Patriotism and the Nigerian Media

By

Mohammed Haruna

Being a paper presented at the Press Week 2005 of the Kaduna State Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists in November, 2005

Mr. Chairman, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, the choice of the theme of this year’s Press Week by the Kaduna State Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists couldn’t have been more apt at a time our fledgling democracy has come under increasing tension. The theme, as you all know, is “Media Credibility and the Nigerian Journalist.” How Nigerian journalists help or hinder the resolution of the political tension in the country will obviously determine the degree of their credibility.

The biggest source of this political tension is obviously the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party. The party not only controls the presidency, it also controls 28 of the country’s 36 state governments. It controls more than 2/3^rd of the National Assembly and about the same number of State Houses of Assembly. It also controls a huge majority of the 774 local governments in the country.

Obviously whenever a party this large sneezes the rest of the country must catch cold. And for many months now, the party has been sneezing a lot. The cause of its own cold is the apparent decision of the presidency to interfere with the day-to-day running of the party. This decision goes back at least four years when the presidency appeared to have changed its mind about Chief Barnabas Gemade as party chairman. Gemade had complained to anyone who cared to listen that the party had been sidelined in government decision making when, as the platform on which the president was elected; it should make some input in such decision making.

President Obasanjo thought otherwise. “Party Officials”, he told the PDP convention on November 9, 2001, “need to be reminded that they are not government officials, appointed or otherwise. Party officials are remunerated from party headquarters and they must stay away from day-to-day executive decision of the government once the party manifesto remains the guide for the president”.

The problem was that the party leadership believed the president had abandoned the manifesto the moment he settled down in office. But that wasn’t the only problem. Another was that whereas the president warned the party to keep off the government he apparently didn’t think the reverse should also apply, i.e. government should keep off the party.

At the convention in question, Gemade and those who thought like him, were thrown out and Chief Audu Ogbe and like-minded members were brought in through what Professor Jerry Gana, then minister of Information, called “Consensus democracy”, to head the party. “Consensus”, Gana said at the time, “is the highest form of democratic agreement”. The minister made this strange pontification in the New Nigerian of November 12, 2001, following the controversy that trailed the party’s convention that year.

Four years on, Gana’s “Consensus democracy”, has now transformed into Chief Ojo Maduekwe’s “affirmatory democracy” , whereby the role of party members in the choice of its leaders is merely to “affirm” those selected by the president and his men.  Maduekwe, not surprisingly, is the party’s appointed secretary general.

A ruling party with no respect for internal democracy obviously bodes ill for the prospects of democracy for the rest of the country. Unfortunately the ruling PDP is not the only one suffering from lack of internal democracy. All the major opposition parties – the ANPP, the AD, and the UPGA – seem to suffer the same affliction. Today none of them can boast of a genuinely elected leadership.

In a country with a simulacrum of democracy instead of the genuine article, the mass media have an important responsibility to play in guarding against the country slipping back into a dictatorship of one party, or of one man, as seems increasingly to be the case. The media’s credibility will stand or fall depending on whether they shoulder or betray this responsibility.

So far the signs about how the Nigerian media will carry out this responsibility are mixed; whereas the private media, both print and electronic, seem determined to guard against any form of dictatorship, government media, including the powerful and ubiquitous NTA and FRCN, have been manifestly complicit.

All of which leads me to my topic, i.e. “Patriotism and the Nigerian media.”  It is in discussing this topic that I will show the conflicting roles the private and government media are playing in protecting or destroying our fledgling democracy.

Before I discuss the topic, it is useful, even imperative to define its key word, i.e. patriotism. The Encarta World English Dictionary defines the word as “Pride in or devotion to the country somebody was born in or is a citizen of.” Another dictionary, Websters New Twentieth Century Dictionary (Unabridged), defines patriotism as “love and loyal overzealous support of one’s own country, especially in all matters involving other countries.” Yet another dictionary, the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics says patriotism is “love of one’s country or zeal in the defence of the interests of one’s country.”

One could go on and on but these three definitions suffice to show us the meaning of patriotism. Essentially it means loyalty to ones nation. Unfortunately, loyalty, like beauty, is often times in the eye of the beholder. Whereas some media theoreticians and professionals  see the media as owing its primary responsibility to state and country, others see it as owing such responsibility mainly to its readers or audience.

Fourteen years ago, Mr. John Tusa, then a chief at the BBC, gave what to me was one of the best insights into this question in a lecture titled “Fourth Estate or Fifth Column: Media, the Government and the State”. He gave the lecture before a distinguished audience at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, Lagos on November 12, 1991.

For me his conclusions best captured what the role of the media should be in any decent society. “The media”, he said, “are the fourth estate of government in a plural, democratic society. In a tyranny, they may well be a fifth column. The Fifth Column. And quite rightly too.”

In other words the media have not just a right but a duty to undermine any state built on tyranny and falsehood.

The matter, Tusa did concede, was however, somewhat tricky. The complication arises because of the overlap between the state and government. Governments come and go but the state remains as the permanent expression of nationhood. However, because governments are expressions of the state, albeit temporarily, to undermine a government may sometimes look like undermining the state.

It is this complication which apologists of tyrannies or counterfeit democracies like Nigeria often use to denounce the critical media as unpatriotic. Let me illustrate by the positions the Nigerian media took some three years ago at the height of the strike against the increase of petrol price by government.

During the strike, the private media were unequivocally against the increase. The public media, on the other hand, were decidedly in support of government. For example the Director General of the FRCN at the time, Mr. Eddie Iroh, did not mince his words about where the loyalty of his radio station lay. “We are” he said in an interview in Thisday of February 2, 2002, “not going to support any act that will put this country in danger merely because we want to promote objectivity and all these values. All these values will be lost to us if there is no Nigeria. We were convinced on that. But we found that the private broadcast sector were like foreign radio stations formenting the activities that in our judgment were not in the interest of Nigeria”.

For Iroh the private media were clearly unpatriotic in their attempts to “promote objectivity and all these values” in their stories and comments about the strike. More frightening than his view was his assumption that telling the truth could only undermine Nigeria’s territorial integrity.

Iroh and those who share his position clearly believe there should be two sets of rules for the media – one set for the media in developed countries and another for those in developing countries. But as Tusa said in his lecture, nothing could be more of a disservice to those who look to the media for a true picture of events. Such double standards, as he said, can only be harmful to the democratic process.

Of course, the media cannot be expected to behave in the same way in all societies. The notion of one size or one pattern of behavior to fit all societies is wrong because the patterns of relationships differ from society to society. But whatever their differences the media in each and every society must learn to tell truth to power, for only the truth can set a people or a nation free and make them strong. Fortunately though truth is constant there are many ways to tell it. The nature of a society will determine how best to tell the truth.

As we enter a difficult stage of our democracy with the ruling party seemingly hell-bent on imposing a one-man dictatorship on the country and the opposition parties seeming helpless to stop it, the media, private or public, have a patriotic duty to stand up to our potential tyrants.

The private media, as any content analysis of their news and views will reveal, have shown that they are up to the task. The same thing cannot, however, be said of the government media.

Fortunately, there is nothing inevitable about the government media being a government lapdog instead of being society’s watchdog. For nearly 20 years after it was established in January 1966, the New Nigerian showed that it was possible to be owned by government and yet speak truth to government. During that period the newspaper became the envy of even the private media for the fearlessness with which it carried its news and expressed its views. Even when the newspaper became a shadow of its former self in the late eighties, it still demonstrated a measure of respectability one found lacking in many a private newspaper. As late as last September, the paper had the courage to denounce the ruling party’s non-elective convention. Unfortunately, the newspaper’s management, rather than rewarding the author of the opinion, Malam Al-Bashak, chose to sack him as an editorial consultancy, probably with a little urging from the authorities.

The New Nigerian in its years of glory was no less patriotic for telling truth to its owners than those media that preferred to play the ostrich. I believe the government media today have a duty to repeat what the newspaper did in those glorious years.

True loyalty to one’s country cannot mean support for its government when it is doing the wrong thing. Such support can only buy a country and its leaders temporary comfort as the Americans and the British have since found out in their so-called war against terror. Their governments lied to the world about the existence of so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and demonized its leader, Saddam Husseini. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair peddled the propaganda that the Iraqis will welcome the Americans and the British as liberators. The global media that should know better, and probably knew better, happily joined this conspiracy of lies.

It has since become clear that the claims about WMD and even about Husseini’s tyranny were mere subterfuge for waging war for Iraqis oil. Probably shamed by their complicity in the lies told by politicians, the Western media have since been exposing some, though hardly all, of the horrendous crimes the Western powers have perpetrated at Guantano Bay, Cuba, and in prisons in Iraq. The latest is the revelation by the Washington Post that the American CIA, contrary to all laws of decency and humanity, has been running secret prison torture chambers in former Eastern Europe.

Naturally, the politicians implicated in this abuse of power see the media as unpatriotic. Any sensible person would, no doubt, disagree. Abuse of office under the guise of defending the nation, no less media propaganda, diminishes a nation not strengthen it. True patriotism lies in ensuring that governments do the right thing and respect due process and constitutionality.

Since the Third Term Agenda became the talk of town, the ruling PDP has revealed itself as a great threat to our fledgling democracy. It is the duty of every patriotic media to make sure the party fails in this its ignoble objective.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening.

Mohammed Haruna

November 30, 2005