PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Jonathan Ishaku's Misrepresentations

kudugana@yahoo.com

Last Friday, December 19, Mr. Jonathan Ishaku, a former editor of the Plateau State owned The Nigeria Standard, attempted to give me a taste of what he said was my own medicine. This was in a rejoinder published in the Daily Trust of that day to my article of December 3, on the Jos genocide of the weekend before. Actually his article had first been published on the back page of the Standard of December 12.

“Since Mohammed Haruna likes to quote past utterances as explanations to present events…,” Ishaku said, “one also needs to remind him of some of his own past utterances and actions which disqualifies him as a fair commentator of public affairs.”

In the opening sentence of his article, Ishaku had accused me of “regurtitating” my “usual anti-Christian drivel” in my attempt to show that the Nigerian media coverage of the Jos crisis was decidedly and predictably anti-Muslim and anti-Hausa.

The two evidences he chose to present to his readers were, first, my handling of the 1987 Kafanchan religious riots as managing director of New Nigerian and, second, my criticism last year of Professor  Jerry Gana’s bid for the presidency, even though like me Gana is Nupe.

Ishaku then concluded his piece with a remark which shocked me for the level of personal animosity towards me and a hatred for the Hausa that he must have harboured deep down his heart all these years. “The professor’s sin in the eyes of Haruna,” Ishaku said, "is that Gana is a Northern  Christian. Had Haruna been a Hausa (all thanks to the thoughtful father who has ensured that his Nupe identity will never be in doubt) we wonder how further up the notch he would have carried his anti-Middle-Belt Battle.”

When a person resorts to abuse it is a sure sign that he knows deep down his arguments cannot stand close scrutiny. And so it was with Ishaku as I shall show presently.

Let me begin with the issue of Professor Jerry Gana. The first time any one tried to attack me, at least in writing, on my criticism of the professor’s presidential bid last year was when my good friend, Reverend Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, accused me in a rejoinder in the Daily Trust of July 21, 2006, of being a religious bigot and a demagogue for saying Gana will never be president.

Like Ishaku, Father Kukah said Gana’s sin in my eyes was that he was a Northern Christian. And like Ishaku, Kukah also tried to dredge up my past as a journalist to prove his point.

I promptly replied in a two-part article on July 26 and August 2 to debunk his charges. To my knowledge Kukah has not been able to answer my counter-charge that his rejoinder was a deliberate and gross misrepresentation of my article on Gana and of my professional past. I suggest that Ishaku goes back to read that article.

Meantime let me repeat what I said about the professor. I was not against his bid because he was a Northern Christian. No, I was against it, I said, because Gana, having served every government since 1985, seemed to have become adept at denouncing today the government he had seemingly defended diligently yesterday. Not only did this raise question about his credibility, it clearly showed he lacked serious convictions.

Most Nigerians would agree with me that probably the biggest problem of our politics today has been politicians who have no convictions beyond personal aggrandizement. 

Father Kukah insinuated in his rejoinder that I tried to pull down Gana only to further the presidential ambition of my presumed benefactor, former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, who is Hausa. Yet it is on record that I had consistently advised Babangida, first, against extending his transition programme and then after he “stepped aside” in 1993, against seeking to make a comeback as a civilian president because, as I said, it would amount to pushing his luck and showing ingratitude to God for seeing him through a turbulent eight-year tenure as military president.

I was against Gana’s Presidency not only because I believed he had problems of credibility and conviction. I was against his bid also because he tried to use religious as a weapon. Not only was that strategy reactionary, I said, for Gana personally it could only have been counter-productive because the Nupe, the tribe to which we both belong, are overwhelmingly Muslim.

Gana is, of course, not the only politician who tried to manipulate religion in their bid for power. But then he is not the only one I have criticized for doing so. When Major-General Muhammadu Buhari was reported exclusively by Thisday early in 2001 as saying on an occasion in Sokoto that Muslims should vote for only Muslims and he subsequently issued a belated retraction, I said on these pages on July 3 that his retraction was unconvincing. I also said he was wrong to play politics with religion.

However, unlike with Gana, I did not criticize Buhari’s presidential bid. This was simply because by his retraction, no matter how unconvincing and late it was, he seemed to have accepted that it was dangerous to play politics with religion.

Ishaku’s second evidence that I lack any credential to be a fair commentator on public affairs was that as managing director I used the New Nigerian against Christians following the Kafanchan riots of 1987. Worse still, he said, not only did I get away with it, I was amply rewarded by the authorities with the membership of the Federal Government delegation to that year’s Hajj.

Ishaku’s more specific grouse was that I published “an incendiary advertorial by a so-called ‘Council of Ulama’ calling on all Muslims all over the nation to take up arms”. This, he said, was against wiser counsel from my editor at the time, Mr. Innocent Oparadike.

Ishaku was right that I authorized the publication of the controversial advert but then it was no more incendiary than advertisements and statements that Christian organizations had issued and which had been carried by other newspapers including the Standard.

In its editorial on the issue, the Nigerian Tribune of June 25, 1987, condemned the New Nigerian for behaving with “criminal lenience.” “It is,” said the newspaper, “criminal irresponsibility for the New Nigerian to publish an unpatriotic, inflammatory and treasonable advertisement.” My simple response, which the Tribune published on July 7, was that the newspaper itself had led the way by publishing worse advertisements and statements. I gave its editors a couple of specific examples.

Not only was the New Nigerian not alone in carrying such adverts and statements, Ishaku told a blatant lie when he said I got away with it and even got the bonus of a hefty reward. Yes, I got rewarded alright, but it was not with a ticket to go to Hajj. Rather it was with four days in detention at the State Security Services (SSS) cell on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos. I am not aware that any newspaper chief executive has ever been detained for carrying paid adverts.

Since Ishaku chose to misinform his readers, let me state here that when Oparadike was summoned by the authorities as editor he rejected any responsibility for the publication of the advert. Subsequently the authorities called me to confirm Oparadike position. I told them he was right, that I was 100 % responsible for the adverts.

Consequently Oparadike was allowed to resume his job immediately while I flew to Lagos only to be detained for questioning for days at the SSS headquarters.

So where Ishaku got his information from that I was rewarded with a trip to Hajj as a federal government delegate I do not know. Again it was not true, as he said, that Oparadike lost his job months later because of the riots or because he was Christian and a non-Hausa . After all long before him, Dan Agbese, Newswatch’s Editor-in-Chief, who is Christian and Idoma - and who incidentally had edited Standard - had had no problem editing New Nigerian for years before he left on his own volition.

In any case on the very issue of the Kafanchan riot the position the New Nigerian took couldn’t have been more critical of Muslims. Its editorial of March 17, 1987, which I wrote, categorically condemned the violence which followed that of Kafanchan. “The burning of churches and hotels which followed the Kafanchan riots,” the newspaper said, “was a most despicable act. Certainly it was a disservice to the religion, Islam, associated with those who perpetrated the act. The very word Islam means peace, so how could its adherents spread violence, even if in retaliation, and still do service to their religion?”

The other day a reader, Greg Salem, sent me and email on my article on the Jos crisis in which he said although he admired my “forthrightness” in saying I see things through an Islamic perspective, he disagreed with my journalism.

“In a nation divided by faith and ethnicity,” he said, “we expect our political columnist to at least be a journalist, sworn to an oath unperturbed by any bias.”

I have no problem with bias because only God, the Omniscient, sees things from all angles. Like it or not we are all born into a tribe, religion or region and we are bound to see things through those prisms. However while I have no problem with bias as such I do have one with  the kind which is so deep that those who cling on to it never want to hear any thing negative about their side in a dispute or any thing positive about the other side.

And this, I am afraid, is the problem with much of Nigerian journalism - and especially with the journalism of the Jonathan Ishakus of his world who are blinded by so much  hatred against others -  which invariably tries to blame every problem of his country on Muslims and on so-called Hausa, meaning every non-Hausa Northerner who happens to be a Muslim.