21 Nov 2008 |
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The ‘bad news club’ By Levi Obijiofor Friday, 21 November 2008 Early this year, I received an angry reaction to one of my articles. The writer, apparently appalled by what he perceived as my preoccupation with negative reports about people and events in Nigeria, wrote in a gust of resignation: “When will you write about positive things in Nigeria?” As if he was unsure the question would make any impact on me, he asked a more direct but forceful question: “When will you and your members of the ‘Bad News Club’ find positive things to write about Nigeria?” The writer’s intention was unmistakeable. Implicit in the second question were two levels of meanings. First, the writer’s dissatisfaction with my essays which he felt tended to focus on negative things about the country. Second, and in a more generic sense, the writer believed that newspaper columnists in Nigeria were couriers of bad news because all that he saw in newspaper columns were negative and depressing commentaries about people and events in Nigeria. Are there reasons to justify the writer’s righteous anger? Do Nigerian newspaper columnists deliberately ignore good news? Do newspaper columnists derive some gratification from ceaseless condemnation of national institutions and leaders? I am not persuaded that columnists deliberately set off to write bad news about people and events in the country. Good news events occur in Nigeria. However, on balance, bad news tends to dominate. It’s all about the volume, frequency and newsworthiness of bad news vis-à-vis positive events. Columnists cannot be regarded as messengers of bad news. Columnists don’t create news. They comment on news events. Why do columnists criticise? Columnists criticise not because criticisms provide them the tonic they need to be alive. Embedded in every genuine criticism is the desire for positive change. Fair criticisms are intended to galvanise national leaders to attend to urgent national problems, to make political leaders to sit up and halt the daily menu of scandals that tarnish the country’s image, to compel politicians to fulfil their election campaign promises, to remind national leaders to provide basic services for the people and to make them accountable and responsible to the people they represent. A review of events in the past six months would show the regularity with which bad news events dwarf positive news in Nigeria. Where can you find good news in Nigeria? You won’t find good news in the College of Legal Studies, Yola, Adamawa State, where the provost has invoked 18th century disciplinary measures and applied them on a number of students. Three students were recently suspended for one semester each. Why? Well, the old-fashioned provost was offended that the students embraced themselves happily at the conclusion of an examination. Worst still, nine students who protested to the House of Assembly over the manner in which the provost punished their three colleagues were rusticated -- believe it or not – for daring to complain to the state legislators. In one moment of sheer madness, the provost has unjustifiably interrupted, on flimsy grounds, the educational careers of his students. The provost’s actions constitute an affront on our sense of fairness and decency. His actions signify a gross violation of the students’ fundamental rights. The victimised students were not given an opportunity to defend themselves. How should students in this college express happiness in future? Perhaps, in the provost’s twisted sense of judgment, the students should rejoice by crying or frowning. There is no positive news about Nigeria when some fraudulent people in Akwa Ibom State engage, in religious pretence, in unbelievably disgusting practices in which children are tortured, forced to drink human blood and other concoctions in the name of exorcism. Thanks to the investigative skills of a British television channel, the world has now seen how we harm and kill children in our society. Religion, the way it is being abused and misapplied in Nigeria, may prove to be the final addictive substance that would finish off everyone – pastors, healers and followers. In the name of religion, Olusegun Obasanjo, a man who governed for eight years but failed the nation in many ways, told journalists in July this year that Nigerians should seek God’s intervention to solve the nation’s electricity problems. Asked about his opinion on how Nigeria could get out of the gridlock in the electricity sector, Obasanjo said: “Anything you don’t have or you cannot get, then leave it to God.” We would have loved to heed Obasanjo’s advice if not that his government appropriated billions of naira for the power sector and achieved nothing. It was in recognition of Obasanjo’s rare superhuman qualities and superlative wisdom that the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, appointed Obasanjo to go in search of peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do you appoint a man who promoted divisive politics in his country to seek peace in another country? Ban Ki-moon should answer that question. There is certainly nothing good in the relationship between the press and the government of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua when journalists are regularly harassed, threatened, arrested and detained unlawfully. It is bad news when Yar’Adua threatens to sue a newspaper for publishing a story about his health but then allows agents of the state to engage in incessant questioning and harassment of the editorial and management staff of the same newspaper. Given a choice between a government that arrests and detains journalists unlawfully and a government that rushes to court each time journalists go wrong, Nigerian journalists would opt for a government that adheres to the principles of the rule of law. In spite of all the hype about rule of law, Yar’Adua hasn’t demonstrated that he rules by respecting national laws. It is for this reasons that journalists would prefer to go to court rather than be arrested and detained unlawfully because the court provides a non-threatening environment, indeed a level playing field where journalists can defend their news reports. Illegal detention rooms in Abuja and elsewhere are not the right places to conduct legal tests of journalistic misconduct. As further evidence of increasing human rights abuses, the nation witnessed two weeks ago the brutalisation of a young woman by six naval ratings in Lagos. What the video recording of that event showed were lawlessness, callousness and inappropriate conduct by six men in uniform who acted as though they were in a jungle hunting feral animals. Exactly four weeks ago, the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation visited the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency and the members were stunned to learn that there was no radar cover for the nation’s airspace. It was a scandal that exposed the dangers of air travel in the country. It was only after the indignity was blown open that federal officials hurriedly began to address the problem. Why should federal officials wait for a disaster to occur before they address life-threatening problems? The bad news just keeps coming. You won’t find good news in the awkward behaviour of an election umpire who went into hiding during the 1993 presidential election and emerged 15 years later clutching a badly written book containing weird accounts of the events of 1993. Humphrey Nwosu’s sudden emergence from his grotto, after 15 years of self-imposed exile, was a joke the nation did not deserve. Remember that Nwosu was the chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) in 1993. So, when Nwosu announced in June 2008 the results of an election conducted in June 1993, he looked like a man who had been in coma since 1993 but suddenly regained consciousness and began to talk about the past. The absurdity of Nwosu’s performance was that he did not have the legal and moral authority and credibility to announce the results of the 1993 election in 2008. You never know with Nigerian leaders. One day, Nwosu could be conferred with a national medal for bravery rather than cowardice. When newspaper columnists write frequently about poor performance by public officers and scandals of extraordinary proportions, it is important to understand that columnists don’t make the news. In the past two weeks, the leadership of the House of Representatives has been drenched in allegations of financial malfeasance involving the purchase of over 300 Peugeot cars and some luxury home entertainment products such as television sets. True or false, the scandal has raised questions about the House leadership’s sense of priority, the purposes for which the cars and TV sets were bought, as well as the moral message being conveyed by the House leaders’ ostentatious lifestyle at the expense of tax payers.
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