PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Miss World riots: Thisday as a scapegoat

Mohammed Haruna

Last week, you may recall, I responded to Sunday Vanguard columnist Dele Sobowale’s two-part rejoinder to my earlier critique of The Patriots’ suggestions of turn-by-turn politics cum five-year-single-term-limit for the president and the governors, as a solution to the problem of the country’s political instability and jaundiced democracy. I had, in my original article, said that The Patriots’ suggestions, far from promoting genuine democracy, could only undermine it. I had also pointed out that as at the time of my article, the Southern newspapers had not started editorializing on The Patriots’ suggestion and that when they do, I would be surprised if they did not shoot down those suggestions for the wrong reasons, namely that the suggestions will be seen as an attempt to stop President Obasanjo’s second term bid.

In his own reaction, not only did Sobowale accuse me of bending the truth about the reaction of the papers to The Patriots, he said I was wrong to argue that the group’s suggestions could only promote a “bananas democracy”, as opposed to promoting the real thing. “It is not an amendment to the constitution” he said, “which turns a nation into a bananas republic; neither is it one or two terms that will guarantee governance; it is people themselves”. Countries, said Sobowale, amend their constitutions all the time, depending on the dictates of the times, citing as examples, the US, the U.K. and Canada. Nigeria, he said, could not be different.

The respected columnist also accused me of imputing the wrong motive to The Patriots when I pointed out that its suggestions were, in part, meant to save President Obasanjo from impeachment.

My original intention in writing this morning’s piece was, as you may have guessed from the title of last week’s piece, not only to continue from where I left off, but to also respond to similar accusations by my brother, Tunji Oseni, the Special Assistant to the President on Media, that my recent articles on his boss have shown scant respect for the facts, that they lacked the rigor of my past articles and that they have in any case, been downright rude.

I still intend to complete my response to Sobowale and also respond to Tunji. However, in the face of the tragic events over the weekend surrounding the Miss World pageant, my responses will have to wait till next week, God willing. For today, one feels obliged to share one’s opinion on the tragedy, for what it is worth.

To me, any which way you cut it, the conclusion is inescapable that the government’s involvement in the pageant was one more evidence of its penchant for creating problems for itself – and, of course, for the rest of the country – and then turning around to blame just about everyone else but itself.

In a multi-religious country like Nigeria, public opinion about staging the contest in the country at all, was bound to be mixed, but given the preponderance of Muslim opinion in a country whose majority is Muslim, it was clearly unwise to have planned the pageant for the holy month of Ramadan. Definitely it was unwise and improper for government to have involved itself in the sponsorship of such an event, which was supposed to be purely private.

But then typical of this administration’s know-it-all attitude, and in-your-face defiance of commonsense, President Obasanjo chose to backslide on a commitment he gave some leading Northern traditional rulers that he will respect Muslim sensibilities, and keep the beauty queens away until after Ramadan. Instead of keeping his word, he decided, probably with a little push from the First Lady, Stella, whose pet project the pageant was, not only to bring in the contestants at the beginning of Ramadan but also to give them red carpet welcome at the presidential wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, of all places, with the full compliment of the presence of some senior ministers like Professor Jerry Gana, to boot. As if this was not bad enough, the queens were shepherded, mostly half-naked, as it were, to the very seat of government to worship at the Villa Chapel!

That it was not only Muslims who were horrified by this apparent celebration of hedonism and vanity by the authorities, was clear from widespread public criticisms of government’s involvement in the show business. Yomi Odunuga, the Punch correspondent in Aso Rock, spoke the minds of such critics when he lamented the total lack of reverence in the Villa Chapel affair in his article in the paper’s edition of November 16. “If beauty pageant is not all about nudity”, he said, “then I wonder why this Rivers-born world queen wore that bare-it-all-nothing-left-to-the-imagination attire to the Villa Chapel. Yet we were presumably in God’s presence”. And it was not Agbani alone who was scantily dressed. All the 88 of them at the Chapel, said Odunuga, except “three or four, who were respectably dressed to the prayer service, were not looking any better than Agbani”.

To make matters worse, said Odunuga, there was not one word of admonition from Professor Yusuf Obaje, the Chapel’s chaplain, who, in the first place, should have insisted that the queens be decently dressed before coming to the chapel. Instead he was full of praise for them. “You represent the best of the Bible”, he reported said. “This is the greatest hour of our national history because this programme, for the first time in history, begins with a prayer, which means that your experience in this country will be wonderful. I believe you are models of character.”

Well, far from the experience of these “models of character” ending wonderfully, it started disastrously, the more disastrously for hundreds of innocent Nigerians who have lost their lives and limbs and property in Kaduna and Abuja because of the insensitivity of a government that believes it always knows what is best for Nigerians.

The authorities, of course, now have a convenient scapegoat in Thisday whose blasphemous publication disparaging the Muslim objection to the pageant sparked the weekend riots in Kaduna and Abuja. That publication was truly irresponsible but the action of government itself in deploying its resources, material and otherwise, in the service of the pageant’s organisers, was worse. It was after all, this government action, which amounted to a gratuitous disparagement of Muslim objection to the pageant, which created the atmosphere that engendered the feeling that others too could disparage Muslim objections to the pageant with impunity. In other words, if Thisday provided the spark that started the weekend violence, government’s action provided the firewood.

This, of course, is not to say that any time Muslims object to something, government should drop it and others should not criticize their objections. After all, this country does not belong to Muslims alone and Muslims are not always right. However, no reasonable person would say the request by the Muslim leadership for the rescheduling of the beauty pageant because of Ramadan fasting was unreasonable. Yet while the authorities appeared to have acceded to the request, they went ahead to bring in the queens just as the fasting began, knowing fully well that the moment they stepped into Nigeria they were bound to grab media attention and continue to do so well after they would have left. And it was no use arguing that no one who objected to the pageant was obliged to switch on his television or radio or read the papers, when the event was bound to get over-saturation coverage.

Therefore, the most probable explanation for government reneging on its promise was that it did not want to be seen by non-Muslims as bowing to so-called Muslim “blackmail” on this issue, as with so many others. It could not have been that Nigeria stood to gain anything from the media exposure of the country, considering the advertisement dictum that a bad product is more likely to fail faster than succeed at all from a great advertisement campaign. And Nigeria, given its poor infrastructure and shoddy services alone, is hardly anybody’s idea of a good product.

Not only that, to date, Nigeria has never made money from hosting any international event. Instead such events have always proved a veritable sinkhole for the tax payers’ money, with, of course, the officials involved laughing all the way to their banks. It was pretty obvious from the way the pageant’s organisers were carrying on, that theirs too was not going to be an exception to the rule. If anything it was more likely to have been worse.

That the transfer to London of the event may have saved the taxpayer the burden of hosting an event that has nothing but even more burden to add to his life, and that the country may also have been saved from an embarrassing exposure of its primitive infrastructure and shoddy services, among other things, was, of course, no thanks to the authorities who were determined to push ahead with the pageant, inspite of the violence that it had sparked. Barely hours before the pageant was transferred out of the country on November 23, President Obasanjo, himself, was telling the NTA emphatically that the show must go on, regardless.

He could not even help gloating over what he apparently imagined was Muslim discomfiture over the celebrity status which Muslim opposition to the pageant seems to have helped bestow on some Sharia convicts like Amina Lawal; the convicts, he told the NTA audience, have become rich and famous from media exposure and this has forced the Sharia states to think twice about sticking to Sharia! Earlier a spokesman of the Nigerian organisers of the event, had even cockily assured the BBC World Service that the event “will not be cancelled”, inspite of the riots in Kaduna and Abuja.

Obviously the shifting of the event to London, was because the participants themselves became fearful for their own lives and safety. Said Miss England, Daniela Luan in an interview with the London Sun. “I want to get on the next flight home. I am scared, terrified”. No less scared was Miss Ireland, Lynda Duffy, who told the Sun, “I want to be safe – that’s more important than any title.” However, less worried about her own safety than the loss of lives and limbs caused by the pageant, was Miss Scotland. “It’s not worth people dying over and I want to come home”, she reportedly told the Sun.

Obviously, the Nigerian authorities didn’t think the pageant wasn’t worth the lives and limbs of innocent people. However, now that they have been forced to let it go, one can only hope that they have learnt the lesson in the saying that prevention is always better than cure. Hopefully, they have also learnt that entertainment, especially show business, should never, in the first place, have received the kind of priority the authorities were more than willing to give to it, in the face of the mass poverty, mass unemployment and insecurity, etc, staring Nigerians in the face.