PEOPLE & POLITICS

The problem with Nigerian journalism

Mohammed Haruna

Early last month, the Nigeria Guild of Editors, under the capable leadership of Mrs. Remi Oyo, organised a seminar on media and society at which the issue of journalism ethics took centre stage. Remi had every reason to feel concerned personally about the ethics of her life-long profession. Sometimes last year some rather unsavoury characters attempted to use her good name jointly with that of my colleague at Citizen, Hajia Bilkisu Mustapha – you would probably remember her as Bilkisu Yusuf – to do a 419 on my former boss, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and on the Lagos media.

As I remember it, those unsavoury characters forged a letter purportedly signed jointly by Remi and Bilkisu claiming the two had General Abubakar’s mandates as his media consultants, to organise a press conference at which they were to state the general’s case for rejecting the Oputa panel’s invitation to appear before it. The Oputa panel, you will recall, had summoned former Heads of State, Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, to answer some charges of human rights abuses during their tenures. All three had rejected Oputa’s summons and their rejection had become a hot topic of news and views in the media.

It has never been clear to me how these faceless unsavoury characters had hoped to dupe my boss and the Lagos media, but in the end no one turned up for their phantom press conference, and, presumably because their invitations were not honoured, they never approached the general to claim any fees. However, their forged invitations to the press obviously had a potential of tarnishing, if not ruining, Remi and Bilkisu hard-earned reputatation. Remi was indeed so concerned she called me to request that I tell my former boss she had absolutely no hand in the scam, as if the general did not know better than to believe that she – and Bilkisu – was capable of hurting a fly, never mind someone like the general whose acquaintance of many years she had been.

Given such personal experience, Remi obviously had good reason to feel concerned about the ethics of journalism in the country. Her concern, however, is more than personal. Last Saturday, she celebrated her 50^th birthday. For most of those years she has been a journalist whose primary objective has been competence and integrity, not fame and fortune.

Not surprisingly, she has been concerned, as the president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors in the last three years, about the current state of journalism in which a craving for fame and fortune has brought the profession into considerable disrepute. Last month’s seminar on journalism ethics was obviously one of her efforts at trying to turn things around.

It is doubtful that she will make any appreciable progress in her objective before she quits as the Guild’s president, but being a far-sighted person she seems content to do her own bit so as to leave something behind, no matter how small, for other like-minded professionals to build upon.

For me it is a reflection of the sorry state of Nigerian journalism that, inspite of Remi and journalists like her who have been up in arms against media malpractice, journalists and their employers and their associations would accept to participate in last year’s so-called media tour in which journalists sat in judgement over state governors. Not surprisingly the tour was trailed by controversies and financial scandals.

In the first place it was presumptuous of journalists to think they, and not the public, had the mandate to rate the governors’ performances. Journalists, like everyone else, are, of course, entitled to their opinions, but to pass such opinions off as THE TRUTH up to the point of scoring the governors and giving them awards was most absurd. Second, it was equally absurd for the Federal Government, as organisers of the media tour, to sit in judgement over state governments in a democracy where the relationship between the two levels of governments is coordinate, not hierarchical, as in a military regime. The six Alliance for Democracy states were therefore quite right to have rejected the media tour.

The tour, if you ask me, was cash-and-carry journalism at its worst, especially considering the fact that those assessed footed all the bills – and more as was widely speculated – of their assessors. Hopefully journalists, their employers and their associations like the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria, the Nigerian Guild of Editors and the Nigerian Union of Journalists, would never again accept to participate in the media tour racket.

The media tour racket apart, journalists and their employers and organisations ought to kick against the recent trend of chief executives of government owned media serving in the campaign organisations of elected executives who are seeking second terms. In this respect the most glaring case is that of Messrs Ben Murray-Bruce and Eddie Iroh, Directors General of the NTA and the FRCN respectively, serving on the campaign organisation of President Obasanjo. Their membership of that campaign organisation is absolutely unethical and unprofessional. It is understandable if Murray-Bruce does not know this since his line of business until he was foisted on the NTA has been show business. Iroh, however, has no excuse for accepting to serve on anybody’s campaign organisation, as long as he heads the FRCN. He has no excuse simply because he is a veteran journalist and he knows only too well that the FRCN cannot fulfill its obligation to be neutral in the contest for the presidency if he is a member of the president’s campaign team.

Therefore, both himself and Murray-Bruce should either steep down as members of Obasanjo’s team or they should be denounced by all the journalism associations. Ditto, chief executives, and indeed any journalist, of government owned media.

Apart from last year’s media tour and the trend of chief executives of government owned media serving in campaign organisations of elected government officials, there are many other issues of journalism ethics that should worry anyone with a care for the integrity of Nigerian journalism. Of all these other issues, probably the most important is the ethnic and sectarian divisions of the mass media. These divisions have been brought to the fore by the recent impeachment threat dangling over President Obasanjo.

Dan Agbese, the Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch, who presented one of two leading papers at the Guild seminar in question – the other was presented by Professor Mike Egbon of Bayero University mass communications department – was right to argue that “the beautiful journalist without bias is not yet born.” Journalists are after all human beings and it is only human to harbour ethnic, religious and other prejudices. Because of this Dan thinks society is unfair to expect journalists to be bias-free when journalists, as human beings, are mere products of society. “Society”, he says, “imposes on the media a burden it cannot itself discharge”.

Dan is right about the inevitability of media bias. However, he is right only up to a point. Journalists may not be bias-free, but it is the imperative of the integrity of the profession that they should allow for the free expression of the other point of view and also reflect it in their news coverage. Surely this is hardly an impossible thing to do.

The sad thing about Nigerian journalism is that it seems so blinded by ethnic and sectarian considerations that it does not admit even a minimum standard of objectivity. For most Nigerian journalists, it seems to be the case of my kith and kin first, right or wrong. Not surprisingly, politicians always try to exploit this weakness of journalism practice to put an ethnic or religious spin on the slightest trouble they manage to get themselves into.

And so it is that when President Obasanjo’s all-wise and all-knowing propensity gets him into trouble with a National Assembly that refuses to be his rubber stamp, he quickly turns his impeachment trouble into an ethnic and religious thing. He talks glibly about his trouble being rooted in his refusal to sign “their deal”, they, of course, meaning the North where his nemesis, Umar Ghali Na’aba, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and many of the president’s most persistent critics come from.

The president talks about “their deal”, as if the essence of politics is not wheeling and dealing. He talks about deals as if they are necessarily criminal things that should be avoided at all costs. And yet he find it alright to do deals with the Abacha family to return monies it is alleged to have looted.

Not surprisingly, much of the media in the country, which historically has always believed nothing good can come out of the North, swallows Obasanjo’s spin hook, line and sinker. He claims “their deal” was selfish and no one asks him to prove it by, say, publishing details of the deal. Even when it turns out that he engaged in some creative writing of minutes of the meeting at which the deals was to have been struck – he got all the important details of venue, attendance and the chairman of the meeting wrong – the press still carries on as if the man has not been his own worst enemy by behaving as Mr.-know-it-all.

Clearly, the deeper problem with Nigerian journalism comes less from the desire of politicians and other public figures to deceive than from the desire of journalists themselves to be deceived. Unless and until Nigerian journalists get rid of this desire to be deceived, all the talk about enhancing the integrity of Nigerian journalism will remain just that – talk!