ZUL-QA’ADAH 18 1430 A.H.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER . 6 2009.
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Journalists: Of greed and assassins
By Taju Tijani
"Gunmen kill The Guardian editor in Lagos," screamed the ghoulish front page lead of The Compass newspaper of Monday September 21, 2009. I hate killing. Especially when it involves journalists and writers. An accusation of selfish self-preservation is not unlikely here. I am an Internet pundit (not of the beer parlour variant as Pat Utomi once labelled them).
The last time Kingsley Osadolor phoned me, he sounded bereaved. He sounded lost and forlorn. As the Deputy MD of The Guardian Newspapers, he was acutely and demonstrably sad to lose one of his enterprising assistant news editors, Mr Bayo Ohu.
Any loss of human life is horrible. Whether rich or poor; intelligent or stupid, ugly or handsome, tall or short, idol worshipper or Christ pursuer, king or servant, death’s nasty bite almost always leaves a ghastly permanent imprint on the living.
The account and execution of Ohu’s assassination was a novelty. The assassins camouflaged as pious, celebrating Sallah in order to get to their target. Oozing confidence, six of the gunmen shot their way in, left Ohu for dead, grabbed his office laptop and mobile phones and walked away. Now the assassination has entered into the genre of whodunit.
Now rewind back to 1989. I was preparing for a new life in the UK when suddenly some nasty brutes put an intolerable, aching suspense to my travel plans. Mr Dele Giwa, the Parallax Snax Columnist and one of the Newswatch founders had been bombed. Bombed! Yes, bombed! Another novelty. Giwa had no false prophets in long white robe doing Rambo on him, rather he got a deadly parcel present from, and ehhm "it must be from the President". His death was a whodunit of whodunit. In spite of Gani Fawehinmi’s tonnes of evidence linking the evil genius and his wild running dogs to the murder, the Nigerian Police Force is yet to nail his killers.
That said, now let us talk about journalists. The disabling of Nigeria’s natural prosperity affected everyone including journalists. We could categorize journalists into 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and now the Yahooze generation of year 2000.
In the 50s-70s, journalists had idealism, integrity, contentment and job satisfaction. They fought and won the argument for our independence on idealism. They managed to get by with little but loved the profession and were proud to be members of the Fourth Estate of the Realm.
They were dogged in their search for truth. They had no official cars to encourage the birth of "posing journalists" of the Yahooze generation. The oil boom of the 80s ushered in a new crop of graduate journalists who entered the profession as mass communication and journalism graduates. They were surplus to requirement for the profession. This was the era of the so-called Benzy journalists. The old argot that journalism is a calling and not a profession that opens the vault to fantastic wealth began to be debated. There was a revolt against the orthodoxy of poverty attached to the profession.
Politicians smelling the death of integrity among the younger journalists began to woo them with tempting brown envelopes stuffed with crispy Naira notes. Politicians and journalists dropped the ancient rivalry and suspicion that had separated them through the generation. They became cozy bedmates. Journalists become rentable like area boys. Many became paid acolytes and errand boys for ex- and sitting governors, generals, politicians, businessmen and ministers. Once truth-seeking integrity kissed the dust, greed and a dream to own a land in Abuja and Lekki became a recurring decimal in their life’s plan and priority.
The worse is yet to come. In the roaring name-it-and-claim-it 90s to Yahooze phase of year 2000, journalists were no longer ditching; they became submerged in greed, material ambition and the opulent life. Laptops and mobile phones became both working and extortionist tools. News stories became negotiable like the cattle market. Threats and counter-threats began to zap across mobile microwaves. Journalists and editors began to behave like corrupt politicians. They began to buy second homes in the UK or USA and are permanently abroad as tailcoats or running dogs for politicians and businessmen.
The public that once respected them as totems and pathways to truth, integrity, objectivity and enlightenment began to realize that they were deceived and betrayed. News stories began to turn nasty, yellow and naturally, objectivity shipped into cash-and-suppress commodity.
Media lobbyists mushroomed and turned into middlemen between recalcitrant, greedy newshounds and scandalized politicians ready to suppress the truth by all means (money and violence) necessary.
Once politicians realize that their desire to bury scandalous stories about them is dismal and hopeless, they turn into feral, brutish avengers. They then go the black market to engage the services of area boy assassins, many of them endowed with inflated but deformed mentality of their invisibility. After the handshake, the mission is simple: waste, get his Yahoozee generation working tools (laptop and phone) and return to base like a hardened MOPOL.
Until we know why Giwa was expecting a gift from Babangida in parcel form; until we know why Ohu was expecting, ah, money, from someone, until we cleanse newsrooms of Yahoozee journalists and editors and enthrone committed, credible, Renaissance newsmen of high integrity, honesty and healthy suspicion of politicians, assassins will still find us as easy target for turkey shoot.
Source: nigeriavillagesquare.com
