His first appearance on the political turf was in 2003 on the platform of the defunct All Peoples Party (APP), which was catastrophic to a first timer. Not deterred with the humiliating defeat, he repeated same appearance in 2007 on the platform of a modified platform, All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). The effort was again disastrous. Not tired as a retired military officer, in 2011, he reappeared on the platform of a brand new party, Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). Again, he received another bashing from the electorates.
Not comfortable and convinced with his defeat and the authenticity of declared results of the elections, he vowed not to try it again until he was quietly reached by the camp of other frustrated but vibrant politicians for a merger to wrest power from the then ruling party. A mega-merger was floated that birthed the All Progressives Congress (APC) which scaled the test of the electorates in 2015.
Looking back to year 2010 five years before Major General Muhammadu Buhari was elected as President in 2015 he delivered a major speech at Chatham House in the United Kingdom, ahead of the 2011 general elections. Then, he was being sold as a converted democrat. Buhari labeled the story of Nigeria, “a depressing story of a democracy without democrats, and of elections without the electorates having much say in the process”. Sadly, Buhari’s analysis in 2010 is more glaring today than it was in 2010 and in the 2015 elections when he was elected.
Today, the nation operates under an intricate web of antagonistic ethnic colonies engaged in all against all, bloody, open and bloody feuds everywhere across the land, actively nurturing puzzling existential questions. Every part of the nation is at war with poorly defined insurgents and bandits. In November 2021, a cross section of the media reported the chairman of the Senate Committee on Army, Sen. Muhammed Ali Ndume, saying that the Nigerian Army was engaged in an unconventional war in 32 of the nation’s 36 states. By the first week of June, insurgency and banditry had moved to Nigerian cities, towns and villages. Killings in Abuja, Kaduna, Taraba, Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Katsina, Kogi etc brazen.
As a student of media and political history, I have had recurrent moments of pride in reading and hearing about the role that my most senior colleagues, founders of journalism in this clime played in the “struggle for Nigeria’s independence” before, during and after the independence. The often repeated and fascinating narratives of the historic roles that newspapers and journalists along with other nationalists played to secure independence from an unwilling and unyielding British colonialists have, always been told with enthusiasm and drama.
The Nigerian media history we were taught, is littered with stories of heroic exploits of early nationalists the likes of Herbert Macaulay, Sa’adu Zungur, Dr. Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Ahmadu Bello Rabah, Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Gambo Sawaba, Margret Ekpo, Raymond Njoku, Anthony Enahoro, Malam Yusufu Aminu Kano, Samuel Ladoke Akintola and several others who effectively used the media to wage the war against the colonialists and their cronies. The colonialists could not intimidate them with threats of arrest etc.
The list of leading nationalists easily duplicates itself as the list of remarkable journalists before they became prominent politicians. The exceptions on the list were Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello. (Awolowo trained and practiced the journalism profession for just six months along with the likes of Babatunde Jose. He went on to establish his private newspaper, the Nigerian Tribune in 1949 while Bello championed the establishment of New Nigerian by the Northern Nigeria Government).
With the above in mind, it is a wonder why such an erudite and astute group of professionals who became the first generation of political leaders produced such an ethnicized and divided nation, where virtually every group feels disaffected. While the struggles against the colonial rule and for independence were crucial and important, not much attention has been paid to what may have been the other fundamental role played by the media in the internally divisive struggle for hegemonic supremacy by these leaders against each other, most especially between Awolowo and Azikiwe.
Comrade Muktar Gidado, a veteran journalist and public relations manager provides an insight: “Those nationalists often engaged in a two pronged struggle that, on the one hand, involved winning independence for a united Nigeria and speaking to the imminent glory of such a putative African nation state, and, on the other hand, mobilizing for or against the domination of their ethno-regional group in the emerging Nigerian political union. But, where has all these led us to as a united nation?”
Over 15 years ago, media experts foresaw signs of looming implosion; they predicted that a great and gifted, nation that may fail—all of which are the result of a long history of ethnic distrust and divisions, regional loyalties, corruption spiced with inept leadership.
Question before us then is this: how did Nigeria become a democracy without democrats, and what role the media played to get Nigeria into the company of pseudo-democratic nations? We cannot speak about democratic consolidation until we unclad how we got where we are in the first place. What went wrong and at what point did the nation go wrong?
And how did the dream of nationalist-journalists quickly transformed into so deeply polarized front-line politicians? Why was it that the dream for a united nation died so early and so painful? Did the struggle against the colonialists consume the energy that was needed to build the nation of our dream?
In 2010, Mc-Quail contended that in virtually all democracies, “the media has a complex relationship with sources of power and the political system”. Scores of media researchers, the likes of Herman and Chomsky, and France’s Nyamnjoh, established the fact that media has a capacity to shape society for good or bad. Aside from their role as the national record keeper, the media also serves as the society’s mirror—-in what Chief Obasanjo described as reflecting the society back to itself. The newspaper press in particular, provides information and essential knowledge for people to participate in the activities of their respective societies meaningfully and without strings attached.
In the case of the Nigerian media, Gidado agree that media practitioners cannot absolve themselves of their negative and positive contributions to the formation of our today’s Nigeria, because of their relationships and closeness to corridors of power.
In the quest for domination of one by the other, weaponised media and ethnicity became principal tools for self-definition and for campaign for elective franchise”. For Barr Musa Adamu Idris, a political activist and lawyer, a divisive Nigerian media mostly promoted the sectional aspirations of their owners.
“A cross section of the Nigerian media, operates primarily to strengthen the political grip of favored leaders over their followers, and thereby the fragmentation of the country”.
And Idris said the newspaper press provided “a remarkable example of over zealousness and irresponsible partisanship”. The Nigerian media became as polarized and as divided along same political and ethnic fault lines that divided the politicians and the nation. The coalition of convenience between media and political elite in the pursuit of non-integrative ethno-cultural interests produced a detrimental political culture. Recent events have proved that their failure to decouple themselves from the political class, according to Nyamnjoh has meant that they became a “vehicle for uncritical assumptions, beliefs, stereotypes, ideologists, and orthodoxies…..that blunt critical awareness and make participatory democratization difficult?”
The media indeed helps to construct an ethnicized political culture. There are strong and direct links between elite ethno-regional exclusionist politics and the media.
However, the media neither acts alone nor is always a willing accomplice. Media proprietors sold the soul of objective and investigative journalism to the thieving elites in power and to service their own political and personal selfish interest, being often a cohort with political elites through common ethnic interests and power pursuit.
As it has turned out to be, the newspaper press has not by any measurable yardstick been a mass medium, but rather, it has served for most of its history as an instrumentalized predominantly urban based, elite to-elite medium. It is safer to say that Nigeria does not have a populist media. Fortunately, the media can still be deployed to counter in-bred antagonism and re-imagine a more democratically productive ethno-federalist nation. In the struggle to foster democracy in cultures in where such concept was alien, it is not unusual to find the media willing and useful collaborators. Even in homogenous or so called developed societies than ours, the media is frequently used to moderate democratic processes.
Conflict and consensus are essential elements in democratic politics, and the press provides a platform where opposing views should find (near equal) expressions.
Dr. Larry Diamond noted that “democratic politics embraces, inevitably and inescapably, an uneasy tension between conflict and consensus”. And as Claude Ake once said: “Politics entails conflict of claims of values, of interest, and of goals: If there is no conflict there can be no politics”.
In other words, according to Abdullahi Muhammed Gulloma, a veteran journalist and political activist, “democracy cannot exist without some sort of conflicts; but it can’t make a success of its existence with confusion, bitterness and hate and bloodletting conflicts. This is a realization that our political and media elite and security personnel need to come to terms with and accept as the reality”.
So far, the conventional media in Nigeria has overtime given its own solicited and unsolicited contributions to the corporate existence of Nigeria as an independent, sovereign and united country irrespective of the pockets of imaginary differences that exist.
What of the other professions excluding the teaching and medical professions? Have they contributed to the expected stability and economic progress of an independent, secured Nigeria worth a mention and celebrating? Unfortunately, we are where we are as a nation still battling the odds to unite, stabilize for sustenance and better days ahead.
Nigeria may be a lucky country with the new men in helm of affairs. The choice is with us to either change the narrative or foolishly and greedily subscribe to the antics of those who boxed the country, to where we are, and are still circulating on the political turf armed to the teeth for stay beyond their welcome. We either behave wisely and patriotically to the success of our elected leaders that can change the narrative, or go into retrogression for selfish interest at our peril. I Come In Peace But Armed With My Pen Which Is Priceless And Poisonous!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
