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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
June 12, Me and Dare’s Diatribe 3 of 3
Having disposed of the central issue of June 12 let us return to some of 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 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 newspapers and magazines and their 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 was we would not, for example, 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 which almost completely dominates the country’s advert market starved us of adverts. 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.
There was – and is – of course an advertising market in the North where we published from which we could have tapped - marginal as it was relative to that of Greater Lagos. The problem was that the big potential advertisers like textile manufacturers believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were in a sellers’ market and so advertising their goods and services and even their corporate images was a waste of money.
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 will try again and again in the right circumstances. Dare will, I am sure, agree with me that it is better to try and fail rather than not try at all.
He 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 say what they don’t mean or think they can insult our intelligence by saying one thing today and completely reversing themselves 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 depending on Dare’s article alone would never have guessed I also opposed Soyinka on his stand in the same interview over 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. If nothing else he appointed me the managing director of New Nigerian in 1985 when I was 34 against the strong objections of several of his confidants who said I was a strong head, a communist and, in any case, too young. He did lots 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 and decisions as anyone could be. It was this, I suppose that prompted the late Mr. Tunji Oseni, a former managing director of Daily Times and one time spokesman of President Olusegun Obasanjo and 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.”
Before then I had urged the military president to ignore all those Nigerians - most notably one faceless Dr. Keith Atkins, the late Marxist veteran politician, Chief S.G. Ikoku and the controversial Senator Arthur Nzeribe - who were urging him to extend his already extended tenure. “If these people are honest with themselves”, I said in an open letter to the general titled Why Mr. President should ignore them all (Citizen, March 23,1992), “they will admit that your regime’s extended stay can only worsen things not make them better. The reason is obvious. If you extend your stay your primary pre-occupation will be your security. Consequently you will be forced to devote a disproportionate amount of your time and the nation’s resources to securing yourself. Even then your security cannot be guaranteed.”
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 was amazed that someone of Dare’s intellect could miss such a glaring difference.
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 own words in the second piece, “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 Dare made against me. I hope, however, that I have said enough to show that, far from exposing me as an abuser of columnism as he set out to do, what he achieved by his diatribe was to provide a classic example of what happens when an otherwise fine writer allows emotion and anger to becloud his sense of reasoning .
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