Opinion

By Tonnie Iredia

This year’s convocation lecture of the fast growing Edo State University, Uzairue, the 4th since its inception has been held at the university campus in Uzairue, Etsako local government area of Edo state. The topic was ‘Rethinking the role of mainstream and social media in national development’- a topic which aptly suited the times coming some 48 hours after this year’s International day to end impunity for crimes against journalists. The occasion gave me the opportunity as the convocation lecturer to make the point that in spite of hostility towards the media by politicians using the law enforcement agencies, Nigerian journalists must continue to push for more development in their country. They must reject political intimidation while remaining steadfast in meeting the obligation of their chosen profession. They did it before under a more severe and tense atmosphere and can do it better now if they are strategic and organized.

At several junctions in Nigeria’s history, the media has always faced persecution for fighting a noble cause in the interest of the nation. During the colonial era for instance, the anti-colonial posture of Nigerian activists made up mostly of journalists was countered by a plethora of legal anti-media provisions beginning with the Newspapers Ordinance No, 10 of 1903. The law required every prospective newspaper proprietor to make, sign and swear affidavits containing their addresses and those of their printers and publishers before embarking on any newspaper production. It also required each media proprietor, to execute a bond of 250 pounds with two sureties. This was to make it easy to trace any person who breached any of the provisions of the ordinance. Expectedly, many journalists were harassed, fined and jailed for their critical writings against alien rule.

At independence when everyone had imagined that peace had eventually come, media battles for the development of the nation did not abate. This time, the media was obliged to reflect the frustrations of Nigerians over the anti-democratic attitudes of the indigenous leaders of the first republic who criminalized dissent and rejected the democratic principles of accountability and credible elections. In 1961, regional elections in the North and the East were massively rigged. The 1964 elections into the federal house of representatives and the nation-wide workers strike which followed in the year were all poorly managed. The violence which greeted the fake election results in the 1965 elections in Western Nigeria gave the media the impetus to mount huge criticisms against the government of the day. This helped the military to seize political power in 1966.

The rigidity of military disposition showed through several military coups that the media would have to fight the military. Several decrees promulgated by the military put both the media and the average Nigerian in jeopardy. Activists were detained without trial while the few kangaroo prosecutions organized by the military were done using a strange law requiring accused persons and not the prosecution to prove innocence. Publishing strong editorials criticising the highhandedness of the military led to the banning of the circulation of several newspapers. Many journalists got bruised but the media survived. The implication of this therefore is that if the media could survive a battle with armed military leaders, nothing can successfully intimidate its professionals from continuing to act as the watch-dog and mirror of society as well as the voice of the voiceless.

Luckily two major developments have since occurred to embolden the media. To start with, for the first time in the history of Nigeria, the media was in 1999 specifically mandated to hold leaders accountable to the people. This assignment was embedded in the highest law of the land – the constitution, specifically Section 22. The provision makes sense because the sovereignty of the people is the highest feature of democracy; the rationale being that anyone in power is there to represent the people. Every leader ought to be accountable to the people. In other words, Nigerian media professionals are since 1999, legally empowered to take-on a function they assumed on their own in the past. There is thus no reason why the journalists of today should allow themselves to be intimidated from carrying out a constitutional assignment.

The second strong point which seamlessly strengthens the media is the efficacy of the digital platforms of the social media. Unlike the mainstream media, social media platforms are exceedingly pervasive. In the absence of allocation of frequencies used by government to curtail the broadcast media, they have no limitations as to scope of operations. The social media is interactive and conversational thereby attracting public participation. It is true that its availability for use by all stands the risk of its being used to propagate fake news and misinformation but media professionals who are trained to practice journalism know what to do to use the new media form to perform well. The digital platforms are quite useful for speedy gathering and prompt delivery of information to the public. The only caution is that while using the platforms, media professionals should always remember the highest ethical value of their profession which is the sanctity of truth. Put differently, the media should use the platforms provided they ascertain the veracity of every material they decide to use.

There is no better time than now for the Nigerian media to rise to rescue the nation. Apart from Nigeria’s current insecurity, the highest since its existence, the country has suddenly become the poverty capital of the world. It is time to halt the nation’s poor governance and in the spirit of section 22 of our constitution compel our politicians to stop replacing governance with unending electioneering campaigns. Ordinarily, this would not have been the best time to insist on this, because we are now in the normal time allocated to electioneering but we need to remember that the current electioneering began as soon the last elections ended. Politicians did not wait for the electoral body to signal the beginning of campaigns for the 2023 elections. There are indeed some politicians who are already allowing the 2027 contests to consume them right now. The media should never allow the campaign against social media by politicians to discourage them from using the digital platforms to create some political sanity in the country.

It is time for the leadership of the media at all levels to insist that when a journalist raises an allegation against a political leader, the subsisting collusion between government officials and the security agencies to immediately convert the allegation into a charge of treason and terrorism should stop. The way forward is for the allegation to be investigated. If it is false, the law should take its course and the journalist should be duly penalized. The present attitude of sweeping the allegation under the carpet by incarcerating the maker is not in the interest of the nation. It only festers unbridled corruption and impunity. By virtue of section 35 of our constitution, no security agency has a right to detain an accused person beyond 48 hours without a court order as they have been doing in Cross River, Imo and Ebonyi states. No political leader has a right to order the detention of journalists simply because the materials published by them are not in his favour. As I stated at Edo University last Friday, section 308 of our constitution gives immunity from prosecution to president and his vice as well as governors and their deputies while they are in office but that immunity from prosecution cannot be extended to immunity from criticism or immunity from being held accountable to the people.

The Nigerian Union of Journalists NUJ and the Nigerian Guild of Editors NGE must immediate depart from mundane unionism and offer robust leadership to their members. Both bodies must combine to take-on any authority that deprives the media from carrying out the assignment given to it by the constitution. This is electioneering time, the media particularly television should stop providing valuable air time to party representatives to tell us their different sides to intra or inter party conflicts. Such time should be given at all times between now and voting day to throw light on party manifestos and strategies for implementing them. Nigerians have since become tired of hearing campaigns that are devoid of the real issues that can uplift our nation.

November 6, 2022

By Tonnie Iredia

The beauty of democracy is the order it brings to bear on governance. Unlike other forms of government, democracy institutionalizes freedom and charts a clear path for the establishment and conduct of government business. Although politicians perceive elections as the preeminent segment of democracy, the reality is that there are other aspects of the system, that are more important than the selection of persons to hold political offices. Indeed, there is a school of thought which insists that the sovereignty of the people on whose behalf government is run is the basic foundation of democracy. Nothing in essence can be more important in any venture than its ownership. Therefore, any system which seeks to convert the people of a nation into the object rather than the subject of governance is not true democracy.

Another crucial feature of democracy is the rule of law which provides for equality of all citizens before the law and which abhors impunity and dictatorial tendencies. Again, for democracy to be said to exist in a country, majority rule and the protection of minority rights must also be provided for in such a country. Above all, there is the rational understanding that the purpose of democracy is the development of society and the improvement of the living standards of the people. This cannot be achieved if as is done in Nigeria, governance is permanently displaced by electioneering. Watchers of Nigeria’s democracy cannot but agree that the nation’s political class is forever consumed by arrangements for the next set of elections immediately after one set ends; thereby stultifying the growth and development of the country. It was for this reason that some analysts may have hailed last week’s warning by President Muhammadu Buhari to his Ministers and other political appointees to not abandon their duties for electioneering.

Buhari spoke last Tuesday at the closing session of the 2022 Ministerial Performance Review Retreat. He insisted and rightly too that the business of government must continue to receive the needed attention notwithstanding that the nation had entered the peak period of electioneering campaigns. Of course, the improvement of performance management as well as the coordination and implementation of presidential priorities for which the president signed Executive Order 012 on the occasion would be undermined if the attention of ministers is shared between governance and electioneering. In fact, ensuring that government business remains on course is crucial at this point because of the implication which a properly arranged performance has for the transition to another administration.
Although Buhari stated categorically that any breach of his warning would be viewed seriously, many believe that the warning was mere politics. Such cynics cannot be blamed because apart from the quiet dropping of two ministers – Mohammed Nanono and Saleh Mamman in charge of the Ministries of Agriculture/Rural Development and Power respectively in September 2021, the president is not known for sacking any minister or top political appointee. In another clime, many of Buhari’s ministers would hardly last beyond a year just as many citizens would have openly condemned governors particularly those of the ruling party who seem to cherish the excessive politicisation of their duties.

Surprisingly, President Buhari who is known for calling his party members to order whenever they derailed, did not halt the decision of his party to turn a governor who was elected to serve a state into the party’s national chairman. As we argued when it was done, the move was unconstitutional as governors were not expected to be distracted from running their states. Indeed, the reason our constitution provided for immunity for president and his vice as well as governors and their deputies was to stop Nigerians from using extreme litigation to distract them from governance. All the arguments about a political party having the power to ask any of its members to undertake certain assignments are in breach of the spirit of the constitution which requires governors to concentrate on societal development. As at today there is hardly any governor in any political party that is not engaged in such self-distraction for political consideration. It is in fact a major reason why governance is weak in Nigeria.

Against this backdrop, last week’s warning by the president to all his appointees to ensure that government business remained thriving is a step in the right direction though some analysts might see it as feeble because it was the third time this year that top political office holders have been so directed to remain dutiful. It will be recalled that some six months back, the federal government had formally directed those of them nursing political ambition to resign their appointments so to avoid divided loyalty. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation Boss Mustapha who issued the circular clarified that the directive affected “all ministers, heads and members of extra-ministerial departments, agencies and parastatals of government, ambassadors as well as other political appointees.” Again, when some ministers picked party nomination forms to run for elective offices, they were directed to stay in office or resign. The ministers of Science and Technology, Education (state) Niger Delta Affairs and Transportation duly resigned while others such as those in charge of Justice, Petroleum (state) and Labour stayed back.

If the real purpose of the occasional directives was to prioritize governance, it is difficult to see why any cabinet minister should be allowed to serve in the ruling party’s presidential campaign council when other members of cabinet such as vice president Yemi Osinbajo and SGF Boss Mustapha were rightly excluded from the list. Labour and Employment Minister (state), Festus Keyamo should similarly be excluded. If done it would offer ample time and opportunity for the president to use all (not some) of his appointees to assiduously supervise the completion of his legacy projects. In the case of Minister Keyamo in particular, the rising unemployment in the land clearly suggests that his schedule of engaging more hands in the special public works in our rural areas should be revived and expanded. The engagement of 774,000 Nigerians under the scheme should not be abandoned because it is a visible and worthy investment policy. Apart from the utility value of the digging and clearance of rural feeder roads and irrigation canals, the advantage of continuing to ensure that such a large number of citizens are gainfully engaged even on an ad hoc basis cannot be overemphasized.

In any case pulling out top political appointees to join the electioneering campaign team of the ruling party is not what should bother government at this point in time. Combative campaigns across the nation in the form of inter party attacks is a more problematic development that requires immediate action. The other day, the National Chairman of the Labour Party, Julius Abure, was forced to cry out over what he described as coordinated attacks on members of the party in Ebonyi, Enugu Lagos and some other states of the federation. At about the same time, the PDP claimed that her members were attacked by party thugs in Kaduna. INEC has since condemned the development and vowed to take up the matter with the leadership of the political parties.

Government should exercise greater control on law enforcement agencies that ought to prevent and or combat violent campaigns. The continued violence at campaign rallies and other political venues places a dark spot on law enforcement. The show of force exhibited at the Lekki toll gate last week to stop an otherwise peaceful protest which democracy permits would have made more sense if directed at political thugs. Instead law enforcement agents are habitually absent at venues of political violence making it appear that they had been compromised to look the other way during such lawlessness. It is time for government to sanction those in charge of law enforcement wherever violent campaigns occur.
October 23, 2022

For every observer who has been following national assembly committees’ sittings vis-a-vis probes, oversight functions and public hearings, it is easier to observe that, in most cases, the substance is left to pursue shadow.

The same could be said to have played out when the senate committee on finance led by Senator Olamilekan Solomon Adeola in its usual grandstanding of putting the cart before the horse and apportioning blames ‘harsh-hosted’ the management of the National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies NBAIS on the 19th of September, 2022.

I followed with utmost unease, the intimidation strategy and conscious manipulations of facts adopted by the committee members. NBAIS registrar, Prof. Mohammad Shafi’u Abdullahi on the orders of Senator Adeola was asked to switch off his microphone midway when he tried to clear issues of revenues and remittances of the agency.

How could one be expected to explain, and clear issues when no attempt was made to avail the person an opportunity to do so? How could facts and figures be proven when a head of a government agency was ordered to switch off his mic? It was a simple psychological warfare strategy aimed at taking your target off-balance and thus having an edge over your target.

The committee brandished figures without detailed knowledge of revenue that accrued, how funds were utilized and possibly how much of the expected revenue hit the purse of the NBAIS.

It was deducible that the committee attended the session with a ready mindset on what to do and what to say, striving fruitlessly to demonize ASUU strike by making unsubstantiated claims.

This is not to deny the fact that there are many government chief executive officers whose stewardships to the Nigerian people are still questionable.

But in the case of the senate committee on finance and NBAIS, the committee denied itself and Nigerians the opportunity to be availed that stewardship report by the management of NBAIS.
In my opinion, the committee allowed itself to be swayed by emotions and thus created room for any discerning mind to puncture its allegations with facts and figures.

Invariably, one could still believe that the intimidation strategy adopted by the committee was a deliberate action aimed at being heard, hailed, seen and held as a pro-people committee.

What played out in the said date to a large extent has validated the widely held belief that when diligence and fair-hearing are thrown to the winds, what is got is a self-seeking exercise targeted at stirring emotional impressions, sensations and sentiments.

Following the incident, I delved to ascertain if the claims by the senate committee chairman and his team during the agency’s budget performance hearing were anything to write home about. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the session was laden with more fuss than a fact-finding exercise.

The registrar of NBAIS, Prof. Safiu Abdullahi was one of the chief executives invited by the committee to make a presentation on the agency’s annual budget performance.

During the hearing, the committee had made several allegations suggesting injudiciousness in the management of funds that accrue to the agency. Senator Adeola alluded that ASUU strike was a result of reckless spending and a lack of accountability by university authorities.

He went as far as suggesting that the federal government should withdraw from funding the salaries of lecturers since according to him, the universities’ authorities have not been accountable for the revenues that accrue to them.

Everyone who watched what played out in the said sitting could easily deduce that the NBAIS registrar was handed a hostile atmosphere where he was demobbed from explaining the facts behind the figures.

Instead of explanation around the figures brandished by the committee, he was confronted with questions that did not seek to unravel the issues on hand, but were laden with sensational questions such as “Is it the Federal Government that funds your agency 100%”? A question that suggests that the committee did not fully understand the workings of the agency vis-a-vis revenue generation, utilization and remittance.

Even though the registrar accepted that the agency was fully funded by the government, the question was as irrelevant as the confrontation. Another question that tended towards sensationalism rather than fact-finding is the question of whether N410million were recorded as collected by the agency for the year 2022.

Also, connecting ASUU strike and the unwillingness of the lecturers to go back to classes to the issue at hand at that material point in time seemed to be aimed at stirring emotions on issues that should be fact-based.

Indeed the committee missed a glaring opportunity to understand how and where the agency funds come from.

Perhaps, the Distinguished Senator should have been schooled on the fact that most examination councils and agencies in Nigeria are heavily owed by some state governments. One would have expected the committee to study the documents presented to it by NBAIS leadership and hinge their questions and points from there. Instead, the chairman and his committee members hastily made conclusions and immediately opted to set up an ad-hoc investigation committee.

The right thing to do if truly the committee was out to know about the application of funds that accrued to the agency was to seek an explanation from NBAIS management on the actual amount that hit their coffers and how the fund was utilized.

If the committee was diligent and willing to get facts rather than arouse sentiments, they would have ascertained how the ‘controversial’ sum of N410million was collected from the state governments and private individual schools across the country.

They would have understood firsthand that owing to the non-payment of the students’ examination fees by some state governments from 2018 – 2021, the agency was plunged into huge debt burdens with their contractors, and suppliers of examination materials. I, as an individual, was been able to unravel that as a concerned citizen. Why didn’t the committee unravel that and possibly aid the agency in its efforts at debt recovery from the state governments running into hundreds of millions of Naira?

Furthermore, the information I was able to obtain further revealed that within the said years under review, examiners were not paid their allowances, thereby putting the management of the agency in a fix where they were only able to pay around 40% of their debt obligation.

A fraction of those arrears of debts owed by some state governments only came in 2022 from information available. NBAIS, was able to settle some arrears of debts, conduct its June-July 2022 examination which gulped about N85million and still remitted about N35million to the federal coffers. The committee failed to understand that the bulk of the money that should have accrued as revenue is currently debts owed to the agency by some state governments and this ugly situation plunged the agency into owing its contractors, examination material suppliers and the examiners themselves.

It is only expedient that the committee should see itself as a partner in progress by liaising with NBAIS and other examination councils and bodies to prevail on the owing states to pay the huge debts owed to the Federal Government through these agencies. It is common knowledge that some states heavily owe most of the examination bodies in Nigeria, a trend that has consistently eroded the revenue generation and remittances of these examination boards and councils.

It was further unveiled, upon investigation that the management of NBAIS did not fold its hands over those debts owed to them. The information available showed that the supervisory ministry – ministry of education has been duly informed of this predicament the agency has been having with some state governments and that efforts have been made by the ministry to reach out to the executive governors of those states to pay up the monies their governments owe the agency.

In conclusion, despite the check and balances that brace the tenets of democracy, it is pertinent to mention that synergy is needed between the national assembly and government agencies, especially the examination bodies and councils to boost and recover debts owed to them by state governments.

Shedrack Iheoma writes from Abuja and can be reached via lightsheddie26@gmail.com