PEOPLE AND POLITICS BYMOHAMMED HARUNA

 

June 12, Me and Dare’s Diatribe (PART 1 OF 3)

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

            I was in far away Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, attending this year’s congress of the International Press Institute, when some friends phoned me on a Wednesday to ask if I’d read a piece on the back page of The Nation’s edition of the previous Tuesday. The author, they said, pulled absolutely no punches in attacking me not just on the last piece I wrote before traveling. He really tried to take me out as a columnist.

            Whenever I travel, I normally google the internet or go to the Gamji website almost daily for Nigerian newspapers to keep me up to date about events on the home front. The week of the article in question, I failed to do so. So I missed it. But since it was on the back page of The Nation on a Tuesday, I knew it had to be my good friend Dr. Olatunji Dare. So I googled his name and found the article. It was probably his longest column. It was probably also the most blistering diatribe he has ever subjected any one to.

            Without doubt Dare is one of Nigeria’s most widely read columnists for his way with the written word, for his mastery of sarcasm, and for his intellectual rigour. With his vicious attack on me in his piece of June 17 titled “Haruna: The abuse of columnism,” the first two qualities were clearly on display. However, even more clearly, as we shall soon see, the third quality, which is the most important, completely deserted him; such was his anger against me over my June 11 article which was the prompt for his. The result was a piece that was long on abuse and totally deficient on intellectual integrity.

            Dare attacked me on several counts, one general, the rest specific. At the general level, he accused me of “journalistic parasitism” because I only “regurgitate” what others say rather than provide any insight of my own. This, he said, was my undoing when I went from newspapering to magazine publishing because all I did week after week was to criticize other newspapers and magazines. The predictable result, he said, was the early collapse of Citizen which I published.

            Still at the general level, not only do I merely regurgitate what others say, he said, I often do so “with reckless disregard for context.”

            Proceeding from the general to the specific, Dare tried to tear my June 11 piece into shreds. I was, he said, on top of my form with that piece titled “Neither May 29 nor June 12”.

           “When”, Dare said, “he says that he agrees with Nobelist Wole Soyinka who told the Vanguard recently that the choice of May as ‘democracy day’ was an ‘ego trip and an insult’ to Nigerians, I say welcome, at long last to the fold. But why use Soyinka as a crutch? Must Haruna always hide behind an authority of a straw man to express even the most prosaic view? Why could he not grasp it on his own and declare boldly that May 29 cannot stand as an authentic symbol of democratic restoration in Nigeria?”

            My supposed inability to stand without using others as crutches, Dare said, derived “from a profound psychological disorder, the explication of which I will save for another day.”

            Dare then went into the heart of the matter for much of the rest of his article by trying to discredit my contention that June 12 is no more qualified to be the symbol of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria than May 29 which President Olusegun Obasanjo imposed on Nigeria in 2000, one year after he became the country’s first elected leader since 1983.

            I had argued in my piece that the same people, including Dare, who became staunch advocates of “June 12”, were the same ones who condemned each and every step that led to it as a sham. How, I asked, could the same sham beget something wholesome?

            In the words of Dare himself – to commit my cardinal sin in his eyes, i.e. the sin of being a master ‘regurgitator’ - “It would be hard indeed to conceive of a scheme more duplicitous than the transition programme that Mohammed’s friend and patron General Ibrahim Babangida presided over for eight stifling years. Every analyst worthy of that title said so at the time that it was a journey into the abyss – everyone, that is, except Haruna. It must be that he was practically unconscious, too beholden to his patron, or too far gone in his self-loathing to dissent.”

            Obviously for Dare and his fellow “June Twelvers” what stopped Nigeria from tipping over into the abyss was not the integrity of programme – for in their eyes it had none - but the fact that for them the right man - their man – won in the end.

            Then in an attempt to make a straw man out of me the easier to demolish me, he said he noticed that in my contentious piece I steered clear of a “line” I had “been peddling since 1993, namely that since the party primaries that produced Shehu Musa Yar’adua and Adamu Ciroma as presidential candidates for the SDP and NRC respectively were cancelled, the presidential election that resulted from the subsequent party primaries should have been cancelled.”

            In trying to make a straw man out of me, Dare obviously seemed to have completely forgotten that barely two short paragraphs earlier, he had said that I had never demanded for the cancellation of the presidential election or, for that matter, the other elections before it. “As far as I know,” he said, “Haruna never demanded that the elections that had produced state governors and functioning state assemblies be annulled because they had been conducted in the context of a flawed transition programme. He never demanded that the presidential election be scrubbed. He never openly called for its annulment.”

            How a man of Dare’s intellect could contradict himself almost in the same breath is truly baffling. But then that is what happens when you allow blind anger – the kind that he must have felt towards me for questioning what has since become a cardinal article of faith for ”June Twelvers” like himself – to get the better of your senses, common or otherwise; they take leave of your head.

            Dare was, of course, right when he said I never said any of the elections should have been cancelled. Indeed Citizen which I published was possibly the first magazine to call for the result of the June 12 presidential elections to be upheld. In a lengthy editorial in its edition of June 21 which had Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presumed winner of the elections on its cover, we said categorically that the elections should be upheld. “In the name of all that is fair and just and in the name of peace and stability,” we said, “this country must let the election be.”

We repeated the same position the following week in another lengthy editorial in which we told off some do-gooder Western governments that had threatened to sanction us if the military authorities did not let June 12 be. Their threat had been prompted by, among other things, Babangida’s abrogation of Decree 13 which had given NEC the powers, among others, to fix and unfix election dates at will.

Most of the press, including Citizen, had condemned the decree. Chief Abiola’s African Concord (April 26, 1993), for example, had condemned it as “the power of life and death”.

This near universal condemnation of the decree made Citizen to acknowledge the irony that we all came to depend on it to save June 12. “President Ibrahim Babangida,” we said, “must have had a chuckle or two just watching us call on NEC to invoke its powers under Decree 13 to defy the court injunctions that forbade it, first, from conducting the presidential elections, and then, from announcing the results.”

            While we dismissed the threats from the Western countries as hypocritical since they were the same ones that often propped up many tyrannical regimes in much of the developing world, we said the suspension of NEC and the almost certainty that the winners of the presidential election would reject any outcome of another election different from that of June 12 meant that the sensible thing to do was to restore June 12.

            We noted, however, that since the authorities were unlikely to do that, the sensible and practical thing for the political class to do was bring forth a southern candidate in the more likely event that the military still insisted on a fresh election. “Abiola’s victory”, we said, “seems to have established an imperative for a southern president to start off the Third Republic.”

            Dare was therefore right when he accused me of changing my mind about June 12 once the deed was done. Of course, Citizen’s opinion was different from my personal opinion but as publisher and editor-in-chief I had a veto over what was published or not.

            However, that I changed my mind about the annulment was for at least one simple reason; the “June Twelvers”, beginning with Chief Abiola himself, turned June 12 into an essentially Yoruba affair. As I said in my column in Citizen (July 19, 1993) titled “A tale of two newspapers,” this should never have been so. In that piece I noted how The Guardian had behaved with maturity in sharp contrast to the Nigerian Tribune, which had made a u-turn from condemning Abiola as an incorrigible philanderer unfit to rule Nigeria to praising him as the greatest symbol of Nigeria’s democracy for no better reason than that a Yoruba had won a general election to lead the country for the first time in its history.

            “As in time of crisis when reason seems to desert us all,” I said in my column, “there have mercifully been oases of sobriety. One such oasis has been The Guardian. Even though it is not without qualifications… the paper has behaved with maturity in sharp contrast to the Nigerian Tribune for its editorial of July 12 which is reproduced elsewhere in this edition.”

               Whereas the editorial of the Nigerian Tribune in question reduced June 12 to a purely Yoruba affair, an earlier editorial in The Guardian of June 23 had cautioned against doing just that. Titled “Arresting the drift”, the editorial argued that the struggle for June 12 was not just between Abiola and Tofa or between the North and the South or between Islam and Christianity. Rather, it was, as the newspaper said quite correctly, a struggle “between the democratic political current nationally constituted…and the anti-democratic current, also nationally constituted.”

            Unfortunately The Guardian’s exhortation was ignored by the “June Twelvers” and, in time, by even the newspaper itself. Several leading supporters of the cause like Alhaji Balarabe Musa, the late Chief S.B. Awoniyi and Col. Dangiwa Umar, who would eventually lose his commission for his stand on June 12, were kept at arm’s length by the inner caucus of the “June Twelvers” simply because they were either non-Yoruba, or, in the case of Awoniyi, the wrong type of Yoruba.

            No one put this unfortunate reduction of June 12 into an essentially Yoruba affair better than Professor Sam Aluko, a quintessential Awoist if ever there was one.

            At the risk of once again annoying Dare, I will quote Aluko extensively in his interview with the Lagos based The Country weekly newspaper (May 20 – 26, 2002), since rested.

Aluko said he was once tried by the UPN hierarchy for reading The Concord and even talking to its reporters because Abiola, its publisher, was then regarded in UPN circles as “the greatest enemy of the Yoruba race because he didn’t allow Awolowo to become president.” This was partly in obvious reference to the propaganda war that raged between Concord and the Tribune in the early eighties which Concord won hands down.

            Everything suddenly changed after June 12, said Aluko. “Then we had June 12 and Abiola suddenly became a martyr. They found Abiola useful as a rallying point for Yoruba cause and he suddenly became a martyr. The Bishop of Akure led us into a procession in Akure that it was Abiola who went and sank a ship that was bringing Bibles and Christian hymn books to Nigeria. We demonstrated in Akure against Abiola in those days. Yet the same Bishop became one of the greatest advocates of Abiola after June 12 because he was a Yoruba… If Abiola were a Northerner, they would be happy that his elections were annulled. If he were Igbo, Yorubas would be happy that his election was annulled. When Abacha deposed the Sultan of Sokoto, there was celebration in Yorubaland. They praised Abacha as a good and a strong man who could deal with the Caliphate. I told them it was wrong because if Abacha had deposed Ooni, would they be happy? They said no, that the Caliphate needed to be dealt with. That again is ethnicity.”

            Not only did the “June Twelvers” reduce the struggle into a Yoruba affair, Abiola himself who should have gone to equity with clean hands did so with his hands soiled. This, however, was not altogether surprising because of his antecedents as one of the closest business associates of the country’s military top brass.

            One of the worst kept secrets of the June 12 struggle was that Abiola was working with Abacha as the most senior military officer left behind after Babangida stepped aside on August 27, to actualize June 12. So enamoured of Abacha did Abiola become that he had nothing but praises for the general. On a visit to the Kaduna State headquarters of his party, the SDP, on September 28, 1993, he praised what he said was Abacha’s patriotism. “I really commend General Sani Abacha,” he said, “because out of his love of the country, he puts his commonsense, experience and intellect to ease out former president, General Ibrahim Babangida. I have no doubt that it is that commonsense, that patriotism, that intellect, that will enable him to ease out his (Babangida) surrogates… but for people like Sani Abacha this country would have plunged into bloodshed.”

            If any evidence was needed of a pact between Abiola and Abacha, this was it. But even more evidence were to surface later on of the dependence of the “June Twelvers” on military conspiracy instead of the admittedly slower and more painful nationwide mobilization of the civilian front to actualize June 12. Early in November, two leading “June Twelvers”, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi and Chief Gani Fawehinmi, categorically called on Abacha to throw out the Ernest Shonekan interim government Babangida had cobbled together upon his departure. Even before their call, when Citizen went to interview Abiola for a cover story in the heat of the June 12 crisis, there was a large picture of Abacha in mufti in his living room and none of Babangida whose pictures used to adorn the living room that was virtually like a town hall as a venue of his business and politics.

            On November 17, the general finally answered the prayers of the “June Twelvers” and threw out Shonekan. However, instead of handing over power to them as they had envisaged, the man predictably kept it for himself.

            Then on November 22, the chief himself went to Dodan Barracks, then the seat of the military government, and met his co-conspirator in what was clearly a propaganda coup for Abacha. The night before, at an acrimonious meeting in Abiola’s residence those who wanted him to cooperate with rather confront Abacha had prevailed. And so when he met the general it was essentially to give him a list of his nominees for ministers – and lament about how the general had let him down.

            The rest, as they say, is history; in the twinkle of the eyes of the “June Twelvers” Abacha went from hero to the chief villain of the piece, just as Abiola had gone from villain to hero with the same speed.

            What became crystal clear from all this was that, contrary to all their highfalutin claims, June 12 for the “June Twelvers,” was more about power than about democracy. This much was obvious even when at Citizen we supported June 12, given Abiola’s very close business and personal ties to the military top brass going all the way back to the days of General Murtala Mohammed in the late ‘70s.

            The difference for us then was that we thought the chief had learnt his lessons that anyone who rode on the back of a tiger was likely to end in its belly. His reliance on the military instead of the political class to get his chestnut out of fire so soon after Babangida annulled the presidential election, showed that he hadn’t.

            One of the things Abiola became famous for in time was his very earthy and graphic proverbs. Among them was one about coconuts and heads. “No one whose head is used to crack a coconut,” he often said, “lives to partake in eating it.” It was obvious that the “June Twelvers” were merely using Abiola’s head to crack the coconuts that had been so difficult for them to crack since the colonial times. Abiola seemed more than happy to let them.

            Not surprisingly he did not live to partake in eating the coconuts that many of the “June Twelvers” cracked with his head. Instead his vast business empire collapsed with his death and none of the “June Twelvers” who made huge political and personal fortunes out of his martyrdom ever deemed it fit to help sustain his legacy, most notably The Concord Press which, in time, became his most well known legacy. Any regular commuter between the domestic and international terminals of Murtala Mohammed Airport, Ikeja, Lagos, must have felt scandalized by the way weeds, and, I suspect, all manner of reptiles and rodents, completely took over the Concord premises that lies between the terminals even before the man died.

In confusing himself about whether or not I ever called for the cancellation of the general elections, Dare said I was disingenuous and dishonest to have “conflate(d)” the presidential primaries with the presidential election proper.” One, he said, was a party affair, whereas the other was “a national affair in which over 14 million Nigerians trooped to the polls against contrived odds.” The two were of course not the same. But if any thing was disingenuous and dishonest it was Dare’s attempt to justify Babangida’s interference with one and condemn him for doing the same with the other.

             One of Dare’s accusations against me is that I am a master of regurgitation who is incapable of arguing or expounding from first principles. It is, he will agree with me, a first principle of democracy that people, regardless of the level of their activity, should be free to choose their leaders. In other words there should not be one set of rules for internal political party democracy and a weaker one for the wider society. Indeed if anything parties should be held to a higher standard than the wider society because as the courts said recently in one of the election petitions before them, a party like the PDP which lacked internal democracy cannot give you democracy since no one can give another what he does not have. If, as Dare himself said, Babangida’s parties were a sham how logical was it then to have expected that they could give the country true democracy?

            For someone who has pontificated about expounding from first principles, how could he fail to see that it was wrong to prescribe one set of rules for one level of democracy and a different set for another level? This is simply practicing double standards. And it is for this reason that I have said time and again and will say so again and again that June 12 cannot have any better claim to be the symbol of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria than May 29, or any other date for that matter.

            Having disposed of the central issue of June 12 let us return to his other charges against me.

            First, he said Citizen merely published “sterile journalism review” instead of news reporting and therefore “its early collapse was only too predictable”. Citizen lasted all of only four years. There were, as Dare knows very well, newspapers and magazines with deeper pockets than Citizen that lasted less than that even in Lagos with its thriving business environment and a relatively large middle class. Still my magazine’s short life is, of course, not a record I am proud of. But if Citizen collapsed after barely four years, Dare knows it was not, as he claimed, because week after week we merely criticized other newspapers and magazines.

            I did not have bother to do an exact count of how many editions we published before writing this piece. But given that there are 54 weeks in a year, we must have published no less than 200. If Dare has bothered to check, none of them ever did a review of any newspaper or magazine as a story.

            As a columnist I did criticize other publications. Even so out of the 100 or so fortnightly columns I wrote in the magazine, less than half a dozen discussed other newspapers and magazines.

In any case, Dare knows, as an old teacher of journalism and one time chairman of the editorial board of The Guardian, that there is a clear distinction between the news columns of the press and its opinion columns. It was therefore dishonest of him to mix the two in trying to disparage my record in publishing.

            And although I am not proud of my record at publishing, I know Citizen did not collapse because of lack of professionalism. If it did we would not have won three national awards for political, business and sports reporting while we lasted. We collapsed partly because I was not an astute business manager, partly because we started on thinner than a shoe string – less than 1,000,000 Naira equity at a time the consultants who did the feasibility study for us said we needed at least 20,000,000 – and partly because the advertisement mafia in Lagos starved us of advert. I always remember how one leading advertising agency told us on a visit to market Citizen that our policy of rejecting alcohol and tobacco adverts was bound to affect our drive for advert for other products.

            Of course consumer adverts are not the only source of adverts revenue. There are also supplements. But even here we had problems. On many occasions we were denied supplements because we published stories that were critical of government. On other occasions we were denied supplements because we refused to inflate our rates for the benefits of some greedy government officials.

            Whatever the cause, I admit I failed in my publishing endeavor. But I am happy that, unlike Dare, at least I tried. And it is better try and fail rather than not try at all.

            Dare also accused me of quoting people with “reckless disregard for context.” As an academician I expected him to provide evidence. He did not produce even one. He couldn’t because there was none. My quotations that so much rankled him were always for a purpose, mostly to expose the shenanigans of public figures who think they can insult our intelligence by saying one thing today and completely saying the opposite tomorrow without any explanation whatsoever.

            For someone who berated me for quoting people out of context, I was surprised that he would so easily commit the same in his diatribe against me. He said, for example, that I quoted Soyinka on his rejection of May 29 as Nigeria’s “democracy day” and agreed with him merely to have the crutch of an authority to stand on. Quite conveniently he forgot to add that I also disagreed with Soyinka over his long standing advocacy of June 12 as democracy day. Anyone reading his article would never have guessed I was opposed to Soyinka on his views about which should be Nigeria’s democracy day.

            Dare also said I had blindly supported Babangida’s transition programme. To refresh the reader’s memory, he said, “Every analyst worthy of that title said so at the time that it was a journey into the abyss – everyone, that is, except Haruna.”

            This was a clear case of intellectual laziness and dishonesty. Babangida, is of course, my benefactor. He paid my school fees to do a masters degree in journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, New York, after the New Nigerian cancelled its sponsorship of same as punishment for my sanctioning editorials and carrying stories and opinions that displeased some Federal Government officials when I acted as its editor. He later appointed me its managing director against the objections of several of his confidants who said I was a strong head and a communist. He did more besides.

            Yet anyone who has followed my writings on the man going back to his days as army chief in 1983 knows that I have been as critical of many of his policies as anyone could be. It was this, I suppose that prompted the late Mr. Tunji Oseni, one of the finest journalists this country has produced, to invite me to produce a paper titled “Why don’t they listen?” for a seminar he organized in August 1998 on “The Media, Transition and Nigeria,” a seminar which he subsequently reduced into a book of the same name in 1999. If Dare had read that book, he would have saved himself the embarrassment of making a charge against me of being Babangida’s lapdog, a charge that cannot stand even the most casual examination.

            For instance, in one of my several articles that appraised Babangida’s transition programme I said its pillars could not sustain a viable democracy. “Truth be told”, I said in my column in the Citizen of November 30, 1992, “the cardinal principles of the transition programme – banning the old politicians, using the open ballot and having a two-party system – are unjust, undemocratic and ignore the plurality of our society.”

            Finally, Dare said I accused him of being an unprincipled columnist. I never did. What I said was that his defense of President Obasanjo while the man was in office was not on point of principle. The two are obviously not the same. One is general, the other specific.

            I still stand by my charge. Anyone who doubts me should go and read his hilarious satirical piece in The Comet, now rested, of May 2, 2002 titled “Dis democracy sef” and another article in the same newspaper of November 5, 2002 titled “A president under siege”. In both articles he defended Obasanjo, not on the record of his performance, which was abysmal, but apparently because the president was a fellow Yoruba and was supposedly under siege from those, to use his words, “Stalwarts of Arewa (who) seized every moment to denounce him as an ingrate who had turned his back on the very forces that had installed him president.”

            I have, of course, not responded to each and every charge he made against me. I hope, however, that I have said enough to show that far from taking me out as a columnist which he obviously intended, what Dare did in his diatribe against me over my article on June 12 was to allow his usual intellectual rigour to completely desert him.