PEOPLE AND POLITICS

The Voice of America versus Buhari

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com 

In writing this week’s piece, my original intention was to revisit the issue of the national conference, sovereign or otherwise, for the so-called restructuring of Nigeria, as a primary objective of Afenifere and the South-West, especially now that their foremost objective, the National Identity Card project, has taken off. Having apparently succeeded in forcing its I.D. Card agendum on the nation, I had expected Afenifere  and the South-West to have since renewed their vociferous demand for a Sovereign National Conference ahead of the next general election, unrealistic as such a demand is.

Perhaps they are merely taking their breadth after the marathon battle over the I.D. Card project. On the other hand, perhaps they already smell victory at the polls for their son, President Obasanjo, what with at the talk of a PDP/AD alliance, which, in the words of the president himself, is expected to guarantee him more than a hundred per cent Yoruba vote. “Your votes,” Thisday of March 2 reported him as telling a rather poorly attended PDP rally in Lagos over the weekend, “must be 100%. In fact, it must be flowing down”.

Obviously for Afenifere and the Southwest, victory for President Obasanjo is a sure banker that a national conference, sovereign or not, will be top of the nation’s agenda, even though, for clearly personal reasons, the president has not pursued it with as much zeal as he had pursued the I.D. card project. Indeed, the president has been dead set against a Sovereign National Conference as could be seen from his response two years ago to a demand for such a conference by Alhaji Lam Adesina, the Oyo State governor, when the president visited the state.

“There cannot be two sovereigns in a nation”, the president said. “The only thing I can do is to give it back to the people who have surrendered it to me. So those who are calling for an SNC, I don’t know what they are talking about. Of course, you (can) have a national conference, but SNC, I do not, I repeat, I do not subscribe to it”” (The Guardian February 2, 2001).

If Obasanjo’s victory at the next elections will guarantee the convening of a national conference, the same victory is also likely to guarantee that it will not be sovereign, given his unequivocal opposition to according it such a status. However, the principle that there can be no two sovereigns in a nation, is unlikely to deter SNC’s proponents from insisting on such a sovereign status, should Major-General Muhammadu Buhari defeat Obasanjo at the elections.

This much can be inferred from the president’s remarks at the Lagos PDP rally over the weekend. “We do not want war” he told his audience. “That is why we (PDP and AD) came together to have an alliance, especially in the South-West. Whichever political party you are does not matter. We don’t want violence, we don’t want the wild, wild west to re-occur. What we want is a peaceful, peaceful west.”

In other words, the only guarantee that the South-West will not pull out of Nigeria which, in plain English, is what the call for an SNC amounts to, is if he, as the son of their soil, wins the next presidential elections. This, at least to me, sounds like a gratuitous piece of blackmail.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, my original intention was to revisit the national conference issue, sovereign or otherwise, to see whether it remains imperative for the nation’s survival, following the aborted attempt to convene it two years ago. I changed my mind about discussing it when I read the press review of an interview the VOA purportedly had with Buhari on the issue of the I.D. Card. I will, insha Allah, still discuss it – that is, the national conference – in a too distant future, possibly next week.

For today, I thought the interview in question deserved immediate attention for its significance to how free, fair and peaceful the next elections will be.

Anyone who has read my piece on “The Press Versus Buhari” on these pages on July 4 2001, will know that I believe much of the press is viscerally and unequivocally opposed to Buhari and are therefore very unlikely to give him a fair shake. The papers that oppose Buhari will argue that their position is a principled one based on the fact that he had shown himself to be against free speech if only by his enactment of Decree 4 of 1984. The decree criminalized news that embarrassed public officials or caused public disaffection, even if the news was accurate.

Decree 4 was obviously a terrible law, but I don’t believe the press dislikes Buhari merely on account of it alone. Otherwise, the papers, as I pointed out in my article, would not have singled him out for attack as someone who is anti-press. Virtually, all our military leaders, including President Obasanjo, during his first coming, were intolerant of the press. Yet you don’t see many references in our newspapers to Obasanjo’s acts of muzzling the press as military leader.

Part of Buhari’s problem with the press is self-inflicted. First, he has a way of speaking plainly which easily exposes him to mischievous misinterpretation by his enemies and to misunderstanding by even his most well-meaning critics. A case in point is his Muslim-should-vote-for Muslims-alone statement in Sokoto over a year and a half ago, which has since become his albatross, notwithstanding his altogether not too convincing denials that he said so.

As a rule, plain speaking should be a virtue all the time, but there are times when it is unwise to speak plainly even though one should never lie. After all one can speak the truth without being too plain about it. It should be obvious from the way Obasanjo has used religion to divide the North, and from the fact that he was the first Nigerian leader ever to officially organise a faith-based thanks giving service for victory at the polls, – remember his Christians – only thanks giving service at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, for his 1999 victory at the presidential elections? – that the president regards himself, in the words of a publication of the Kaduna Branch of CAN, as God’s battle-axe for Christianity in Nigeria. The difference between Obasanjo and Buhari, however, is that you will never catch Obasanjo saying anything that would reveal what is in his herat in this regard.

Not only does Buhari have the problem of speaking plainly, too plainly some would say, he also has the problem of surrounding himself with some people who apparently believe that even the most constructive criticism of their man is the act of an enemy. In other words, like George W. Bush said to the rest of the world after September 11, either you are for their man or you are against him. Obviously such a black-or-white-and-nothing-in-between philosophical stand can only alienate even the most well-meaning critic from their man.

However, if part of Buhari’s problem with the press is self-inflicted, the main problem lies clearly in the prejudices of a Nigerian press, which is mostly anti-Islam and anti-North. Unfortunately for Buhari, he happens to be both a Muslim and a Northerner.

In this respect, Buhari is of course not the only victim. From the nation’s first and only Prime Minister to date, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to General Abubakar Abdulsalami and all the other Nigerian leaders of Northern origin in between, none had ever been spared the sustained vicious attacks of a press that apparently does not believe anything good can come out of the North and Muslims.

As Alhaji Babatunde Jose, the undisputed doyen of the Nigerian press, has pointed out in his 1987 book on his journalism career at the Daily Times, Walking a Tight Rope – Power Play in Daily Times, the South-Western press, which overwhelmingly dominates the Nigerian press scene, has been viscerally condemnatory of Northern leaders as the country’s dominant political elite, because South-Western politicians, as the country’s most Westernized elites, had always believed it is their birth right to rule over the country.

“Lagos”, said Jose in his book, rather disapprovingly, “was Nigeria and there was resistence to the backward provincials coming to share power in Lagos”. Since colonial times, Jose pointed out, “The Yorubas had literally ruled Nigeria… to the exclusion of Hausas and the Ibos”. Before independence the Yorubas, he said, had produced second generation graduates in law, medicine and engineering while the Ibos were just starting with the first generation. The Northerners had not even started and the Hausas that most Yorubas were familiar with were mostly beggars and guards, and, at best, koranic teachers and kolanut traders. The Yorubas found it hard to swallow the fact that in a democracy, the leaders of such a people would not only demand for a share of power commensurate with their population but that they could go on to acquire such power.

This historical root of the hostility of the South-West press towards Northerners, who also happen to be Muslims mostly, seems to have only gone deeper with time. It is a measure of the depth of this hostility that some newspapers would run the VOA interview with Buhari about the I.D. Card project in which he was said to have told Northerners to reject it, completely out of context. This clear case of mischief, of course, has a foreign dimension to it, since the VOA is an American broadcast station. The foreign dimension, however, has a domestic source.

Following September 11, the Americans apparently decided to intensify their use of the VOA for their propaganda war against Muslims wherever they are. Part of the strategy for this war was the recruitment of Sunday Dare, a newspaper journalist who speaks little Hausa, to head the Hausa service of the VOA , a service whose listeners are overwhelmingly Muslims.

Kabiru Muhammad Gwangwazo, a former BBC part time staff and someone familiar with the VOA set-up, writing in the Daily Trust of January 10, 2002, described Dare as a “notorious Nigerian Yoruba tribal chauvinist Christian journalist”. Gwangwazo may have an axe to grind with the VOA because, as he himself admitted, he was once rejected for a job at the station. Even then on account alone of how the VOA decided to run the Buhari interview on the ID Card project, one will find it difficult not to agree with Gwangwazo’s characterization of Dare. For only an ethnic chauvinist and a religious bigot will handle the Buhari interview the way the VOA management did.

That interview was granted nearly one year ago after the I.D. Card project had become contentious because of Obasanjo’s initial insistence on linking it with the next elections, of course, at the behest of Afenifere and the South-West both of which had insisted on the project as a condition for participating in the next elections. Clearly the decision to run that interview without informing its audience that it was an old one, was intended to portray Buhari, as the presidential candidate of the ANPP, as an unrepentant sectionalist and religious extremist. This is especially so because no where in the interview did the station mention the fact that Buhari himself had registered for his I.D. Card and had exhorted others to do so since the project was no longer linked to the elections, even though he still thought the project was a totally misplaced priority and contained a hidden agendum of those who want to reduce the population of the North and of Muslims.

Quite predictably the local press jumped on the interview to hammer in their prejudices against Buhari. Which is a great pity, because it is such irresponsible and unprofessional conduct which sows the seeds of the political violence that has made it impossible so far for Nigeria to experience a successful civilian to civilian transition. So long as the press carries on this way, so long will such a successful transition remain a mirage.