People and Politics By Mohammed Haruna

“Vision 2020, Economic Growth and the Nigerian Editor”

ndajika@yahoo.com

 Beginning tomorrow morning the Nigerian Guild of Editors will hold a four-day conference of all Nigerian editors in the print, electronic and on-line media in Kaduna.

The NGE hopes to attract about 300 editors from all over the country and has lined up a very formidable array of speakers and discussants to talk on various topics under the theme, “Vision 2020, Economic Growth and the Nigerian Editor”

The speakers include Dr Shamsudeen Usman, the minister of National Planning, as Guest Speaker. Other speakers are Malam Tanimu Yakubu, Special Adviser to the President on the Economy, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Hajiya Amina Ibraheem, Special Adviser to the President on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Mr Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice-Chairman, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr. Ledum Mitee, President of MOSOP, the Ogoni rights organization, and Professor Pat Otomi, Director, Lagos Business School.

The theme couldn’t have been more appropriate for times like these when the global economic boom of only yesterday seem to have gone into an inexplicable bust that has most people wondering what really happened. One obvious explanation, of course, is that for decades now speculation seemed to have taken over from good old hard work. In other words image had taken over substance. But then this explanation still begged the question about how even the smartest lot among us allowed themselves to be swept by a tide of media spin.

Nothing illustrates this triumph of speculation over substance better than the experience of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) last year. Composed of 15 odd countries, OPEC produces just under half of the world’s oil but holds nearly three quarters of its reserve, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq alone holding 25% and 10% respectively.

Oil, along with its associated gas, is, as we all know, the single biggest source of the energy the world uses to grow its economy. It also has a virtual monopoly over the world’s transportation on land, sea and air.

OPEC, of which Nigeria is a prominent member, started last year with oil selling at a high of 100 dollars. By July it had climbed to over 147 and there were indeed speculations that it could climb to as high as 200 before the year ran out. Barely two months later, in September, the price crashed back to the 100 dollars it started with. In November it crashed even further to 49 dollars, a far cry from what speculators said it would climb to.

Throughout this period of price rollercoaster little changed about the fundamentals of supply and demand. For the generality of industry and economic experts, more specifically those who gathered at the recently concluded Fourth OPEC International Oil Seminar in Vienna, Austria, the explanations lay in speculation, a global rise in inflation and the devaluation of the dollar in which most of the world’s reserves are held. Of these three most experts agreed speculation was the chief villain.

This is where the Nigerian editors – and by extension all Nigerian journalists and publishers – come in. Speculations thrive on the absence of transparency and nothing promotes speculation like a mass media that shirks its watchdog role in society and instead turns itself essentially into a launderer of images, corporate or individual. Here the record of the Nigerian media in holding those in power and authority in both the public and private sector to their responsibilities has been a mixed bag. The media have not exactly been lapdogs of those in power and authority. But then neither have they barked loud enough, never mind biting any one.

Instead they have all too often allowed self-promoting and self-aggrandizing individuals to ride all too easily to power, fame and fortune on the pages of their newspapers and magazines and on their airwaves. They seem to have missed the lesson from abroad of the collapse of such global corporate giants like Enron – incidentally, but not surprisingly, its local affiliate has been doing a poor job of producing electricity for Lagos – and the dot-com companies as well as the fall of such financial con artists like Mr. Bernard Madoff, i.e. the lesson that invariably substance always catches up with image.

This is a lesson the Nigerian media giants now gathered in Kaduna cannot continue to ignore if they are to do their own bit for the growth of Nigeria’s economy.

I do not think Nigeria is on course to count itself among the world’s 20 biggest economies by the year 2020, if only because we seem incapable of producing enough energy to power our economy out of its underdevelopment in spite of the abundance of our oil and gas. This is not to mention our mixed up priorities in deeds if not in words.

One obvious example of our mixed up priority is the on-going re-branding campaign. The assumption of Professor Dora Akunyili, the Minister of Information and Communications and its principal promoter - presumably along with her principals - is obviously that our basic problem is that of image not substance. Her stock response to criticisms of the campaign is that the previous one under President Obasanjo failed because, among other things, it was first launched abroad and it was over-priced. The great lady, who is herself a great beneficiary of media spin, apparently forgot that the principal target of any country’s re-branding is the outside world. Nigerians, in any case, know too much about their country from their nasty and brutish day to day experience to live in self-denial. So where better to start your branding campaign than from abroad?

As for Obasanjo’s branding campaign being over priced, Akunyili has yet to tell us how much hers will cost in the end beyond denying the 3 billion Naira that has been bandied around while offering the incredulous line that most of the invited participants would do their own bit practically for free.

However, in spite of every thing we can still end extreme poverty in Nigeria by the year 2020 if governance can be half or even less as transparent as it has been in the last ten years. We have the material and human resources to banish poverty in all its forms from our land in almost next to no time. What we lack are those who would lead the campaign not just in words but in deeds.

As members of the so-called Fourth Estate, editors and, by extension, all other media professionals, can only bark rather than bite in the literal sense of the word. But without their barking those who have the authority and power to bite may never feel the need to do so.

This is why the on-going global economic crisis is as much the fault of the global media as it is of the real actors whether in the public or private sector; without their roles as cheerleaders of rogue companies like Enron and con artists, or what in local parlance we’ll call 419ners, like Madoff, the world’s economy would not have fallen off the cliff so precipitously as it seems to be doing.

And as it is with the world economy so it seems to have been with our own local economy. The local media watched and even cheered when smooth talking speculators took it over, virtually lock, sock and barrel. One far reaching result was a stock exchange that over valued company shares leading inevitably to a huge bust. Yet so far no one has been held responsible for what went wrong. Instead the media is even giving voice to those who want the Nigerian Stock Exchange to be bailed out with the tax payers money while those who profited from their self-seeking decisions hold on to their loots and continue to parade themselves as financial and business wizards.

Forget about being among the world’s top 20 economies by the year 2020. But if we want to banish poverty from this country at all the media moguls gathered in Kaduna for the rest of this week to debate their roles on how to grow Nigeria’s economy must never ignore the lesson that propaganda, as the staple of the media, has its limits because in the end truth will always out.