PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Plateau Crisis: The Press as the No. 1 culprit

kudugana@yahoo.com

Last week I argued on these pages that the recent ethnic and sectarian war along the so-called indigene/settler divide in Plateau State and, by extension, similar wars elsewhere, was the fruit of President Obasanjo’s apparent adoption of vengeance as policy. That is, vengeance against the North for the “crime” of one of its leading sons, General Sani Abacha, who as Head of State, sent Obasanjo to jail for life and would indeed have executed him over allegations of complicity in a coup attempt against the late general, but for international pressure and providence. I argued that Obasanjo sought his revenge by adopting the time honoured strategy of divide and rule, in this particular case by seeking to divide the North along religious lines.

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 Independence in 1960. “The struggle for power as to which party or which of the three major ethnic groups – Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba – would control the federal government at independence was fierce. LIBELOUS FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION – HALF-TRUTHS DELIBERATE FALSE-HOOD, CHARACTER ASSASSINATION AND LITTLE OR NO RESPOECT FOR TRUTH – PREVAILED. (Emphasis mine).

Since few newspapers existed outside Lagos at that time, it is obvious from where the tradition of distortions and outright fabrications in the Nigerian press started. By the same token it is also clear that the principal victims were those from the sections of the country which had few newspapers to defend them.

Again, Alhaji Babatunde Jose. “The Yorubas”, he said, “had literally ruled Nigeria since the British came to the exclusion of the Hausas and Ibos. While the Yorubas had produced the second generation of graduates in law, medicine and engineering, the Ibos were just starting with the first generation. But the Hausas had not started at all… Lagos was Nigeria and there was resistance to the backward provincials coming to share power in Lagos ”.

In other words, the Lagos elite, which was essentially Southern, more specifically Yoruba, in composition, saw itself as the natural heir to the colonialists. However, because the North was more than half the population of Nigeria , democracy at Independence meant that the Lagos crowd could not win the war for power at the centre. In waging the war, the Lagos crowd used its media advantage over the North to the fullest, distorting and deliberately misrepresenting the words and deeds of the Northern political leadership.

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 May 18, 1953 , he reported the Kano riots which was provoked by a campaign rally speech by Chief S.L. Akintola, then deputy leader of the Action Group. The campaign had been preceded by the rejection by the Northern Peoples Congress (N.P.C.) of the self-government motion moved by the Action Group , as a result of which the Northern leaders, including the region’s Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, were booed by the crowd in Lagos and all the way to Ilorin on their way by train back to Kaduna. These crowds had been served a distorted version of what happened in the Lagos House of Representatives by the Lagos press. The Northern leadership had requested for a little more time to prepare itself for Independence to which the Southern leadership seemed to have agreed, only to turn around and portray the North as preferring servitude under the colonialists to self-rule.

The Northern leadership was still seething in anger for this apparent act of bad faith, when Akintola took the campaign for Independence to Kano . “The Hausa’s” said Jose in his book “felt insulted in their own home ground by Akintola who addressed the crowd in fluent Hausa. Lives were lost and property damaged.”

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 United Kingdom . Throughout their journey and  stay in the UK , said Imam, Zik became his best friend and tutor and someone he came to trust completely.

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 British West Africa ”, for the consideration and endorsement by the editors. This was a list of demands for social, economic and political reforms for the sub-region. Imam and the delegate from Sierra Leone refused to sign, while the Gambian delegate signed with 19 reservations.

“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 England we shared the same room. Dr. Azikiwe and myself were almost always together. He taught me a lot of things. The only thing he could not teach me was how to dance. I accompanied him to the dances and held his coat for him. When he was tired we drove back home”.

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 UK had engulfed the North, to use his own words, in “a conflagration of ignorance”.

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 Lagos were essentially the handiwork of “northern politicians whose access to patronage has been severely curtailed”! (Saturday PUNCH March 9, 2002 ). Much earlier, Odugbemi had argued in The Comet that every group in Nigeria , except the Hausa-Fulani, had a “legitimate grouse” against the way the country was being run. The ethnic minorities in the North, he said, were struggling to rid themselves of “Hausa-Fulani imperialism”, the Niger-Deltans were up in arms against the degradation of their environment and the robbery of their oil, presumably by the Northern leeches, while the “educated and articulate Middle class of the South generally, particularly the Yoruba bourgeoisie,” simply wanted the country to be properly run. Well, this “articulate and middle class Yoruba bourgeoisie” has been running this country in the last five years, and see what a big mess it has made of it.

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 December 17, 2000 , he pointed out, quite correctly, that no ethnic or other group in this country, or for that matter anywhere in the world, has a monopoly of vice or virtue.

“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 Nigeria ’s problems, with a clarion call to politicians and journalists alike to put an end to the use of emotion-laden labels like ngbati, kobokobo and gambari as propaganda weapons against each other. “It is”, he said, “the frenzy of the political war lords, along with the hysteria of media headlines that turns these words into murderous identity tags. Is it not time, after these years of fighting, to take down those fences of prejudice and reach one another across our artificial barriers?”

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.