor, on suspicions of money laundering. The governor had gone to Germany for, of all things, cosmetic surgery.
As if these episodes were not “interesting” enough, last weekend’s double tragedy came along. First, a Bellview aircraft disappeared immediately after take-off on Saturday night and for over 12 hours our various authorities could only second-guess each other on the fate of the aircraft and its passengers, several of them Very Important Persons. Then, while the authorities were second-guessing each other about Bellview, the equally tragic news of the death of the Fist Lady, Stella, was broken to Nigerians by Mrs. Remi Oyo, spokesperson for the president. The First Lady, said Oyo, had died in Spain, after undergoing surgery. She couldn’t say what kind of surgery it was but reports later said it was, again, cosmetic surgery.
These must indeed be terrible times for our president. It is a terrible thing to loose one’s other half under any circumstance. It is even more terrible when the vanity appears to be the cause. Long before Alamasiegha, I have often wondered why anyone whose source of income is not show business or modeling would want to put himself under a surgeon’s scalpel for no better reason than to enhance one’s looks. Easy money, along with vanity, is a possible explanation, but even these, to me, cannot completely explain the irrationality of it all. Hopefully, cosmetic surgery was not the cause of the death of our First Lady.
Not only did our president lose his other half possibly in rather vain circumstances, he also lost one of his closest confidants, Alhaji Mohammed Waziri, the Chairman of the Nigerian Railways and reportedly a spearhead of the campaign for the president to succeed himself in 2007. Waziri was among the fatalities of the Bellview crash.
As the president grieves over the double tragedy of the death of his wife and the crash of an aircraft killing all 117 passengers and crew, all this within 24 hours, the hearts of all Nigerians must be with him and with other Nigerians who have lost dear ones. However, even as we give them our hearts, we must not allow emotions to push us into fake sentimentality and hasty conclusions about Black Sunday.
To start with the danger of hasty conclusions, already the media is full of the condemnation of allegedly negligent and venal airline authorities that allow our airlines to fly un-airworthy aircrafts. There are, no doubt, such aircrafts flying around our airspace but as Vice-Marshal Isa Doko, a former Chief of Air Staff and himself an ace former fighter aircraft pilot, told the Voice of America Hausa Service in an interview yesterday, the airworthiness of aircrafts does not necessarily correlate with their numerical age. It is therefore ill-informed for anyone to conclude that the Bellview aircraft in question crashed because it was old. The aircraft was 25 years old. By the air industry scale, that makes it relatively new.
Our airline authorities should therefore avoid succumbing to popular sentiments that would like to see aircrafts banned simply because they are “old”. Instead they should seek to educate the public on the things that make an aircraft un-airworthy.
As they seek to educate the public about air safety, our airline authorities must, however, know that they do so with a deficit in their credibility with the public. They must know that there was simply no excuse for the fact that a country that only recently spent billions of Naira sending a satellite to space, could not use it to spot where an aircraft crashed.
Worse still, when a private television and radio station – African Independent Television and Ray Power, its companion radio station – scooped everyone on the location of the crash, the country’s broadcast authorities banned them for their exertions. One would have thought what they deserved were praises for their enterprise.
The excuse was that they showed gory pictures of the crash scene. Broadcasting gory pictures without warnings may be professionally controversial, but that could not have been the only, or even the real, reason the authorities shut them down. Otherwise Ray Power radio could not have been ordered off the air along with AIT since radio stations do not display pictures.
Happily the insanity lasted only about 24 hours as the authorities apparently quickly realized their mistake and un-banned the television and radio stations.
While the Bellview crash seems to have led to some hasty words and deeds, the death of the First Lady seems to have led to so much fake sentimentality. The clearest manifestation of this is the way the official media, especially the National Television Authority, have covered her death to the almost total neglect of the Bellview crash. The fact is that if you depended on the official broadcast media, you would hardly have guessed that the President Obasanjo was not the only Nigerian grieving over the loss of his wife.
As First Lady Stella has touched many lives for good, but in eulogizing her the official media must not forget that the First Lady Syndrome, basically the sole basis of her influence, has been a much criticized phenomenon. Lest we forget, back in the late eighties when Maryam, the wife of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, started the FLS as we know it today, it was widely criticized as a cynical manipulation of the positions of our rulers by their wives for essentially private gains. Whether this was a fair and accurate perception, it was the popular perception.
The reader may remember that Chief Fawehinmi, the human rights lawyer, even sued Mrs. Babangida’s Better Life Programme for being illegally funded from public treasury. That case had the effect of forcing her and subsequent First Ladies to look outside budgetary allocations to fund their activities.
More recently, Wole Soyinka, the Nobel literature laureate, was on record to have condemned Mrs. Obasanjo’s role as First Lady. In an interview with the rested Tempo (June 14, 2001), Soyinka urged Nigerians to rise against what he described as “this duplication at the top, a duplication which takes place in subtle, overt, vulgar and ostentations manner.”
For Soyinka it was not enough that the programmes of a First Lady, if not the office itself, were no longer funded from government coffers. For him, even the resort to private finance was blackmail. “There is,” he said, “a blackmail going on, a blackmail against institutions, against other tiers of government which are made to kowtow and to recognize … and I don’t give a damn whether people say, ‘oh, we are raising private funds here and there, for private functions,’ No I don’t buy that kind of casuistry.”
When President Obasanjo first came into office in May 1999, he seemed to have shared Soyinka’s attitude towards the FLS. At that time he firmly committed himself to abolishing the office of the First Lady as it had become since Mrs. Babangida. However, as with so many promises he made at the time, he also failed to keep this one. Far from abolishing it, he seemed to have allowed his wife to go one better than Mrs. Babangida, by decreeing, like Mrs. Mariam Abacha before her, that no wife of a governor, much less the chairman of a local government, should call herself the First Lady of her domain. Surprisingly neither the wives nor their governor-husbands raised a whimper in protest.
As we mourn the tragic loss of our First Lady, we should put it in perspective and not get too emotional. This way we will hopefully avoid the frenzy that accompanied the equally tragic death of Ibrahim, General Sani Abacha’s son, back in January 1996. At that time, the reader will remember, we tried to outdo each other in exaggerating his virtues and attributing to him achievements he never made, simply because he was the First Son.
The official media should know that over-saturation of their viewers and audience with the death of First Lady, sad as it is, could lead to public antipathy rather than sympathy for her and her bereaved husband. Too much of anything, as they say, is bad. At a time when the nation has lost 117 of its citizens in a tragic air crash, several of them with many years of meritorious service to the nation, the comparative negligence of the Bellview crash is untenable morally and professionally.
As we mourn our losses of last weekend may the Good Lord give President Obasanjo and Nigerians the fortitude to bear their losses and may He also bring these “interesting times” to an end. May we never again see the like of this week’s Black Sunday.
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