PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Plateau Crisis: The Press as the No. 1 culprit Last
week I argued on these pages that the recent ethnic and sectarian war
along the so-called indigene/settler divide in I also argued that even though the president was ultimately responsible for the ethnic and sectarian wars all over the place, the greater responsibility belongs to the mass media for essentially playing a divisive role in the history of this country. I then left off with a promise that this week I will try to show why the mass media is the No 1 culprit for the socio-political mess in which we have found ourselves. On the surface it would seem wrong to blame the mass media--for ease of reference let’s simply call them the press—for all the things that are wrongs with society, since the press merely serves as society’s mirror. If, for example, the actors in society are rouges, would it not be wrong and irresponsible for the press to say they are angels or vice-versa? However, scratch the surface a bit and you will find that the problem with our rhetorical question is that the messenger all too often distorts the message. In other words, all too often the press, as society’s mirror, does distort rather than merely reflect the image of the object standing before it. At times it does worse; it fabricates the images. Unfortunately the history of the Nigerian press, which is overwhelmingly dominated by the press along the Lagos/Ibadan axis, is a history of lots of distortions of and fabrications about the sociology, politics and economics of this country. My
principal witness here is Alhaji Isma’il Babatunde Jose, the doyen of
the Nigerian press, no less. In his 1987 book, Walking
A Tight Rope: Power Play in
Daily Times, Jose had this to say of the conduct of Nigerian press
in the run up to our Since
few newspapers existed outside Again,
Alhaji Babatunde Jose. “The Yorubas”, he said, “had literally
ruled In
other words, the In
this respect, two classic examples will suffice as proof. The first
involved Jose himself as the then northern regional editor of Daily
Times. On The
Northern leadership was still seething in anger for this apparent act of
bad faith, when Akintola took the campaign for Jose, as I said, duly reported all this in his paper. However, something strange, he said, happened to his report. “I had quite correctly described it in my copy as a riot between Hausas and Yorubas. Somehow, it appeared in the Daily Times as a riot between Hausas and Ibos, a very different matter and potentially a very dangerous error…We never ever found out how the mistake occurred. Was it as accident or was it a deliberate attempt to foment trouble?”
Fast rewind to 1943. This
time the principal actors were (1) Dr. Nnamdi
Azikiwe whose
firebrand journalism, epitomized in the West
African Pilot that he started in November 1937, changed the face of
colonial journalism, and (2) Alhaji Abubakar Imam, the most famous
editor of Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo,
the longest running and perhaps the most successful vernacular newspaper
in Nigeria. In his 1989 memoirs edited by Alhaji Abdurrahman Mora, Imam
narrated his experience as a member of an 8-man West African press
delegation led by Zik to the On
their return home, however, Imam soon discovered to his dismay that his
trust in the great Zik was misplaced.. During the sea journey, Zik, said
Imam, had drawn up a 21-point “Atlantic Charter and “I
was very happy” said Imam, “that Dr. Azikiwe took a keen interest in
me even though I refused to sign his ‘Atlantic Charter’. For,
throughout our sea journey and our stay in Such
was the relationship between Imam and Zik until they returned home only
for Imam to discover that a news dispatch that Zik had sent home to his Pilot
while they were still in the Zik’s dispatch did not stop at reporting Imam’s refusal to sign the “Charter”. Beyond that the paper’s editor went on to impugn the integrity and patriotism of Imam and the Sierra Leonian delegate who had joined Imam in refusing to sign. “Surely” said the editor, “M. Abubakar Imam and Mr. T.I.D. Thomson have disappointed us for their failure to sign. I am surprised that we still have Africans who will not be bold enough to ask for what they feel is their right”. As a result of the dispatch, said Imam, he became the object of attacks from many of his readers and admirers and even others who were not literate but heard rumours that he had refused to protect the interests of his people. Imam then felt obliged to explain to his readers why he refused to sign the charter. This, he said, was essentially because he had no mandate to make some of those demands and because others were of no relevance to his region. For example, he said, the demand for free education had no relevance to the North since it was already free. The problem was of reluctance by parents to send their children to school and the regional government was already taking steps to make it compulsory. To make matters worse, on the very day Imam completed his point-by-point explanation on why he refused to sign Zik’s charter, the Pilot, according to Imam, published a photograph captioned “People from Bida”. The people, he said, “were first jeered at and then called the type of people I said did not want compulsory education. Another photograph of an office was shown and captioned, ‘Imam says he does not see any need for a hospital in the north!’ Can this be my true position? How could such attitude lead to harmony and mutual understanding?” I am sorry if I have bored you with these rather lengthy stories about the Nigerian press during the colonial period, but I thought this was necessary to show what happened in Plateau has its roots in a press that has had a history of peddling hatred and casting a section of the country as the villain of Nigeria’s problems and therefore deserving of being put to the stake, or worse. Several generations after Zik, Imam and Jose, little, perhaps nothing, has changed about this attitude. On the contrary many a journalist and columnist have sought to build their careers on this demonisation of the so-called Hausa-Fulani. Foremost among such columnists was Chief Bola Ige who consistently referred to the Hausa-Fulanis as the Tutsis of Nigeria in his Nigerian Tribune column. Another was the late Justice Adewale Thomson who often said in his column, also in the Tribune, that corruption was second nature to Northerners, just like transparency was second nature to the Yorubas! Today’s
columnists and journalists like Azubuike Ishiekwene, editor of the PUNCH,
and Sina Odugbemi with The Comet,
seemed to have picked up from where the older ones left off. Ishiekwuene
once claimed that the murder of Ige and the January 27 OPC massacre of
Hausas in Fortunately,
it is not every journalist or columnist from the South who thinks every
problem of this country can be blamed on the North, more specifically on
the so-called Hausa-Fulani. Femi Osofisan, a pioneer writer at the Guardian
and a columnist with The
Comet is one such person. Writing over three years ago in The
Comet of “The Yoruba”, he said, “are really no better nor worse in their vices and virtues than any other ethnic group. Just as they give birth to cowards, so do they father intrepid men. Like others they have their heroes, just as inevitably as they nurture villains”. Osofisan
ended his piece, which I consider one of the most accurate analysis of Without doubt if our politicians had listened to Osofisan, but more importantly, if journalists had refused to allow themselves to be used by politicians to peddle those prejudices and hatred by simply doing their jobs as their profession demanded, we would not have suffered the tragedy on the Plateau, nor all these other wars in every corner of our country. It is still not too late for us to hearken to Osofisan’s words. |