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THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN NIGERIA
by Akinwumi Adesokan

The Nigerian press has evolved as a mouthpiece
of constituencies firmly rooted in civil society.
- Adigun Agbaje

Whenever government officials in Nigeria want to exonerate the government of the day of the charge of press gag, they say the Nigerian press is the freest in Africa. They speak as if it is the government that willingly allows newspapers and magazine reporters to write and publish what they wish. There is something fraudulent in what their assertions suggest. The Nigerian press, it is true, is free, even at such ignoble times as during a dictatorship, such as we recently witnessed under General Sani Abacha. The press can even be licentious, irritatingly licentious. But, like any true freedom, the freedom to practice journalism decently or in Nigeria always has to be fought for and seized. It is not handed over with mutual smiles, like a gift; as a matter of fact, the virility of media practice in that country is at once in spite of and because of any form of dictatorship. If you shut down a newspaper house because it published an embarrassingly true report, the operators of that publishing house might choose to defy your unconstitutional order. After all, their responsibility is not to force and falsehood.

Since the mid-1980s, the number of newspapers and magazines has grown rapidly in Nigeria. Between the end of the Second Republic in 1983 and the final days of the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida ten years later, seven newspapers and nine magazines began publishing. Actual figures are unknown or unreliable because the rates of growth and collapse are dependent on the political and economic conditions, which are far from stable. But there are some thirty daily newspapers and about twenty weeklies, including magazines. About two-thirds of these are published in Lagos. With the exception of Daily Times, New Nigerian, and the state papers, most are independently owned. The owner(s) may or may not have political ambition; some may even be fronting for the government or government officials. But once the paper gets in the public domain, it is bound by market logic to define other important territories.

Due principally to the pluralistic nature of Nigeria and the adoption of the federal principle in 1954, interests have developed in the country that the political society cannot contain and the state cannot fully control. Those interests, securely locked in the civil society, have found expression in the press, and it is not an accident that there were newspapers in Nigeria before there was Nigeria. At the best of times (which is to say, in theory), these social forces further democratic principles: the rule of law, freedom of the press, civil rights, and so forth. Tested in Nigeria, they have been seen to promote the claims of ethnicity, religion, and other geo-political calculations. Strictly speaking these are not negative values. In the case of Nigeria, they reflect a sense of reality. But one central issue at every time is that of federalism: Beyond the experience of 1954-1966, the country has been ruled as a unitary state. Worse, in all of its thirty-nine years of political independence, Nigeria has been ruled by the elected representatives of the people for less than ten years. The rest of the years, soldiers have been in power. Nothing promotes discord in a plural setting more than the application of a singular force, hence the bitter struggle between the media and power which is the focus of this paper. (Let me quickly add that there are also tensions during a civilian era, but the avenues and opportunities for dissension are as multiple as there are interests. The basic fact that the rule of law prevails in principle puts contenders at par.)

This is not the case under the most secured military regime. During the Abacha dictatorship, the media went through every imaginable form of terror. But the story has a history.

The partisanship of the press during the Second Republic (1979-1983) was used as an excuse by the military regime of Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon to promulgate Decree Four of 1984. That anti-press decree was evoked to jail two journalists that same year, the first time such a thing would happen in the country's history. The harshness of that decree (Protection Against False Accusations Decree) was one of the reasons General Ibrahim Babangida cited for overthrowing Buhari and Idiagbon in a palace coup in 1985. By the time he left power in August 1993, Babangida had gone full circle: jailing journalists, shutting down their offices, seizing copies of their magazines without even the pretense of an enabling decree. So when Abacha came in November 1993 and reopened all the newspaper houses that Babangida had shut over the simmering annulment of the June 12 presidential elections nobody was fooled. He did not abrogate the Newspapers Registration Decree 43 of 1993 (created late in Babangida's days) which stipulated that newspapers had to be registered by the government before they could operate. By the following January, his agents were already seizing copies of Tell magazine, whose reporters, like those of TheNews and TEMPO, had had a rough time during the last months of Babangida. By August, three of the national newspapers - The Guardian, Concord, and - were under locks. In November 1997, during the fourth anniversary of his coup, Abacha was holding close to a thousand political prisoners in jailhouses scattered all over Nigeria, and about a third of these were journalists. Apart from the five who were released in January and April 1998, all the journalists remained in jail until Abacha expired in June 1998, thus giving room for all the changes that the country has been witnessing.

The travail of the media under the Abacha regime, like the regime itself, was largely a result of the political crisis that followed the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections by Ibrahim Babangida. For the first time in ten years, Nigerians had the opportunity to exercise their democratic rights at the polls. And what an exercise it was! For the first time in the country' history, a free and fair election was held, and a winner was going to emerge whose victory would not be as a result of rigging. Past elections had been categorized by violence and rigging, and the military had twice seized upon this as an excuse for coming to power. In fact, the process that culminated in the elections was disrupted several times by Babangida. He cancelled all the parties independently formed by the politicians and formed two for them: the National Republican Convention (a little to the right) and the Social Democratic Party (a little to the left), pretending to model the country after the two major political parties in the United States. The parties' manifestoes and funding, as well as the original administrative staff, were freely supplied by the military government. A transition plan announced in 1987 was expected to terminate in 1990, but it was extended until January 1992, then January 1993, and finally August 1993. The elections of June 1993 were the last lap. Nicknamed Maradona for his wiliness and unpredictable moves, Babangida had a number of sayings that did a lot to confirm the belief that he was closely stage-managing the procedure. One of these was, "We don't know who will succeed us, but we know who will not." He was also fond of saying that his regime would be the last military regime in the country. In early June a group called Association for Better Nigeria, ABN, headed by Arthur Nzeribe, one of the banned presidential aspirants, secured an interim injunction restraining the NEC from conducting the elections. It rather favored the continuation of Babangida's government in power until 1997. The government allegedly supported this group. Following the injunction and signs that the government might cancel the planned voting, the director of the United States Information Service, Mike O'Brien, declared that the United States would not accept a cancellation. O'Brien was promptly deported from Nigeria, and the elections took place on June 12. Three days after the voting, results were already showing Chief Moshood Abiola of the Social Democratic Party in the lead. Then ABN returned to court to challenge the validity of the elections and successfully got a high court in Abuja, the capital, to suspend the counting of results. The chairman of NEC disappeared. Tension began to build up. On June 23, eleven days after the voting, an unsigned piece of paper emerged from the office of the press secretary to the vice president, announcing the annulment of the June 12 1993 elections. By this time, the Campaign for Democracy, CD, had compiled results from the thirty states, and Abiola had won majority of votes in nineteen. Three days later Babangida himself appeared on national television to justify the annulment.

But the media, taking up the case of the shocked public, were waiting for him. Although he took the initial credit for abrogating Decree Four, Babangida had begun to fritter all the credit barely a year after he got into power. He was on record for consciously seeking to co-opt the media by appointing a former journalist as information minister. He announced amnesty for all political detainees, including journalists, and began reviewing the cases of those already jailed. But the extent of his sincerity became clearer with time. In a little over a year, two things had shown the shallowness of Babangida's much-vaunted respect for the freedom of the press: the still-unresolved murder in 1986 of Dele Giwa, founding editor of Newswatch magazine, and the shut down of the same publication for publishing the ungazetted report of the Political Bureau. Equally, his alienating economic policy, contrary to the spirit of the style of its adoption, was just more of the same old story. Furthermore, his attitude toward the political process, borne out in cancellations, bans, and extensions, had alienated the public, and so too the media. A weekly newsmagazine, Tell, had appeared on the newsstands in April 1991; among other liberal objectives, it aimed at helping to foster the emergence of a southern president in a country where the north had virtually monopolized the political leadership. A year later, when another magazine, African Concord, published a story that suggested Babangida had lost control of the economy, its editors were told to either apologize to Babangida or resign. They chose the latter, and by February 1993, the editors had formed the founding team of another weekly newsmagazine, The News. Between them, Tell and The News constituted the core of what was later termed the opposition press. Before the annulment, Babangida's security agents had shut down the offices of The News over a story analyzing the Machiavellian ways of the military leader. This was in the midst of regular seizure of copies of either magazine any time they ran a critical story on the regime. On June 23, the day the elections were cancelled, a formal press release from the office of the attorney general announced the proscription of the magazine: Its heroic attempt to frustrate the closure of the office by publishing from an undisclosed location was now outlawed. The following week, however, the same company came out with a new publication: TEMPO. For the remaining part of the Babangida regime, TEMPO and Tell did virtual battle, publishing underground and so promptly that government's agents were constrained to allege that they were being issued from the American embassy. They ceased to be normal magazines; they were published in a tabloid form due to the logistics of underground publishing. And they sold! Their tactics were so successful that by September, all the media houses shut down in the wake of the annulment were each issuing a new clandestine title. But when Abacha came to sack the interim government that had replaced Babangida, the media had a respite. The bans were lifted and they were allowed to resume work at their offices. But here Abacha merely created a deceptive liberalism, not unlike that which Babangida had used to consolidate his own regime eight years earlier.

It is necessary here to give an idea of how Abacha came to power. Although Babangida annulled the elections, his wish to conduct fresh polls through the interim national government failed. The public and the media were resolute in their disapproval, and a Lagos high court in fact pronounced the ING illegal. Most people expected the president-elect, Abiola, to take his mandate at once. But when Babangida was quitting office, he left the erstwhile Secretary of Defence, Sani Abacha, behind. There is an argument that Babangida himself was forced by Abacha and some other military officers to relinquish power in late August, but the public and the media claimed credit for his ouster. The confusion that attended the conduct of the ING before and after the court ruling provided the armed forces, well manipulated by Abacha, a chance to seize power again. Calling itself a child of necessity, a new military regime with Abacha at the head edged itself into power on November 17, 1993. If Abacha's coming to take power from ING, then led by Ernest Shonekan, provided any respite, military government-style, this was brief, and it quickly emerged that he was up to no good. But disappointed at Babangida's handling of the June elections, people wanted an end to the interim arrangement; so deep-seated was their hatred of the contraption that some well-meaning human rights activists, believing that Abacha could come to restore Abiola's mandate, actually called for a military coup. In fact, Abiola met with Abacha before the coup. Earlier in the year, during the July protests for the validation of the election results, Abacha, as defense secretary, had sent out soldiers to shoot protesters. More than 200 people were killed in Lagos alone.

But once it became clear that Abacha was no democrat, but a mean and ambitious fellow who just wanted "to reign," politicians and journalists who were initially skeptical again reached for the weapons turned against his predecessor. In early May 1994, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO - a collection of civilians, retired military officers, and human rights activists) was formed, marking the beginning of the opposition that lasted until his death. The coalition demanded that Abacha and his team resign by month-end and urged the boycott of the impending Constitutional Conference. In his takeover address, Abacha had promised that the conference would be vested with "full constituent powers." But it turned out to be a selection of his cronies and would-be cronies. Most people in the southwest refused to turn out for the elections, and when the assembly gathered in the federal capital to deliberate, one of the members, Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, successfully got the assembly to settle for a vote asking the regime to quit by January 1996. Abiola went about campaigning against the regime and demanding his mandate. He declared himself president on June 11, 1994, at a symbolic ceremony in Lagos. But after about two weeks in hiding, he was arrested and later charged with treason. In July the Nigerian Labour Congress called a strike at the instigation of one of the most powerful unions, the National Union of Petroleum and Gas Workers. After a day the labor leadership called off the action, but NUPENG did not back down. The strike went on for nine weeks, virtually paralyzing economic activities in the country. With the arrest and detention of Abiola and the hounding of the strike leaders, a different kind of tension was building now. Newspapers and magazines were becoming more and more resolute in their criticism. When The Guardian ran a story that suggested divisions among the regime's leading officers concerning Abiola's treason trial, it was promptly shut down. Soon, The Punch and National Concord (the latter owned by Abiola) were similarly closed. In the next couple of months Abacha went out to war with practically every segment of the society, including the military - his constituency. Late in February 1995, mass arrests of military officers, serving and retired, were announced. They were alleged to be plotting to overthrow the regime. Included in the list were Olusegun Obasanjo, former head of state (1976-1979), and Yar' Adua, his former deputy and mastermind of the January 1996 ultimatum. When the newspapers published reports that none of the arrested men was found guilty by the investigating panel, four journalists were randomly picked and jailed for life. Their offence? Being accessory after the fact of treason. Notably, two of the four were from Tell and The News, known for their anti-government stance. Following international campaigns, Abacha and his junta commuted the sentences in October 1995, but a week later he approved the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People. (Over twenty members of this movement had been arrested in May 1994 in connection with the murder of four Ogoni chiefs.) From this time until his death in June 1998, Abacha was putting every critic in jail, ordering their executions by his secret police, or running them into exile. If you were a critic of Abacha in those days, you were either on the run, or about to be; in jail, or about to be; or dead, or about to be.

The journalists did not give up. The three newspapers that had been shut down were reopened after one year. They remained as before, including The Guardian, which had never really been known for combative reporting. (In February 1996, Alex Ibru, publisher of The Guardian, was cruelly shot in the street in Lagos but was lucky enough to survive. A few weeks before, in December, there was an attempted arson attack on the offices of The Guardian and The News.) Rather than be scared into a retreat, the newspapers actually became more confident and were joined by a rash of new ones, with tendencies that ranged from libellousness to servility. One businessman who became notorious for supporting Abacha and had private bodyguards who shot protesters in Ibadan in May 1998, began publishing his own newspaper about this time.

But an interesting development was introduced at this point. Journalists took on responsibilities other than reporting. Two journalists, Edetaen Ojo of The Guardian and Austin Agbonsuremi (also of The Guardian, but later to join a radio station), formed the Media Rights Agenda, a pressure group dedicated to promoting the freedom of information. The journalists had been working closely with human rights groups in Lagos and therefore were able to appreciate the value of advocacy that was not strictly combative. In the dark days of the dictatorship, they published a monthly newsletter called Media Rights Monitor, which covered all cases of violations of the civil rights of Nigerian journalists. They continue to publish it. The Independent Journalism Centre, a subsidiary of Independent Communications Network Limited, which publishes of The News and TEMPO, has also been created. It worked closely, and continues to do so, with organizations like PEN, Amnesty International, Index on Censorship, the Washington-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the Canadian Journalists Association, the World Press Institute, and Reporters Sans Frontiers to bring the appalling situation in Nigeria to the notice of the world. Much of the international campaign that ensured the eventual release of all journalists held by Abacha's agents was the result of an alert network between the IJC and these organizations. Others, like the Centre for Free Speech and Journalists for Democratic Rights, also did useful work, but because they are new and less institutionalized, their impact is only very recent.

Abacha did not back down. Instead, he dug, charging opposition figures like the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and several others with treason. He isolated Nigeria completely until the moment the suspension of the country from the commonwealth. This took place after the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and still remains in force. While he spread terror and paranoia through the entire country, Abacha and his closest allies and family members continued to steal public funds as public utilities decayed. That those he put in jail had no hope of release until his death serves as proof of his inflexibility. When he died on June 8, 1998, he was the sole "consensus candidate" for the presidential elections slated for last August.

My attention has been focused exclusively on the print media, as you must have noticed. This is not an oversight. Until September 1993, the electronic media were exclusively in the hands of the government. Both the National Television Authority and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria are state organs, controlled from the Federal Ministry of Information, though they had to find some of their funding from commercials. The National Broadcasting Commission, however, granted some licences to a number of private radio and television houses in 1993. The earliest of these began transmissions in September 1994. Seven private television channels and two radio channels are operational in Nigeria at the moment. For logistic and corporate reasons, none of these could do any guerrilla work during the time of Abacha. I'm not suggesting that such methods were very necessary in all cases, but to a great extent, the regime's disregard for the rule of law rendered the time-honored journalistic ethic of neutrality (truculently canvassed by many journalists) pretty pointless in Nigeria. Even reporters in some state-owned radio stations got suspended or sacked for airing reports considered unfavorable to the regime. The clandestine Radio Kudirat, named after Abiola's wife, who was murdered in Lagos by assassins believed to be carrying out the dictator's orders, did stay on the air. From late 1995 through last Christmas, when it went on recess, Radio Kudirat broadcast almost daily to listeners in Nigeria. In fact, Soyinka's involvement in the so-called treason charge (which the Nigeria Police Force dropped after Abacha's death) was linked to his broadcasts on the radio.

The experiment of Radio Kudirat points to several possibilities - and not just in a time of disaster. Considering the linguistic diversity of the country and the high level of illiteracy, it is beyond argument that the immediate impact of English-language newspapers is limited. One of the highest circulation figures ever recorded by a newspaper in Nigeria was less than two 200,000, and it was a weekly publication . In contrast, figures attributed to UNESCO put radio listeners in Nigeria at 19.4 million and television watchers at 3.7 million. The most popular source of news in northern Nigeria is not newspapers. It is not even the FRCN, Kaduna. It is the BBC Hausa Service. And this is just as broadcasting is being deregulated. Imagine what will happen ten years from now, when the roads are not likely to be all-tarred, when electricity may not have served even the cities well enough, but when more Amplitude Modulation stations will be crisscrossing the airwaves. Just imagine.