PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Why Jerry Gana Will Not Be President

kudugana@yahoo.com

Over four years ago Biodun Shobanjo, the chief executive of Insight Communications Ltd., Lagos, and one of Nigeria’s leading advertising gurus, presented a paper on the prospects of print media advertisement to an anxious audience of members of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria. The print media’s share of advertising revenue, he pointed out, had declined sharply since 1990, compared to those of radio and television, thanks in large measure to the complacency of its publishers. Times, he conceded, were tough for the industry due mainly to the phenomenal increase in the cost of doing business in an industry like that of newspapers and magazines which was so much dependent on imports at a time when the Naira had suffered a devastating devaluation.

But then, argued Shobanjo, it was when times were tough that the tough got going instead of helplessly wringing their hands. Times may be tough for the private-sector dominated print media, but said Shobanjo, they remained more credible and more reliable than the government dominated electronic media and therefore ought not to be loosing ground to radio and television in attracting the country’s advertising income.

I was among the audience on that occasion and what particularly struck me about Shobanjo’s presentation was not so much the force of his persuasive argument as the style of his presentation.

Shobanjo, I thought, was at his sarcastic best as a consummate advertising expert. He sought to grab the attention of his audience with the very opening sentence of his paper and I thought he succeeded most spectacularly.

“I love Professor Jerry Gana”, he said. “Perhaps after Chief Enahoro, he may go down in history as one of our finest government spokes persons. The man shows so much passion for his job… Jerry Gana gesticulates: he explains, sometimes over explains why certain things are done or why they are not done. He’ll tell us why the price of petroleum products have to go up, the fact that the people are impoverished notwithstanding. And quite honestly, more often than not you have to sympathize with the gentleman even if you don’t necessarily agree with him.”

Then just when you thought Shobanjo truly admired Jerry Gana’s passion for his job as government spokesman, the advertising expert dropped a hint of sarcasm about Gana’s passion for his job.

“Gana’s only contrast with Chief Enahoro,” Shobanjo said, with all the subtlety of a master of his trade, “is that you had no cause to disagree with Chief Enahoro’s explanation.”

In plain English what Shobanjo clearly meant was that Jerry Gana’s virtue as a passionate advocate of a cause was more than offset by his vice as someone with little or no credibility.

To drive home his sarcasm, Shobanjo illustrated his point with the spectacular but tragic event of January 27, 2002, when some bombs accidentally went off in Ikeja military cantonment and started a huge panic across Lagos which led to the death of hundreds of its residents in a canal they had fled into.

Gana, said Shobanjo, had shortly before the tragedy, vigorously defended a recent government decision to have at least two NTA stations per state before the Senate Committee on Information.

“Professor Gana,” said Shobanjo, “passionately justified the huge capital investment that government must make on these stations since government wants every Nigerian to know what is being done for the people through television. And he seems to have had his way, going by the number of TV stations that the NTA has since sprouted. By the end of the year, Nigeria would probably have the largest number of TV stations per one million people.”

The hollowness of Gana’s passionate argument before the Senate Committee on Information was, however, soon exposed by the tragic events of January 27, 2002. In spite of the fact that Lagos had at least seven TV stations including two NTA stations which boasted of the widest reach, there was total information blackout on the day of the tragedy. “If television had played its role of information immediacy”, said Shobanjo, “then I would not have headed towards Agege on the 27^th January, in my confused state, believing that I was fleeing from an invading army.”

Shobanjo was only one of hundreds of thousands of Lagosians who thought Lagos was under attack by an invading army opposed to Obasanjo’s regime. Unlike Shobanjo, however, more than a thousand of these frightened Lagosians never lived to tell their stories. Chances are they would have if the government dominated radio and television stations had done their job of informing the public accurately and in time.

Jerry Gana, as minister of information at the time of the Lagos tragedy, must bear some responsibility for this tragedy. Beyond that tragedy, however, Gana must also bear some responsibility for the lack of credibility of the FRCN and the NTA as the largest radio and television stations in the country. This is for the simple reason that, except for the foul-mouthed Femi Fani-Kayode, President Obasanjo’s spokesman who specialized in abusing each and every critic of his master, Gana has been arguably the most passionate government propagandist the country has had. Certainly he has been the longest serving since military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, brought him to limelight as the boss of MANSER in 1985.

This status alone should convince Gana that he would be hard to sell to Nigerians as a presidential material. But then one of the greatest dangers of propaganda is that its perpetrators soon come to believe the lies they have told again and again and again.

This can be the only reason why after having served just about every government in this country since 1985, with all their shifts in policies and objectives, Gana has indicated that he would like to become the next president of this country.

Ordinarily nothing would have made me happier than a Gana presidency. First both of us are Nupe. Second, we both went to the same famous Government College, Bida. Third, he has a brilliant mind.

Unfortunately for someone so brilliant Gana chose to become perhaps the most obsequious man that ever walked the corridors of power in Nigeria. To him every Head of State he served, from Babangida through Abacha to Obasanjo, was God-sent. And not only did he kow-tow to them, he did the same to their wives. I always remember with a deep feeling of shame how he once told Maryam, Abacha’s wife, during one of her birthday bashes, that God spent extra time to make her one of the most beautiful women in the world. I felt great shame as a fellow Nupe and a fellow old boy of Government College, Bida.

His gratuitous obsequiousness has obviously been the main source of his credibility problem but it seems to have also created other problems for him, not least being his religiosity.

For some inexplicable reason he seemed to have chosen to further his political career by matching his obsequiousness with religious zealotry. For someone who comes from an ethnic group whose majority are Muslims, I thought that was an unwise strategy. For, during the 1983 general elections, Gana, as a Nupe Christian minority and the senatorial candidate of the opposition Nigerian Peoples Party handily defeated my boss at the New Nigerian, Malam Turi Muhammadu even in Bida, Malam Turi’s hometown, which is over 90% Muslim. This experience, I thought, would have taught Gana to avoid using religion as a tool for political power.

So far, however, this strategy seems to have served him well, especially with President Obasanjo whose messianic streak Gana has apparently exploited with as much  passion as he has used to serve every government since 1985.

The most glaring manifestation of this religiosity is the role Gana played, as minister of information, in foisting a live telecast of the Sunday Service at the Villa Chapel on NTA’s audience, something which was unprecedented in our national live. One could not agree more with the Daily Trust’s editorial of June 3, 2003 on this development titled “Between Obasanjo, Gana, NTA and religious broadcast from the Villa Chapel,” when it said, “It seems to us no government in recent times has taken this cynical manipulation (of religion) to the height which we have now been witnessing under President Obasanjo.”

Gana, I can authoritatively reveal, became Obasanjo’s minister through the same cynical manipulation of religion. At the time Obasanjo was forming his cabinet, the ministerial nominee from Gana’s Niger State was to come from the Kontagora zone based on an agreement that gave the Bida zone the governorship ticket and the Minna zone the Deputy Governorship. Gana was fully aware of this arrangement but still wanted to be minister even though he was from the same zone as the governor. When the state PDP refused to send his name to Abuja, he allegedly told the authorities in Abuja that this was because he was a minority Christian in his zone. Apparently, Obasanjo swallowed the bait and gave Niger state an extra ministerial slot.

Gana, I am reliably informed, was always one of the first to arrive the Villa Chapel, not so much to minister to the pastoral needs of the Christian folks of the Villa as to massage the president’s huge messianic ego. Yet last week Gana told reporters that he persistently told his boss to his face that his third term agenda would not wash! “I talked severally and very very loudly to my boss (Obasanjo)” the Daily Independent last Wednesday quoted him as saying, “but my words could not have the expected impact. May be you did not hear about it because I was not doing so on the pages of newspapers or the media… Many a time I made it clear to him that the third term thing was not right”. Talk about stretching the people’s credulity to breaking point and insulting their intelligence to boot!

This manipulation of religion is bound to backfire on Gana sooner or later. Last week he seemed to have taken this manipulation to another level when Thisday ran a front page lead story on him which said Northern Christians have rallied behind his presidential ambition. “Northern Xtians,” said the newspaper in its headline on July 5, “Rally Behind Gana.”

“Professor Jerry Gana,” said the newspaper in the introduction to its story, “has become the rallying point among Northern Christians who see in him worthy presidential material… Gana who hails from Niger State is believed to be popular among Pentecostal Christian leaders in the North.”

For someone who has always prided himself as a “progressive,” it is truly amazing how Gana cannot see that using the religious card in his immediate constituency and in a region where Christians are in a minority is the surest ticket to failure. Worse for him still is the fact that rather than take an ecumenical approach among his Christian folks, he seems to have chosen to emphasize his Pentecostal identity, when he should know that such an approach can only alienate most Catholics and other non-Pentecostals.

Gana may be a passionate and brilliant orator but it takes more than brilliance and passion to become a president. Among others things it takes credibility and it also takes conviction. By serving every government since Babangida, Gana has palpably demonstrated that he has neither. This is why, baring some miracle, he will not become the country’s next president.