PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 kudugana@yahoo.com

 

 

Miscellany

 

Last Saturday was supposed to have been a major success story for those of us at Arewa Media Forum (AMF). Instead it turned out a bit of a damp squib. Before I tell you how, I need to explain what the AMF is. As the name suggests, it is a forum of some northern professionals and businessmen concerned about the failure of the mass media, especially the private ones, in the north, something which has led to an unbalanced and, therefore, an unhealthy information order in the country.

           

The unique thing about the AMF is that its membership, unlike those of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) or the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) is not of professional journalists alone. Indeed, when it was formed nearly ten years ago, it was not even at the initiative of journalists. Currently, journalists dominate its membership and both its chairman (myself)  and its secretary, Mohammed Bomoi, are journalists, but some of its more active members are businessmen and other professionals like administrators, bankers, etc.

           

For more than two years after it was initiated by the late Malam Ahmed Salihijo of the Afri-Project Consortium (the Consultants of PTF) and a few of his friends with media savvy, it met once a month to find ways of redressing the information imbalance between the North and the South. Unfortunately, it petered out long before Salihijo died in 1999.

           

It was revived a little over three years ago with the same objectives and essentially the same membership. In those three years it is not apparent that it has made much progress in achieving its major objective of redressing the information imbalance in the country, an imbalance which has kept the North on the defensive.

 

However, it has had some success towards reviving the media profile of Kaduna, as a former regional capital, by inviting public figures at the centre of one controversy or the other, to have interactive sessions with journalists on those controversies. To date, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Umar Ghali Na’abba, the current Speaker, Alhaji Aminu Bello Masari and the Deputy Senate President, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu have participated in the interactive sessions which were well publicized. More public figures across the country and across the professions have since shown interest in participating in the sessions.

           

The AMF has also had some success in drawing the attention of those in authority to the need to re-examine its strategy of proliferating FM radio station, instead of boosting the old regional stations in Enugu, Ibadan and Kaduna and possibly creating a few more so that, say, a Yoruba or Itsekiri living in Maiduguri, or a Hausa or Nupe living in Port Harcourt, can be informed and entertained in his own language away from his native land. Of course local FM stations have roles to play in information and entertainment but, consistent with the government’s policy of privatization, the AMF thought it was best that government left the establishment of the FM stations mainly to the private sector, while concentrating on the regional stations.

           

Apart from its concern about the neglect of the old regional stations, the AMF has also tried to intervene in the privatization of the New Nigerian by trying to convince the Arewa Consultative Forum, the governors of the northern states and the management of the Bureau of Public Enterprises of the need for the ownership to remain essentially northern when it finally goes private.

           

All these are hardly earthshaking achievements but they pointed in the right direction and certainly were better than simply sitting on one’s buts and hoping that matters will sort themselves out on their own.

           

Early last year we decided to intensify our interface with the public by introducing an annual lecture series in which a major national figure will talk about a major national issue. After widespread consultations we decided to invite Chief Joseph Aderibigbe, one of Sir Ahmadu Bello’s acolytes and a former secretary to the Governor of Kwara State, to kick off the series with a speech on the theme of The North: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Along with the speech we also invited two veteran journalists, one a retired broadcaster and the other a retired newspaperman and now a media scholar, to talk about the relationship between the media, democracy and development using the North as a case study. Finally, we also decided to launch a collection in a book form of a number of papers delivered about five yeas ago on the subject of reporting the North. The papers were delivered by experts on various aspects of the media, including broadcast, print and the internet.

           

Initially, we fixed January 31 for the event, only to discover that it was the eve of Eid-el-Kabir and that our Special Guest of Honour, the Vice President Atiku Abubakar, the Chief Host, the Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, and several other important guests would be away for Hajj. We then shifted it to February 28, which was last Saturday.

           

This was what turned out a damp squib, instead of the huge success we had envisaged. The reasons were several. First, somewhat late in our preparations, we had to cancel the lecture series because Chief Aderibigbe, who had accepted our invitation in principle, received the formal invitation too late to get permission from the Bishop of his church for a couple of days leave as the chairman of the Committee in charge of organising a major annual event of the church. Second, the Daily Trust and FRCN, Kaduna, with its enormous reach, advertised the wrong dates for the events due to some inexplicable miscommunication between them and the AMF. Last but by no means the least, our event clashed with the formal opening of this year’s now famous Kaduna Trade Fair, which is its 25th.

           

It was not altogether surprising then that the event was a bit of a damp squip; the  size of  the audience was respectable but small and the takings from the book launch was also small. However, the quality of the audience more than compensated for its relatively small size, what with the presence of notable figures like Chief Sunday Awoniyi, Alhaji Adamu Fika, Alhaji Usman Faruk, former military governor of the defunct North-West State, Malam Turi Muhammadu, Alhaji Abba Kyari, former Managing Director of UBA Plc, Mr. Ndanusa Alao, Managing Director of New Nigerian and Malam Ahmed Rufai Mohammed, managing director of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, Alhaji Idi Farouk, director general of the National Orientation Agency, Honourable Dr Usman Bugaje, Alhaji Wada Maida, erstwhile managing director of the News Agency of Nigeria and Dr. Hafiz, standing in for the minister of defense, Dr. Rabie Musa Kwankwaso.  

          

The presence of these and other VIPs apart, the papers delivered by Alhaji Mohammed Ibrahim, former Director General of NTA, and Dr. Mvendaga Jibo, former political analyst at the New Nigerian and Daily Times and now an Associate Professor at the University of Jos, were very well researched and stimulating. Indeed the papers elicited so many questions and comments from the audience that the Chairman of the occasion, Malam Liman Ciroma,  former Secretary to the Federal Government, could only take a few due to time constrain.

           

Now, while those of us at AMF were engrossed with organising last Saturday’s media event, two even more important issues were hanging fire in the mass media. The first was the resumption of the controversial polio vaccination campagn which some three odd states in the North had rejected on grounds that the vaccines had been deliberately laced with, among other things, anti-fertility contaminants. The second issue was the revelation by The Guardian that the ministers of finance and foreign affairs were all along being paid their salaries in dollars.

           

To start with the “dollarised” ministers, I have read some defense of the government and the ministers in newspapers, notably by Segun Adeniyi in Thisday and Dr. Tunji Dare, a former Chairman of Editorial Board of The Guardian, in The Guardian, I think. I have also read Dr. Reuben Abati’s unequivocal condemnation of the whole thing in The Guardian.

           

I have no doubt that most people comparing the two opposing arguments will come down decisively on Abati’s side. First and foremost, the whole thing is downright illegal, if not criminal. Our laws forbid public officers from owning and operating foreign bank accounts. You may say it is an idiot law which is observed mostly in the breach, but it is simply not acceptable for government itself to break the law.

           

Second, it insults the intelligence of Nigerians for the defenders of this egregious act to say that the two ministers are making a sacrifice by accepting a small cut in their salaries. Reminds you, doesn’t it, of Mr. Gaius Obaseki’s “sacrifice” in descending to live in presidential suites at the five-star Nicon Hilton Hotel for four years instead of the palatial residence to which a man of his rank as the boss of our oil industry is “entitled”.

           

Third, it is simply not as if no one else in this country can do the jobs of the two ministers. Fourth with due respect to the experience and expertise of the two, there is nothing exceptional about their performance in office to date. If anything it has been worse than business-as-usual, especially at the ministry of finance which seems to have found no solution yet to the country’s monetary and fiscal mess of the last four years.

           

Yes, I agree completely with Abati that there is simply no justification for “dollarising” any minister of this country, or in any way discriminating between one cabinet minister and another.

           

Finally, the polio controversy. If it looks like there is no end in sight to the controversy, the greater portion of the blame must go to the Federal Government and World Health Organisation officials who prefer to ridicule and blackmail the rejectionists instead of addressing their fears. Yet these fears are not without a basis.

 

First, vaccines elsewhere, as in the Phillipines and Brazil, have been laced before. Second, the people of Kano State are yet to recover from Pfizer’s secret but dangerous experimentation not too long ago with meningitis vaccine in the state.

           

Third, it is disingenuous to blame the rejection of a vaccine entirely on religious bigotry and superstition. For several years now British parents have rejected single doze MMR (missiles, mumps and rubella) vaccine because of fears that it caused autism in children. And as if to underscore these fears, when British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was asked by  the press mid-last year, if he had submitted his new-born baby for MMR vaccination, he refused to answer, leading to speculations that he too had no confidence in the safety of the vaccine. No one has accused Blair or his British compatriots of religious bigotry or superstition, even though by then doubts were already being expressed about the study linking the vaccine with autism.

           

Fourth, I have talked to some of my public health doctor friends and read some simple literature on the polio and how it spreads. It seems to me ridiculous that WHO officials would claim that new cases of the diseases, first in Central African Republic, and then nearby Ghana, came from Kano, one of the states to reject the vaccine. The 1999 edition of A-Z Family Health Encyclopedia of the British Medical Association, had the following to say about the causes and incidence of Polio: “Infected people pass large number of virus particles in their faeces, from where they may be spread indirectly, or directly via fingers, to food and thus infect others. Airborne transmission also occurs.”

           

Obviously, close and sustained human contact is necessary for the disease to spread. Ghana, perhaps, but the human traffic between Nigeria and Central African Republic is hardly sufficient to justify the claim by WHO  that  Kano is to blame for their discovery of polio in CAR.

           

No, the solution to the polio controversy is not to ridicule or blackmail anyone into capitulation to the vaccine industry and its lobby or to corrupt government officials. The solution is to deal with the fears of the rejectionists, who, no doubt, do not want their children infected with any disease.