PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Obasanjo, NTA and the Politics of Religious Broadcast

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

Our takeoff point this afternoon is the editorial of Daily Trust of September 25. Titled “NTA’s religious broadcasting too clever by half”, the editorial expressed great anger at the way the NTA has insisted on inflicting the private devotions of President Obasanjo in the Villa chapel live on Nigerians every Sunday. “We insist”, said the paper, “that the weekly broadcast from the Villa chapel . . . violates the common patrimony of all Nigerians which the NTA’s airtime represents”.

Daily Trust was angry not only with NTA over the live coverage of the Villa chapel every Sunday, it was also angry with the authorities of the station over how it has “abandoned” the best tradition of journalism by turning the station’s news broadcast on Sunday into mainly reporting church sermons. This, argued the paper, does great injustice to its constitutional role as a mass medium and also serves to undermine religious harmony in the country.

The September 25 editorial was actually a follow-up to the paper’s first on the subject not too long ago titled “Obasanjo, Jerry Gana, NTA and religious broadcasts from the villa”. In that editorial it sought to draw public attention to the fact that the live broadcast of the president’s private devotion was unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. Hitherto, only clips of prayers on official occasions like Independence anniversaries or Armed Forces Day, or devotions during ceremonies like Christmas and Sallah, were broadcast.

This new twist to the coverage of the devotions of the country’s leaders, Daily Trust said in the words of its September 25 editorial, was indicative of “the cynical level to which the government of the day had sunk in trying to exploit religion”. This, continued the paper, was in spite of the president’s own warnings against the dangers inherent in playing religious politics in Nigeria.

In an apparent attempt to stem the angry response of Nigerian Muslims to its provocative broadcast, said Trust, the station has resorted to broadcasting clips from the Tafsir by the Chief Imam of the National Mosque in Abuja every Friday. This, said the paper, was simply being “too clever by half”.

It is difficulty, if not impossible, not to agree entirely with Daily Trust. The NTA’s live broadcast of the president’s private devotion in the Villa chapel every Sunday represents the kind of relationship that should never exist between the mass media and public office holders. The contrast between this relationship in Nigeria and the one in, say, the United States and the United Kingdom, our role models, couldn’t be sharper as would be testified to by anyone who has monitored the Hutton inquiry into the apparent suicide of Dr. Kelly, a British weapons expert, over a BBC report on Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

While in the US and the UK the government/media relationship is one of mutual respect, here in Nigeria it is an incestuous one of one partner raping the other and both apparently enjoying it.

Lord Hutton’s narrow remit which is to uncover the causes of Kelly’s death, is clearly an attempt to divert public attention away from the central issue of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. The central issue is that both the US and UK governments lied through their teeth about Iraq’s alleged possession of WMD to justify their invasion of the country. Instead of focusing on those lies which have since been exposed by the inability of the US/UK to produce any evidence that Iraq possessed any WMD nearly five months after their occupation of Iraq, the public’s attention is being diverted to the BBC’s admittedly sloppy reporting of Tony Blair’s subterfuge.

This diversion is apparent from the division in the British press over who is to blame for Kelly’s apparent suicide; is it BBC for its sloppy reporting of the “sexed up” intelligence report or is it Tony Blair and his men for trying to intimate Kelly for expressing scepticism over the accuracy of Blair’s dossier on Iraq?.

Most right wing newspapers like The Times and Daily Telegraph have blamed the BBC while liberal ones like The Independent and The Mail have tended to blame Tony Blair and his men.

Not only is the focus on who is to blame for Kelly’s death a diversion from the central issue in the Iraqi war, the fact that the debate is about the EXERGERATION rather than the FABRICATION of the Iraqi dossier shows the extent to which the diversion has succeeded. For, here we have a case where a country’s leader is told by some of his closest advisers that the intelligence report he was about to publish lacked any substance. “We will need to make it clear in launching the document”, Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, said in an e-mail, “that we do not claim that we have evidence that (Saddam) is an imminent threat”.

Exactly one week later, the prime minister goes ahead to claim that Saddam was not only an imminent threat, but that he could in fact activate his chemical and biological weapons “within 45 minutes”. Subsequently, he went on to claim that Saddam also bought uranium from our neighbouring Niger Republic, a claim which, like the WMD charge, has turned out not only to be blatantly false, but there is evidence that the prime minister knew he was lying when he made the claim.

But, dear reader, I too have digressed, albeit not without good reason. My subject this morning is not the lies and lies told by the US/UK axis of hegemony to justify their invasion of Iraq. This is a subject for another day, possibly next week. For now the subject, as I’ve said at the beginning, is what should be the relationship between public broadcasters and the governments of the day. I have narrated the BBC/Labour government fracas in some detail merely to show that the responsibility of a public broadcaster is essentially to the people and not to the government of the day, especially where truth and the common interest of the people are under threat as was clearly the case in Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq in spite of hostile public and sceptical expert opinion.

Never mind its sloppy reporting, the important fact was that the BBC found out that the intelligence report used to justify the Iraqi invasion was too weak to justify a war. Quite rightly it decided that it was in the greater interest of the public to disclose its finding. Naturally the government was not amused in the least by the disclosure. Very unwisely, however, it thought it could intimidate the BBC into apologising and retracting its report by latching unto BBC’s sloppy reporting of the issue. The BBC board and management, all independent minded men and women, refused to be intimidated and instead chose to stand firmly by their reporter. They were of course, all aware that BBC exists to serve the collective British interest. But they also knew, as trustees of the organisation, that they, and not some narrow-minded politicians, should be the best judges of how those interests were best served.

It is impossible to imagine this kind of thing happening in this country. Or is it? With the current crop of board and management of our public broadcasters, most certainly not. How can it, when their boards and managements could not even tell the government that it was absolutely unethical and unprofessional for them to honour the invitation of the ruling party to be part of the campaign organisation of its presidential candidate? How can they when their boards and managements do not see anything wrong in inflicting the private devotions of the president on their audience every Sunday?

It may be impossible for the current board and managements of our public broadcasters to stand up for what is right and proper but there is nothing inevitable about kowtowing to one’s political masters even in a Third World country.

Once upon a time the New Nigerian did it. It did so for nearly the first 20 years of its founding. So also did Radio Nigeria Kaduna under such venerable broadcasters as Alhaji Abba Zoru and the late Alhaji Dahiru Modibbo. So again, did the Daily Times under the equally venerable Dr. Babatunde Jose, during the period the federal government held a veto over its editorial judgement from 1976.

There is absolutely no reason why the records of the New Nigerian and Radio Nigeria Kaduna and Daily Times cannot be repeated or even surpassed. All that is required are professionals of high integrity and independent-mindedness and a political leadership with compassion, wisdom and humility. Right now both are sorely lacking and the prospects of their emergence do not look too good even in the medium term.

But then, who knows, the God whose name our leadership invokes in vain everyday and the same God who also works in mysterious ways, may choose to save Nigerians sooner than they think from the cynical manipulators of our religious and other differences for their own selfish ends.