Two top officials of the Buhari regime had cause last week to appraise the role of the media in the current war against corruption. The leadership of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, which visited Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir David Lawal, was told of the major role of the media in ensuring the success of the war against corruption even as he urged them not to be used as a tool to discredit the campaign.
At a different forum, Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed who had been holding interactive sessions with a broad spectrum of the media to solicit support for the graft war, must have shocked his audience when he said corruption was fighting back through the media. Hear him: “Well I can tell you that corruption is already fighting back and it is fighting dirty. Sponsored articles have started to appear in the newspapers and in the social media. ‘Talking Heads’ have started making the rounds in the electronic media, all deriding the fight against corruption and the government”
The minister further underscored the seriousness of the allegation when he vowed that no amount of media or other attacks by pseudo-analysts or hack writers will stop the train of the anti-corruption fight.
Mohammed is entitled to his views on the motive and driving objective of the articles and comments which he considers inimical to the corruption crusade. It is not out of place for the accused, some other vested interests and all those scared that the war could still get at their doorsteps to take measures including the most ignoble to weaken the momentum of the fight. It is also within the run of events that those accused will have their own perspectives of the matter which they are entitled to push forth through any means available to them including the media.
No doubt, a campaign against corruption of the magnitude that has been embarked upon by the government is bound to stir up controversy. It cannot be expected to do any less. Opinions and perceptions are also bound to differ depending on how the public sees the prosecution of the war. All these are irreducible decimals in a democracy that guarantees the fundamental rights of the citizens.
It is therefore vital that in the fight against corruption, the inalienable rights of the citizens to freedom of expression are neither trampled upon nor abridged under the guise of specious allegations. Those who harbour contrary views on the direction of the campaign must not be blackmailed into abandoning them by a government that just rode to power through opposition. One only hopes this is not another attempt to muzzle dissent. But, it is one thing to allege that vested interests are fighting back to scuttle the overall success of the war and a different kettle of fish to find in the media, a willing tool for such unpatriotic undertaking.
There are fundamental flaws in such a mindset. The first is the assumption that the media can easily be corrupted to scuttle the war against graft. Its corollary is that any or every article or opinion which in the views of the minister is critical of the war, is sponsored and therefore an evidence of corruption fighting back. If this point is stretched further, it could be misconstrued that all those who express reservations on the direction of the current war are motivated by pecuniary considerations.
That would amount to a sweeping and uncharitable allegation; a big insult on the credibility of writers. For, it conveys the annoying impression that commentators and writers are that cheap; not propelled by their conscience when they express opinions on some of the deficits of the corruption campaign.
There is also the inherently faulty assumption that the media is the only institution that can be so compromised and deployed by corruption to fight back. This is not borne out by extant realities. In verity, there is a surfeit of other institutional mechanisms that could be deployed to compromise the war. It is not the media that are responsible for the long delays in prosecuting offenders (some of them former governors) for about eight years now. Neither are they liable for the corruption that is still going on now in high and low places nor responsible for the fight corruption staged during the last governorship election in Bayelsa State. So why single them out for selective attack even when they are being cajoled by the same government for support in the fight? One finds in this, a contradiction of sorts. Or is the allegation meant to intimidate the media to do the bidding of the government in convicting the accused outside the laws of the land or cover up allegations of bias?
The other assumption is that any and every article that does not tally with what the government considers favourable to the corruption war is an evidence of corruption fighting back. If it is that easy to corner the media to do the bidding of the highest payer, the minister would have been in a better position to achieve that after his series of interactions with a broad spectrum of key media men and women. After all, the government’s financial chest is much larger than that of all those who are being prosecuted for one infraction or the other put together.
If after such interactions we still find a residue of opinions on what needed to be fine tuned for the war to command wider acceptability, the inevitable conclusion is that there are more to such opinions than corruption seeking to fight back. That is the reality the minister has to face and very squarely too. We now face the danger of reducing the media to a victim in the chessboard of the war against corruption more so, given the deleterious consequences such banal profiling will impose in the performance of their duties of keeping the government in check. We may inadvertently be clearing the way for anarchy or the dictatorship the minister alluded to.
There is the more grave risk of such labelling blackmailing writers to the point of inability to comment freely. If you argue that it is wrong to fight the corruption war outside the laws of the country, you stand accused of aiding corruption to fight back. Corruption is fighting back when the inherent dangers of convicting the accused in the court of public opinion or issues of double standards are raised.
It is also corruption at war when you question why some of the accused were allowed to go home after refunding some money while others who were granted bail by the courts are being denied freedom. And the government comes out boldly to endorse such. I guess it was corruption spoiling for skirmish when the minister had the effrontery to ask “What are we even talking about. Is the human rights of the 55 persons more important than the human rights of 170 million Nigerians”, in answer to reporter’s question on the alleged looting of N1.34 trillion between 2006-2013. Yet, it is a legal principle that it is better to set free 100 accused persons than convict one innocent person.
One would have been recruited to scuttle the corruption war if you pointed out that the current war as desirable as it is, is limited in scope and therefore its overall success ratio is bound to be circumscribed. It is constrained by the fact that it targets the symptoms and not the roots of corruption. It fights corruption after the offence has been committed to the neglect of the systemic dysfunctions that propel, sustain and reinforce the malfeasance. We may succeed in jailing some corrupt people, recover some funds and send fear to future offenders. But all this would still fall below what is required to holistically and permanently wrestle the endemic cankerworm to the ground.
Fighting the manifestations of corruption rather than its root causes will have no answer to the moral dissonance between the civic public and the primordial realm. It will prove inherently deficient in explaining why those who leave public offices poor are derided by members of their primordial attachment while the smart ones who helped themselves are hailed. It will neither account for, nor sufficiently address the do- or-die politics that has become part of our political culture. Nor will it provide permanent remedy to that which activates bitter competition among the dominant groups to control the resources at the centre. These are the real issues. The appropriate therapeutic response to corruption will be one that is multi-dimensional; targeting attitudinal and value change through a total overhaul of this country structurally.
NATION
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