Public Service Obligations of State-Owned Media

WORKING WITH POLITICAL PRESSURES

A paper delivered by ADINOYI OJO ONUKABA at a workshop on “Media

Institutions and Capacity in Nigeria” at Regency Hotel, Ikeja-Lagos, on October 18

– 20, 2005

I would like to thank the organizers of the workshop for inviting me to speak on the topic,

“Working with Political Pressures”. I am sure what qualified me for this role was my experience at The Daily Times of Nigeria, Plc which I managed from 1999 to 2003.

Well, by the time I arrived there, the Daily Times newspapers were no longer as powerful and influential as they used to be in its hey days. So, I was lucky to preside over the affairs of the newspapers at a time they were no longer hot favourites of people in government.

Unlike some of my predecessors. I received no query or sack threat from aggrieved top government officials. Editorials were not dictated to us from the headquarters of the state security service. I did not go to bed thinking if I would survive the next day as the managing director. The truth is that it was a job nobody wanted. I had taken it out of sheer adventure and daring. At some point I wondered if the President and his Vice read our papers at all. I found that they were regularly included in their bunches of newspapers. On two or three occasions, the President raised some questions about stories in our papers. He wanted to know if we were sure of those stories. I said we were. And the matter died there. Once we carried a story about the Vice President which we later found to be untrue. He did not complain to me about it. But an aide had hinted me that he had expressed surprise that the Times could do that to him. I went and apologized and the matter was laid to rest.

Over-zealous top government officials routinely went to the President and his Vice to complain that the Daily Times was anti-government. They were not happy that we had decided to assert our independence and distance ourselves from the ugliness of the past.

We carried stories that our competitors carried even if those stories were critical of the government. Several times readers would say to me: “I could not believe I was reading the Times”. I took that as a compliment. Neither the President nor his Vice ever bothered to raise their complaints with me. Of course it helped that I had access and I was close to the two people who were expected to sanction me. When the Sunday Times carried the world exclusive story on the overseas mansions of the then Kogi State

Governor Abubakar Audu, the President was told that I was using the Times for ethnic campaign. I was not there, but he was reported to have said that I was not that sort of person. The matter ended there.

From my own limited experience, it can be said that democracy and the openness it engenders was a factor in the relative peace I enjoyed during my four-year tenure. Other factors included the sometimes liberal disposition of our current leadership, its willingness to respect the constitutional provision for a free press, the fact the Daily

Times could be ignored as it no longer dominates the newspaper market, and the relative

2 absence today of the sort of bitter rivalry that existed among the parties in the First and

Second Republics during which the media openly took side. The dominance of the political space by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has created a situation where opposition parties offer no clear alternative platform to the ruling party. In the Second

Republic, the differences between the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and the Unity

Party of Nigeria (UPN) or between the NPN and the Progressive Alliance were clear and unambiguous. The contest for power between these camps was tough, bitter and violent and the media could not insulate itself from it. In fact, some people accused the media of fueling it. Under the tensed political situations that we had in the First and Second

Republics and during the repressive military rule, the political pressures on the media was intense and deadly.

“I was entrusted with the responsibility of editing the Daily Times for thirty-four months leading to Nigeria’s independence on October 1, 1960. Circulation was rising, and rival political parties wanted their news and views on the pages of the Daily Times. If a leader made a statement that earned the front page one day and the other day we were unable to carry a statement by a rival party leader on the front page because of a more human story, the Daily Times was accused of partisanship”, former Daily Times Managing Director

Babatunde Jose wrote in his memoir, Walking A Tight Rope.

“If to illustrate a feature article the photograph of one party leader was used on the top of the page and his rival’s photo was used at the bottom of the same page, we were accused of implying that one leader was politically on top of the other”.

3 Political pressure in the media may be defined as any attempt by an individual or a group to force or compel or influence the media to act in a particular way. It could come in the form of gentle persuasion or threat or legal prosecution or withdrawal of patronage. All human endeavours face their own peculiar pressure from those who want things done in ways that favour them. Perhaps because of its capacity to control the minds of people and influence social behaviour, the media is often more vulnerable to pressures than other professions. Most people or groups naturally want to look good in the eyes of others.

How we are perceived by the world means a whole lot to us. The media provide the channel through we get to know and form our opinions about people, organizations and things. This is why people or groups strive to control or influence or manage information flow about them.

As I said earlier, political pressure can come in various ways: it could be the case of an intolerant government threatening to or actually shutting down or suspending a media company as we saw during the Babangida and Abacha military regimes or sacking the top officials of the company, especially in state-owned media; it could come in the form of arrests and imprisonment of journalists; it can come through legislation such as the notorious decree four under which Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson were jailed during the Buhari administration; it could be the threat of a lawsuit or actual lawsuit in which billions of Naira is being demanded as compensation for damaged reputation; it could be commercial in nature such as threatening to or actually withdrawing advertisement or

4 sponsorship; and it could come in the form of an organized social group staging protests or mobilizing its members to boycott the products of an offending media company.

When CITY PEOPLE carried a story alleging that a certain society woman had died of

AIDS, her friends placed advertisements in the newspapers asking people to stop buying the publication. Although the boycott campaign was not very successful, there is no doubt that it might have rattled the popular soft-sell. Sometimes pressure could be mounted on journalists by families, friends, community and social groups to which they belong; it could come through the infliction of physical violence on one or two members of the organization with the hope that it will send a clear message to others. The letter- bomb killing of Newswatch magazine editor Dele Giwa in 1986 showed the extent to which a government was prepared to go to silence critics. Some people will swear that the magazine has never quite been the same since that tragic episode. The bombing of

Bagauda Kaltho during the Abacha regime was likewise meant as a chilling message to any daring journalist that human life did not mean much to Abacha. Pressure could be in the form of material inducement (money, land, company products, facility tours, etc.) aimed at influencing a media organization to carry favourable reports about the giver.

No media organization can ever escape political pressures. How we cope with it or manage it depends on the ownership (private versus private media), the philosophy of the organization (radical versus conservative), the leadership of that organization (in terms of the level of integrity and maturity of its top officials), and the political development or sophistication of the society in which the media company is based (advanced

5 democracies versus Third World dictatorships or emerging democracies). Working with political pressures calls for wisdom, tact, guile, luck and commitment to the core values of the profession such as truth, justice, fairness, balance and accuracy. When a media is under pressure to do certain things, its leadership should politely say “We are sorry we cannot. It is against our principles”. Before yielding to pressure, you may want to ask if what you are about to do is fair to all concerned and whether it serves the public good and if truth will be a casualty.

When The News magazine first reported the greed and corruption of former Inspector-

General of Police, I am aware that all their sources for the story came under pressure from Balogun to deny what was attributed to them. A rival news magazine did a story pooh-poohing The News scoop, but The News was undaunted. Neither the threat of lawsuit would make them deny their own story. A year later, Balogun was indicted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for stealing N17 billion from the police. This week, EFCC announced that it has discovered another N1.1 billion hidden by Balogun in Bond Bank. I am sure by the time the Commission is through with him, it would have recovered enough to fund one year’s national budget. The News has been vindicated in the end. That is what any media organization should do. It should insist on truth and professionalism.

When I was at the Daily Times, a state governor mounted pressure on me to remove our correspondent from the state whom he accused of never seeing anything good in his administration. I looked into the matter and discovered that our correspondent had been

6 doing his work well. He was critical of the state government in his news stories and features but he had not done that out of malice. He was known in the state for his independence and integrity. He insisted on giving the governor’s opponents opportunity to air their views about governance in the state. He went beyond the sugary press releases from the governor’s press secretary to do critical stories. We decided to leave the correspondent in the state despite increasing threats to his life. We asked if he wanted to be redeployed and he refused. We left him in that state until his family finally convinced him to ask for a temporary redeployment because of their concern for his safety. The profession dies a little whenever we yield to pressure or blackmail. We must always insist on doing the right thing.

Recently in the United states, a federal judge sent The New York Times correspondent

Judith Miller to prison for refusing to disclose her source for a story that uncovered a CIA agent. Miller chose to go to jail rather than violate the ethics of her profession. She was let off after the judge modified his demand to arrive at a compromise. Her story teaches us to be ready to make personal sacrifices in defense of our profession and that political pressure could lead to the loss of freedom.

The points I have made in this paper are that political pressure on the media is real because the struggle for the minds of people is tough and vicious; that political pressure comes in various ways and from various sources; that our ability to cope depends on a number of factors; and that we must remain steadfast and strive to uphold the core values of the profession at all times.

REFERENCES

1. Ajibade, Kunle (2003). Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes, Heinemann

Frontline Series, Ibadan.

2. Anyanwu, Chris, N. D. (2002). The Days of Terror, Spectrum Books Limited, Ibadan.

3. Dare, Olatunji (2000). “From Iwe Irohin to “naiganews.com” – The Nigerian Presss from 1859 to 1999” in the book “Hosting the 140th Anniversary of the Nigerian Press” edited by Tunji Oseni, Tosen Consult.

4. Omu, Fred (2000). “The Nigerian Press: Milestone in Service” in the book “Hosting the 140th Anniversary of the Nigerian Press” edited by Tunji Oseni, Tosen Consult.

5. Hunt, Todd and Ruben, Brent D. (1993). Mass Communication: Producers and

Consumers, HarperCollins College Publishers.

6. “Newspapers: Do they shape your thinking?”, AWAKE, October 22, 2005.

7. Jose, Ismail Babatunde (1987). Walking a Tight Rope: Power Play in the Daily Times,

Ibadan University Press Limited.