Erasmus Ikhide
 Published
September 10th, 2008
Meet Suicide Journalism: the prison memoir of the publisher
and editor-in-chief of Nigerian most radical weekly news
magazine of the first order; Insider Weekly. Suicide
Journalism is not all about a participant’s account of the
profession’s ardour or candour, but also of the horror of
incarceration of Nigerians who are made to pass through the
eye of a needle while behind bars. It opens the door into
the thoughts and feelings of people angling for change,
service to humanity and social justice.
Osa Director’s experiences in the prison are gut wrenching
and emotionally piercing in their social significance in
abiding human truth. The book’s deep introspection, the
accounting of prison life and fellow inmates all deeply
illumine the best and the worst of human nature. It asserts
that those who view their punishment as a part of a larger
purpose in life are best equipped to survive the inhuman
condition of prison life. You will, in the book, encounter
the eagerness of the surviving spirit of an inmate in the
draughty Hell hole waiting improbably for an amnesiac
dictator to give order to his collaborating goons to
unfetter his vector; either on account of public outcry or
on self-conviction that the victim may go and sin no more.
But there is a hardened inclination with inordinate template
to have unrepentant patriots hounded behind bar in order to
advance the reign of terror on the gullible. The 213-page
book examines critically the failings of politicians and
citizens alike who succumbed to the inordinate impulses of
their primitive leaders, whose innate drive to rape or maim,
derives from uncanny lost for elusive power can be checked.
Nothing can be more nauseating than the stories of
corruption and abuses of power, but the whole picture of the
human will to dare the oppressors and survive is by far more
inspiring. It’s even more daring and challenging when brain
dead humicider buffoons go for the jugular of the senate
minded ones who emblematize all there is to life and civil
orientation. Incarceration stripped one of his or her
equality. But the tragedy of it all is that the journalist
and the tyrannical dictator in Nigeria both derived their
zestful patriotism and psychosis from the ideal of equality.
Nothing is more dispiriting than to suffer inhuman detention
and humiliation at the hands of a degenerated ruler with
wooden cadences who is inferior to you in every sense of the
word.
The book is not all about seriousness, however. There are
also light moments of reprieves; the quixotic moments of
being made Minister of Information by fellow inmates, who
are known for brutalizing new comers as he is being
transferred from one prison after another, and the receiving
of love letter from his Double F – which serves as moral
boasters – who, in his description of her ‘shines like
galaxy of stars’. What is more? If the assumed senate
society refuse to appreciate the worth of her percussionist,
and he is left to be medalled by prison inmates who were
freer than their incarcerator who imprisoned them, then
Jessy Jackson is eternally right: ‘that oppressors need also
to remain inside the ditch to hold the oppressed down in the
ditch’. This is not without severe brutality and mental
torture that Nigerian prisons are famous.
The biochemist turned eminent journalist, like every other
hero of our fledgling democracy is in the fruits of our hard
earned democracy every Nigerian enjoys today – at least
relative freedom of speech. He had earlier dreamed of
tendering plants and animals but, found self ministering to
the soul of a vanquished nation and a world with stoic
indifference to human dignity. There might never have been
Suicide Journalism without Tell Magazine, the cradle of Osa’s professional tutelage and her prodigious team of
whistle-blower. Their strength of character and the
determination to help a drowning nation and withstand
military dictatorships and oppressive aberration saw through
the birth of Insider Magazine and Suicide Journalism.
Creation is meaningless and of no effect whatsoever without
the sacred sanctity of human life. Dictators who toil with
human lives, just because they are afraid of the unkind
verdict of history from its first chroniclers – journalists
– or just being discomforted within their demented being,
turn out, in the long run, to be the worst victims of their
afflictions.
Bad weeds never die. Erstwhile President Olusegun Obasanjo,
the self created dictator, in all intents and purposes
guaranteed repressive regime for uninterrupted eight-year.
He ran a cloak and dagger government and suffered from dowdy
image – in a nation that had suffered from several
liabilities and had yearned for redemption. On September 4,
Obasanjo ordered State Security Service SSS, under the
leadership the bleached scion of ape generation, Kayode Are
who invaded media houses in one of several raids perpetrated
by the State Security Service SSS officers against the media
for lending voices to the voiceless. The editorial offices
of Insider Weekly news magazine in Lagos were attacked.
Officers smashed the doors in and vandalized the office,
seizing several documents. While inside, they arrested
production manager Raphael Olatoye. They later visited the
printers' office and seized all copies of the magazines'
most recent edition. Before leaving the editorial offices
they chained and locked the doors. Later that day the SSS
published a statement saying that they had ''stormed'' the
magazine because it had been ''consistently attacking,
disparaging and humiliating the person and the office of the
President and the Commander-in-Chief.'' That is how so many
a dictators come about the criminalization of criticism of
government policies as an act of treason. Granted that
freedom of speech lately has grown through the cracks in the
firmaments of our fractured democracy, away from what it
used to be under military juntas, yet we need a freer space
to grow democratic tenets through press freedom. Even today
in Nigeria nothing has changed significantly. You still hear
government roaring down on media houses and journalists
through threats of suing for libel and the justification the
media do not have like the tolling of a funeral bell. Press
freedom in Nigeria remains a mirage without the passage of
Freedom of Information Bill, FOIB, and those who hid under
the Official Secrets Acts to perpetuate corruption will
ensure the retention of the status quo.
Do you remember Abacha? Do you remember triple ‘D’ – the
diminutive demented dictator? General Sani Abacha was the
worst dictator of his time in living history. He ran
berserk, crushing every obstacle on his part to realize his
vaunting ambition as the first Nigerian military President
to have transmuted and civilianized his governance, using
state resources he stashed away in about 150 banks, totally
N600 billion all over the world to sink the nation and drown
its people!
Ismaila Gwarzo, Abacha’s national security adviser, NSA has
confessed to collecting hundreds of billion of naira from
Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN 15 times in dollars and pound
sterling with the collaboration of Abacha’s son, Mohammed
and Abacha’s aide, Zazzawa Zafara. Part of the money was
used to finance ‘Abacha Criminal Organization’ all over the
world. But the three Musketeers and erstwhile Heads of
State: General Buhari, General Babangida and Abubakar in a
mutual sanitation absolved Abacha on the 10th anniversary of
his ignominious passing, garlanded him with heroic robe.
Buhari, the iron cast dictator dismissed the documented
looting spree of Abacha, saying they were unproven
allegations. Babangida on his part dismissed Abacha looting
festival as mere ploy to give dog bad name in order to hang
it. ‘‘It is not true that he looted public treasury, I knew
who Abacha was because I was close to him,’’ he said.
Abubakar who succeeded Abacha and returned the nation to
civil rule because to do otherwise would have plunged the
nation into total collapse averred at the 10th anniversary
that ‘‘it was unfair to accuse Abacha and his family of
looting public fund’’.
Mohammed Haruna, the syndicate journalist and Chief Press
Secretary to President Abubabar almost lost his job for
addressing Press Conference over some Abacha’s recovered
loots by Abubakar’s junta, after an earlier agreement to
that effect the previous night without seeking further
clearance the following morning before addressing the Press
Conference. He was ordered to recant his words and tell the
world that Abacha did not steal again but, he objected.
Haruna would say later that what informed Abubakar decision,
even his now revisionism is as a result of his hogwashed
version of Islamic belief of ‘see, hear and say no evil of
the death’. I never knew that in a secular nation such as
Nigeria that religious belief affect ones patriotism! Now
this. Nigeria is too rich to be poor and too poor to be
rich; courtesy of Buhari, Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar
looting sleaze who are the proponents of a state of all
chiefs and no Indian.
Abacha has been succeeded ingloriously by Omar Al-Bashir of
Sudan . Al-Bashir is the worst dictator at the moment with
atrocious iniquity against his nation and people. It
remained baffling that rulers with comatose consciences lay
claim to mental superiority while clutching at ephemeral
power; while the people whose sovereignty they ought to hold
in thrust wallow in genteel dehumanization of a swallowed
heirloom. General Sani Abacha and Babangida did just that.
Obasanjo did much the same. And who says Umar Musa Yar’ Adua
will not be tempted much later, even now, to acquaints
himself with those repression decadence in tandem with the
cult ruling class.
No one, in my estimation aptly described Osa as Prince Tony
Momoh: himself a media and legal authority as ‘the greatest
activist journalist of the 21 st-century’. The Prince would
ask rhetorically, ‘tell me of any journalist who asserts his
negation against the establishment’s anti-peoples’ agenda as
though a corrosive hole has been drilled into the core of
his being as does Osa Director’? Osa understand how
important new media is to African democracies, the third
world countries and the belligerent societies – the
imperative need that it be responsible and honest, free from
personal bias, fair and accurate in critical times that
require social regeneration.
Even in climes where social justice is the abiding metaphor
of human existence the media serves as the agent of
political, technological and economic reordering of such
nation. He is still asserting himself to social justice, not
deterred in spite of earlier incarceration, firing aims at
the repressive regimes. It is this quality as an incurable
inquisitor of truth and paragon of justice inherent in him
from cradle that led him into journalism. Though I have
never met Osa in flesh and blood, but that kindred spirit
that yolks its own across borders, mountains and valleys
repeated its cosmic fervency. A barrister at law, Osa is now
imbued a killer instinct to advance the cause of justice and
humanity. He offers you Suicide Journalism written with
genius perfection. Without exaggeration, the book ranks
third most influential of the nearly 2160 books I have read
in terms of spontaneous career change, apart from ‘AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR The Story of my experiment with truth’, by M.K Gandhi the saint of slum of modern Indian and ‘Long Walk
to Freedom’, by Nelson Mandela; the two world best moral
leaders that ever existed.
The book is particularly essential for people like me who,
having strayed and found themselves in places other than
their core calling, yet battling daily inexorably to
retrieve their cactus patch to actualize their authentic
being, in spite the near penury that seems to be associated
with journalism, the major determinant in a world that is
adrift with reality. The book is not just a product of
expedience or a mere nosey parker in some voyage in fantasy
island but, of a drive to fight the wrongs and ills in the
world, tendentiously visited on humanity by the slammer
bearers and their sycophantic collaborators.
But because humanity will almost always remain
unfortunately saddled with monsters like President IBBs’ of
Nigeria; President Idi Amin Dadas’ of Uganda, Prime Minister
Antonio de Salazars’ of Portugal, President Slobodan
Milosevics’ of Yugoslavia, President Robert Mugabes of
Zimbabwe, President Hirato Kokis’ of Japan, President Saddam
Hussiens’ of Iraq, President Radovan Karadzics of Pale,
President Megistu Haile Marims’ of Ethiopia, to mansion just
but a few, Suicide Journalism and dissidents of Dele Giwa’s
cast would continued to serve as third force catalyst in
advancement of social justice.
Africa particularly is a slaughters’ society, where
political opponents, dissidents or journalists are fed to
crocodiles; hack off the feet of prisoners of war, and then
starve and assassinate hapless citizens. Professor Wole
Soyinka said this much in his book, The Man Died while
arguing against the creation of a culture of impunity and
apathy in whatever guise in any society. According to the
wordsmith: ‘If these and like crimes were complete in
themselves, if they ended in their own occurrence and had no
implications for the future beyond the unpleasant memory, we
would be content to bury our dead, console the maimed and
proceed with a calmed will into the future. But with the
certain knowledge that such events are unresolved, and their
lack of resolution promotes their own kind a
hundred-thousand fold, with increasingly sophisticated
machinery of outrage and camouflage, in increased boldness
and cynicism which only pauses when a people’s will is
wholly dominated, one recognises the sanctimonious opiate
inherent in popular slogans like bygones is bygones’.
Africans are particularly stone blind to their leaders’
rapacious plunder. While they flaunt their obsessive wealth,
desperate politicians, driven to the extreme, the pauperized
belligerents endure the suffering and hardships never
witness since the slave trade era. A nations whose mass of
people are treated like medieval potentates, who avert their
forlorn faces while the leaders sunk deep into the
collective till to minister their greed does not qualify for
the description of a nation. Leaders who have less spiritual
interest and compassion than Joseph Stalin of the Communist
USSR and Adolph Hitler of Fascist Germany need psychiatrist
evaluations. It is to be assumed that government failure to
revisit IBB case, and bring him to justice over Dele Giwa’s
killing many years after has implicit connivance that sits
ill with the demons that are piloting the affairs of the
Nigeria State. Dele was just a journalist. He had no guns to
kill Babangida and his allies, nor money to mobilize
Nigerians against his dictatorial streak. His only weapon
was his brain and his pen and had hoped to destroy Babangida
with the truth about his crime against humanity. That is the
only way the big for nothing giant that the Nigeria nation
has come to be known may expiate or exorcize the demons that
seat atop the rudderless edifice that is only waiting for
its ominous collapse. Even if Babangida escapes retributive
justice on this part of the earthly divide, he certainly,
would be inherited by the earth: the lots of the wicked, as
against the peace maker who earth inheritance belong. Who
can know the topography of the human mind? How do we
ascertain the wellness of one of the most bloodthirsty
despot, whose Squadron-Leader, Adamu Sakaba had urged to
destroy the expired explosives, and objected, which later
killed hundreds of innocent Nigerian citizens in Lagos and
elsewhere?
Dele Giwa has resurrected through his incarnate, Osa
Director whose turning point and life changing decision took
effect with the demise of the former through letter bomb, as
his remains were laid in state at Ogbe Stadium in the
ancient city of Benin . He didn’t have a whale of a time to
make that choice to become a journalist. Though he may not
be the only one to make such decision in such circumstances
in living history, but he made omelet out of his own egg.
Not many could. He could not countenance beholding the
lifeless and mangled body of his hero in a white casket,
whose weekly column serves as daily menu for his famished
eyes and that of his friends. The death of Dele influences
the cause of Nigerian’s recent history through the brave and
defiant and vibrant reporting of News Watch Magazine;
Tell Magazine, The News Magazine, Insider weekly news magazine
and many more magazines and newspapers too numerous to
mention that were the creation of the after-murder of their
co-traveller, the epitome of investigative journalism.
Osa Director has done and still doing his bite as part of
his duty to contribute in his own little way, to humanity
that is dearly in need of savage, therefore making history
and being part of it at the same time. Barrington Moore was
aware of this when says "The struggle concerns contemporary
capitalist democracy's capacity to, live up to its noble
professions, something no society has ever done....As one
peers ever deeper to resolve the ambiguities of history, the
seeker eventually finds them in himself and his fellow men
as well as in the supposedly dead facts of history. We are
inevitably in the midst of the ebb and flow of those events
and play a part, no matter how small and insignificant as
individuals, in what the past will come to mean for the
future."
No Nigerian politician, elected or selected is thinking
about capacity building. Our libraries are empty, yet
Nigerian government has set mountainous goals for itself
called vision ‘‘2020’’: that it wants to be among top 20
supersonic economy countries by 2020 through Millennium
Development Goals, MDGs projections! Economy growth is not a
happenstan, but a product of concerted efforts of all who
wish themselves and their nation good. But one the many woes
of Nigerian project are that it does not put her money where
her mouth is.
Do you think we can achieve MDGs projections without
education in all ramifications? Can you talk about education
without books? Don’t you think it will do this nation a word
of good if we have Suicide Journalism in all the 36 states
of the federation; every Constituencies, Local Government
Councils, Wards and families? How do you think we can have
it in those places without buying? How do you read without
buying? I just bought.
Ikhide is the Director
Of Research, Constitutionalism
And African Democratization, CAAD.
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