24 Oct 2008 |
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The Arrest of Jonathan Elendu and the Resurrection of Tyranny in Nigeria By Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh Whenever tyranny is confronted with the evidence of its evils, it consults violence. This inheres in the fact that its core is a rotten assemblage of visionless inertia and eternal anomie. It has nothing to recommend it to reason. It advertises raw might that is consigned to the jungle, as a credible currency in affairs where civility is called upon to arbitrate. But men of courage across all times have always craved liberty or death. They have forever preferred a life of freedom, to that of comfortable slavery, no matter the guise under which it is packaged. When the choice draws over to that between liberty and death, they have willingly chosen to yield their lives to ensure that their posterity will not be called upon to endure such indignities. Patrick Henry spoke for all men of courage for all times. I would not know what you may choose. But for me, it is either that I have my freedom or I am ready to pay with my life, so that my posterity will not have to contend with such primeval indignity. But since tyranny is never a charitable enterprise, it never yields its strangulating hold willingly. It is never ready to get its fangs off the bleeding flesh of its victims, until it is forced to do it, by a higher power, both actual and moral. Tyranny’s congenital disability is that it chooses to lord it over us without our consent. And to effectively achieve that, it seeks absolute control over our fundamental freedoms. Jean Jacques Rousseau must have had the range between the micro-tyrannies of the world and the macro-dictatorships environing man, when he opined that we are born free, but have been everywhere in chains. Slavery in whatever form or shape is the most debilitating and most morally depraved of all human situations. Dictatorships and tyrannies seek the enslavement of the people, whom democratic principles designated as the sovereign. The evil in totalitarianism lies in the fact that it assumes omnipotence, which is not an attribute of finite beings. Omnipotence resides outside human society. This explains why Aristotle contended that whoever seeks omnipotence, or seeks to reside outside the society of men is either a god or a beast. And since these guys are certainly not gods, their bestial nature certainly comes to the fore, supersedes, and influences their actions in the social arena. This explains why many tyrants in history have tried to create gods out of themselves. They hued statues dedicated to their images and constructed theologies to back up their self-worship. Roman emperors from Nero to Caligula were all cast in this mould. Hitler did it in his neotonic fixations of an Aryan supremacy. Stalin exercised the power of life and death, with an iron sceptre over much of Soviet Union’s history. Emperor Jean Bokassa and Mobutu sesse Seko were central African examples of god-complex. Sani Abacha created a citadel of corruption and sycophancy on Nigeria’s seat of power. The list is endless. The examples are inexhaustible. Every government is susceptible to degenerating into a tyranny. Power possesses such facility in the most proximate potency. It is the ontological fault-line which underlies human finitude. Lord Acton was not sleepwalking into reality, when he opined that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He restated a fact that has played out severally under history’s gaze. This explains why Montesquieu called for the effective checks of power by its separation and concentration in various hands which would effectively act as a formidable check and balance against one another. But nothing scuttles tyrannical designs in a polity like the eternal vigilance of the population. Vigilance has been the price of liberty. This lies in the fact that the human mind is so very ingenious at avaricious contrivances. Power has throughout history; sought ways of lulling the maid of popular vigilance to sleep as to enable it construct pedestals of its debaucheries without let. To this end, human history has borne unholy witness to the bastardization of the separation of power concept in so many instances. The executive, legislative and judicial powers have been in history cannibalized by ogres in power, as to nullify their potency to check and balance each other. But since nature reacts to disequilibrium with the same promptitude with which it creates it; these three estates of the realm got back a long-lost brother, namely the press. This became the fourth estate of the realm and is coeternal and of the same age as human attempts at governance. The vocation of the journalist has been to keep power responsible, while informing the masses, educating them and entertaining them as well. Entertainment is not the major vocation of journalism. It is education. The journalist is the modern gadfly, who insists that both parties of the social contract attend to the terms of the contract. The government is constantly under the microscope of journalists, who knowing the frailty of the men of power act as checks on them and their policies as to forestall capricious whims from taking up life as law of state. It is a very noble vocation. It could equally be abused like Fox News and the obnoxious, partisan-fanaticism of Bill O’reilly and Sean Hannity are in the habit of doing. But be that as it may, the journalist serves a social function which is indispensable as it is sacred. They tell truth to power. But power most times prefers to hear the praises of its farting being sung in symphony across the land. Many journalists, who in allegiance to the sacrosanctity of their vocation have refused this sycophantic posture of acting as cheerleaders for irresponsible power, have lost their heads. Many of them are in prison. But their courage and dissidence remain the beacons of hope for human society. Many a journalist has seen the blossoming of reason-resistant sycophancy in corridors of power. They have seen and reported on the jesters who trade in gossip and peddle rumours as the policy of state all because of their nearness to power. And many of them have seen and entered a dissent on the use of tax-payers money to underwrite such sleazy waster of human resources and decadence. Exposures like this have fanned the banners of tyranny cold in so many instances. Tyrants are afraid of the press because of the ontological disability of their claims to power. Tyrants since the days of the Machiavellian Prince have always known like David Hume articulated that every government’s stay on the tribunes of power is based on the opinion of the people. And once that opinion gets massively unfavourable, the government loses its authority to govern. To this end, many governments and power players across time have sought to manage information through censorship like the medieval Inquisition did with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; the advertisement of raw might like Yar Adua is doing in Nigeria today, just like Abacha, IBB, Obasanjo and Buhari before him did; dissimulation like the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird did in the United States in the 1940s; book burning like Hitler did in Nazi Germany; government-sponsored controlled assassination like was the lot of Anna Politovskaya in Russia and even with judicial death sentences like is the case in many dictatorships across the world today Tyrants since time began have been afraid of information because Information banishes ignorance and leads to knowledge. And since knowledge is power, information which necessitates knowledge is a powerful instrument that strikes fear into the hearts of tyranny. To this end, tyrants have sought a management of it. The rise of tyranny in history has always been marked by the avid desire to censor and control information, or to clamp down on the press. In the recent actions of Yar Adua, we see a renascent tyranny, rising from the depths of rottenness, like Poseidon rising from the sea. Over and above that, tyranny is cowardice protected by popular timidity. Every tyrant is a coward. But the people are too timid to see that. This explains why every tyranny fears the innocent confrontation of ideas, which has forever being the brewery of human progress. Tyrannies are societies in geometric regress. Progress is foreign to this embrace because there is no intercourse of ideas, which fertilizes and brings forth innovation. Everything in this construct is an anachronistic psalm composed to sing the praises of a political megalomaniac. This explains why tyrannies expend great resources to sculpt statues of the tyrant, or to name every public square, toilet, street and institutions after him. Journalists have stood most times against such obscene misapplication of the resources of state. But since power will always want to have its way, journalists are misconstrued as enemies of state, because every tyrant grows to see and equate himself with the state. To that end, a journalist challenging the translation of his caprice into law remains forever a persona non grata in his computations. In spite of all these attempts at information censorship, the journalist’s has been a high moral ground. Although Napoleon realised that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that Thomas Jefferson in contemplating what to choose, when the choice is between a government and a free press, showed no hesitation in choosing a free press; the journalist has remained an endangered species. Although the press have been vocal advocates of freedom and social justice, many journalists have been denied freedom and justice, simply because of their advocacy. But any society that allows tyrannies to mistreat and persecute journalists is simply writing its obituary. Governments that have killed journalists have also been known to be the same governments that will bath no eyelid in massacring its own citizens, whenever the tyranny feels its position threatened. Tiananmen Square is an eternal instance of this. The journalist has been the guy who speaks for the common man. If the journalist is killed today, the government will entertain no hesitation in massacring the common man tomorrow, since his mouthpiece is no more. Be that as it may, any government that arrest government or attempts to censor information is not only dangerous; such a government has admitted its own incompetence. It has passed a vote of no confidence on itself. And the people should not hesitate in sacking such a government. Why a journalist would be tried for leaking state’s secrets. That is to say that the government is so incompetent that it cannot protect its secrets. I have scarcely read of a journalist that broke into a government’s ministry and stole files contains state’s secrets. Many of the alleged secrets are given to journalists by the people who made them secret in the first instance. And most of the so called secrets in the Nigerian parlance are acts of treason committed by the rulers against the Nigerian state, which they feared will attract for them, the displeasure of the electorate. In spite of the classic perfidy of tyranny as loosely recounted above, the Nigerian situation is not getting better. In fact, dangerous times are now upon us. The arrest of Jonathan Elendu is only a tip of the iceberg. The government of Umaru Musa Yar Adua has at last started showing its tyrannical fangs. It is no more content with its sickening incompetence and consolidated corruption. Now it wants to show its more sinister side. It wants to show that in spite of the mantra on its lips, it cares no hoot about the rule of law. The facts of the case are as follows: Mr. Jonathan Elendu, one must remember is a Nigerian-American online journalist and internet blogger. With his website Elendureports.com, this guy was among the pioneers who took it up themselves to liberate Nigerians from the massive dosage of falsehoods that our governments and men of power dish out on Nigerians on a daily basis. These online frontiersmen took their passion for their country seriously. The ferreted information that asked hard questions about the outright lies that the Nigerian government have been feeding Nigerians. That was his only crime. Other things are mere allegations. Mr. Elendu is guilty of the above crime. But the great thing about this guilt is that what he did was not a crime. The dysfunctional Nigeria security apparatus SSS, which is an agency dedicated to the god of torture, picked up Mr. Elendu on arrival at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja and have been holding him incommunicado since then. He has been denied access to his family and to his lawyers. And more than 48 hours since his arrest, no charges have been preferred against him. He has not been arraigned before any court. He is still being held under the funny ruse of investigating him. I wonder if Nigeria is a state of emergency as to warrant the suspension of Habeas Corpus. All these are simply pointers to the fact that the Nigerian journalist now more than ever is an endangered species. He stands between two corrupt walls. On one hand masses an estate of corrupt politicians and outright crooks; underwriting a massive campaign to make puppets and parrots of official cant out of them; and on the other is a corrupt state so very afraid of having its undeodorized ass exposed by the searchlights of conscientious journalism. As sad as it is, we urge Umaru Musa Yar Adua, the man presently in custody of a stolen mandate, to release this man to his family. Mr. Yar Adua must know that Nigerians have borne his incompetence bravely; we would not add tyranny to that yoke. Release Mr. Elendu now!!!!
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