PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Father Kukah’s Misrepresentations II

kudugana@yahoo.com 

Among the things Kukah tried to dredge up from my past to justify his diatribe against me was that in 1982 I ran a story, as acting editor of New Nigerian, which accused the then governor of Niger State, Alhaji Awwal Ibrahim, of being caught with a large sum of foreign currency abroad. On that occasion, he said, I was fighting a Nupe war against Alhaji Awwal because “some Nupe elite considered Awwal a Hausa man!” The story, he said, was later proved to be false and I was duly punished for it.

In the first place, New Nigerian never ran any such story. What the paper did was write an editorial on February 3, 1982, advising Alhaji Awwal to be more forthcoming than he was in his answers to questions by some media correspondents about the rumour. Naturally Alhaji Awwal protested to the New Nigerian authorities about the editorial and threatened to sue but eventually never did. I was asked to carry an apology which I refused on the grounds that the editorial was fair comment and never accused the governor of theft. A panel was set up by the management to look into the circumstances surrounding the editorial.

Of course as acting editor I accepted full responsibility for the editorial even though it was not my idea in the first place and I did not write it. The editorial was the consensus of the previous day’s routine editorial conference at which the late Chief Mike Pearse, then Managing Editor, Clem Baiye, then Associate Editor, Mr. Steven Bamigbele, then Group News Editor, and other members of the editorial conference, were present. Almost all of them, as well as me, were invited to testify before the panel.

However, for some strange reason, the one person who wrote the editorial, Clem Baiye, presently the Chairman of the Editorial Board of New Era and publisher, Verity Communications Ltd., was never invited even though he offered to testify and shed light on the circumstances surrounding the editorial.

The panel’s conclusions were never made known to me nor was I punished. The closest thing to a punishment was that the management went ahead to carry an apology to Alhaji Awwal against my protest.

I am at loss therefore to hear Kukah say that I ran a false report against Alhaji Awwal when no such report ever existed in the first place. I am even more at loss how he can accuse me of fighting a Nupe war against Alhaji Awwal in the mistaken notion, according to him, that some Nupe elite thought Awwal was Hausa, but at the same time turn around and condemn me for being a lackey of the same group I was supposed to be fighting against!

Alhaji Awwal Ibrahim is of course Hausa and is today a well regarded first class emir in Niger State whose formal title is the Sarkin Zazzau Suleja, a title which clearly shows the Hausa origin of the emirate of Suleja. So where Kukah got his information from that Awwal is not Hausa, only he can say. This, however, is just by the way.

The important thing was that whatever the ethnic identity of Alhaji Awwal Ibrahim, I never fought any ethnic wars against him. I was never a member of the Ndaduma Association, the Nupe umbrella organization that fought the ruling NPN in Niger State. Indeed I was against its core objective of an Ndaduma State based on my belief that a federation of ethnic nationalities is a recipe for political instability and chaos.

Kukah said Jerry Gana won the 1983 senatorial election because of his personal popularity. Gana himself boasted recently in Thisday (July15) that he won the senatorial election because he “was able to mobilize the rural communities who rejected financial inducement and voted for somebody who had no money because I was a lecturer from the university.”

Well, if Jerry Gana had no money, so too did not Malam Turi Muhammadu his NPN rival, even though he had served diligently and successfully as managing director of New Nigerian. The fact was that for the first few years after retiring from the newspaper, he had no house of his own and lived free in a bungalow in Kaduna on the goodwill of an acquaintance.

No, Gana won the 1983 election not because he was personally popular among his people. At that time few of them had even heard of the obscure lecturer from Ahmadu Bello University. He won simply because the Nupe, for certain political reasons, had risen almost to the last man against the ruling NPN and didn’t care about the religion or status or whatever of their choice of candidate. As a matter of fact long before Gana, Malam Turi was offered the NPP ticket by the party but he felt honour-bound to remain in the NPN even though he knew it would take more than a miracle for him to win.

It is instructive that Gana has never contested any general elections since then. Instead he has sought to further his political career by serving every government in power since 1985, regardless of their changes in policies and philosophies. Consequently, he seemed to have become a past master in denouncing today the very government he served seemingly diligently and enthusiastically only yesterday.

If, therefore, Gana and Kukah think the former is about to repeat his success of 1983 in 2007, I make bold to say they will get the shocker of their lives as long as Gana thinks his  surest ticket to the presidency is to play up his religious identity. Needless to say, such a strategy is not only retrogressive; it is bound to backfire especially among his Nupe kin who are overwhelmingly Muslim and who have since ended their rebellion against the mainstream party.

Kukah also accused me of hounding Innocent Oparadike out of office as editor because he and I disagreed over the position of the New Nigerian on the OIC controversy of 1986. It is true I, as managing director, disagreed with Oparadike over OIC but that was not the main reason why he had to leave. From the word go Oparadike seemed to believe his remit was to change the editorial direction of the newspaper as essentially a mouthpiece of the North within the context of Nigeria’s oneness. For example, he refused to serialize a biography of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Premier, ahead of the book’s launch on January 15, 1986. Consequently the Vanguard and the Triumph beat us to the serialization.

Then when the book was finally launched, Oparadike gave it a short shrift instead of the saturation coverage it deserved. Try to imagine what will happen to the editor of say, The Nigerian Tribune founded by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the premier of the West, or even The Sketch the region’s newspaper, if he refuses to serialize a book on Chief Obafemi Awolowo or treats in a lackadaisical fashion the story of the book’s launch at which all the Yoruba Who’s Who are gathered.

Then there was the case of the quotations the Challenge Bookshop used to sponsor on New Nigerian’s back page. Sometimes in May of 1986, the newspaper carried a letter from a reader protesting the discontinuation of the quote. Oparadike, in a clear case of mischief, added a note from the editor saying that the writer should either send his financial contribution to Challenge Bookshop to enable it continue the sponsorship, or he should appeal to New Nigerian’s management to resume the quotations as a public service in like manner as it did the Ramadan Timings for Muslims.

It was clearly mischievous of Oparadike to compare the two because the right comparison was with the Quote from Hadith, which the Islamic Trust used to sponsor. Both were evangelical, unlike the Ramadan timings which was seasonal and was essentially public service that benefited even non-Muslims because it gave the Nigerian times for sunset and sunrise. Oparadike knew that we had discontinued the quotes from Hadith when Islamic Trust stopped paying.

As time went on it was obvious that the two of us could simply not work together, because Oparadike wanted to reorient the New Nigerian in a manner that could only cost us our readership. Many professional colleagues outside the New Nigerian including the late Dele Giwa of Newswatch and Stanley Macebuh, then managing The Guardian, tried to intervene but it was all in vain. Macebuh, for one, reportedly advised Oparadike that every newspaper had its ethos as dictated by its founders and its core readership and either an editor believed in that ethos or was prepared to live with that ethos or he had no business going to work there in the first place.

Oparadike may have been the first Southerner to work in the New Nigerian, but he was not the first Christian. Before him there was Dan Agbese and he never tried to change the newspaper’s essential character as a mouthpiece of the North in the context of national unity. In the same vein when Farouk Mohammed became the first Northerner to edit Daily Times in the 80’s, he never attempted to change its character as a Southern newspaper. Nor did the Federal Government’s forceful acquisition of the 60% of the company in1975 make any difference to the newspaper’s character.

I could go on and on about why Oparadike had to leave the New Nigerian, but that would merely be opening up old wounds. The point, I hope, is made that no newspaper will tolerate an editor who does not share its philosophy or at the least is prepared to live with it.

Kukah also sited the composition of the editorial board of the defunct Citizen which I co-founded in 1990, as evidence that I am a religious bigot. The newsmagazine, he said, had not a single Christian on that board. Until Kukah’s Friday article I did not know that Tawey Zakka, Ike Okonta and Bolaji Adebiyi, among several others besides, were not non-Muslims. Indeed Zakka, who is now editor of Sunday New Nigerian and who I mentored along with several other Christian staff of the New Nigerian including Ndanusa Alao who today is its managing director, felt outraged enough by Kukah’s accusation that he phoned me to ask for the reverend father’s phone number with the intention of drawing his attention to his gross falsification of the facts.

Father Kukah asked why I allow myself “to play these yeoman’s games for others” and why, I have not learnt any lessons given the few times “my fingers were burnt while pulling chestnuts for others.” Among the occasion I got my fingers burnt, he said, was the Awwal Ibrahim case which I talked about at the beginning of this article. Another occasion, he said, was my sack as managing director for playing a partisan role in the controversy that surrounded the choice of Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki as the Sultan of Sokoto in 1988.

My simple answer to his charge is that I was sacked precisely because I refused to play anyone’s yeoman game or to pull anyone’s chestnut out of fire. The New Nigerian, as any of its reader knows, was critical of the choice of Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki as Sultan even though he was widely believed to have been the choice of those in authority. To now turn around and cite it as an example of me pulling anyone’s chestnut out of fire is a clear case of turning logic on its head.

Finally, if I was such an intolerant religious bigot, perhaps, just perhaps, there will not be a Reverend Father Mathew Hassan Kukah as we know him today. For it was nearly two decades ago that I, as managing director of New Nigerian, persuaded him, as a little known priest, to start his column, The Mustard Seed, in the Sunday New Nigerian. This was on the strength of his occasional pieces to the New Nigerian. I did that consciously to balance the Friday Islamic column in the New Nigerian with a Christianity column. It was that mustard seed that grew into an oak tree that is today the famous Reverend Father Mathew Hassan Kukah.