"Only people who are knowledgeable about the history of Nigeria and are presumed to have internalised the lessons it teaches should be allowed in print or on air to preside over sensitive or explosive issues"
Bellarose Okogie is a radio broadcaster after my heart.Hérs is a racy style powered by good diction and the right choice of words.In advancing years,she makes me rise much earlier than I did in work years to catch her early morning newscast on City FM radio station in Lagos.But she often is unable to hide herself behind the news.
What do I mean? months ago, she Carelessly in a side talk described Lagos aa a "NO MAN'S LAND." And against the clamour of the political party of governor Akinwunmi Ambode in Lagos, that is the All people's congress (APC), Bella would appear to root for the governor. Alaba Alape quickly corrected Bella in a telephone call to the live broadcast that Lagos belonged to some people. I had wished then, to ask Bella if she belonged to the family of cardinal Olubunmi Okogie extended family.If she does, as her name would suggest, she must be a christian and, thereby familiar with the story of the birth of our Lord JESUS, that Joseph and Mary, His parents, heeded the government's call for census of citizens by going to their native Nazareth from Jerusalem to be registered in the head count.Thus, the Lord JESUS would be called JESUS of Nazareth.There is a reason everyone is born by his or her parents, and none other, why one belongs to a country.
Sometimes, we are violently reminded of this such as through the unfortunate experiences of the Jews in the hands of the Germans and of Asia in Uganda under General Idi Amin.The Jews who went from Canaan to Egypt because Joseph, their kindred had become a Lord of the manor in that foreign land, did not regard themselves as Egyptians simply because generations of them did not even know that a land called Canaan existed.Those who did would beseech the Lord to take them back home to Canaan someday. Moses would appear on the scene and lead them towards the Promised Land,Canaan.These Jews returning home would find Canaan occupied by interlopers and fight wars to once again regain their fatherland.
Soon, however, they would wander away from home to greener pastures all over the world...The Amercas, Europe, Asia etc. In Germany, they would live as if they owned Germany, virtually dispossesing the Germans of their own land.Under Adolf Hitler during the second world war, Germans dislodged the Jews from Germany under circumstances too horrendous to describe here.These circumstances are a powerful historical lesson for those people who neglect their own land and seek to make the land of other people an extension of their own land. Even in their wildest imaginations the europeans who colonised Africa during the weakest point of African history never thrived to make Africa their land.They merely exploited its resources as they still do today from their own lands.The Ijebus, my people, helped the Ibadans to defeat the Egbas during the yoruba inter tribal wars.For this reason, the Ibadans gave Ijebu soldiers a place in Ibadan called Ijebutedo to settle after the war.This must have been well over 100 years before Adegoke Adelabu, an Ibadan political leader, was killed in a motor crash which the Ibadans said chief Obafemi Awolowo, an Ijebu, masterminded with Ijebu remote control, for which they embarked on the retaliatory killings of Ijebus in Ibadan about 1957 or1958. My father, an Ijebu with tribal marks,was among police reinforcement from Abeokuta sent to Ibadan.To avoid being identified and killed, he had to wear police tear gas mask.Till this day, the Ijebus in Ibadan know they are not Ibadans but Ijebus. Everyone who is not a territorial thief knows his or her root like the back of his or her palms.
An exception would be those land hungry europeans who fled from home and fell upon the simple and unsuspecting American red Indians in today's united states, or those who fell upon the Austrailian Aborigens or the dutch, fleeing from the black sea,fell upon the peoples of Southern Africa. Bella, more about this another day.
Today's issue is the electoral law amendment bill which, like a football or ping pong ball, the Nigerian legislature and executive has been kicking up and down.The 2019 elections are a volatile question.This morning, Bella called for the opinion of her station's listeners on who, between President Mohammadu Buhari and the National Assembly is delaying the passage of this bill into law.This was after she had re -educated them that this was the fourth time the president would decline to sign the bill into law.
The net effect of her summary was that, without this law, the elections would be rigged and bring the president back to power against the popular will.She gave the impression that president Buhari was the stumbling block or the spanner in the works who kept refusing to sign this deal although the National Assembly kept meeting his demands all in a bid to make the elections impossible to rig, the bill haven blocked all the loopholes. Her presentation made president Buhari look like a lamb fit for no other place but the slaughter slab.
I opened my mouth and almost couldn't close it, as we say in yoruba land when we are shocked beyond words.Luckily, many callers pulled Bella by the ears. I wondered if Bella didn't know the politics and legalism behind the ping pong.The governors and the legislators want their own elections to run first so that, when secured, they can frustrate the president's re - election and pave the way for a corruption friendly president.
Unfortunately, they played into Buhari's hands with many flaws they always do not detect in the draft, and the new ones they are making.When you are plotting, you do not get things right.While the ping pong was going on, they probably forgot that there was an African union and an ECOWAS initiative to improve elections quality in Africa to which Nigeria is a signatory.These initiatives demand, for example, we are told by lawyers, that an electoral law must be in place no fewer than six months before an election. Isn't that reasonable? This is December, about two months away from the 2019 elections. Do we want the polls to be postponed? Under which law would that be done? And what would the insinuations be? Bella ought to have called for comments against this background..Elections are volatile questions in Africa.The opposition claims always it is cheated if it loses. In 1964, Nigeria's opposition boycotted the polls.That boycott led to the first military coup two years later and to the civil war the year after that. Only people who are knowledgeable about the history of Nigeria and are presumed to have internalised the lessons it teaches should be allowed in print or on air to preside over sensitive or explosive issues. That was why, in 1979, when I went to England for a journalism training, the news editor of a newspaper I worked under, who was in his seventies, was suprised that I, at 29, was already a line edior.
It wasn't my problem.Nor is it Bella's.There is economic explosion in our country, shelling editorial oppprtunities faster than professionals can be well groomed and matured to fill them.
I guess the same applies to other professions such as banking, military, the judiciary, the academia which is filled with half baked professors and the priesthood which has led to all kinds of pastors.When General Yakubu Gowon went to the United Kingdom on a state visit in the 1970s and stopped by at the military school in Sanhurst where he was trained as a senior officer after his primary training as a junior officer at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), his old military teachers were still there about 3 or 4 ranks below his new status. If by military tradition he was bound as a trainee to salute them in his days at Sanhurst,they were now bound to salute him because, on a second coming he had become their superior officer! Never mind the British.They will giggle and grin from one corner of the mouth to the other, once he was no longer within air shot and eye view.
Bella remains my star broadcaster, nevertheless. I will continue to lose one or two hours sleep every morning just to catch her voice.Catch you up, Bella.
...Prince Olufemi John Kusa, a Veteran jounalist, was a former Editor of The Guardian and former Editor - In - Chief, The Comet(rested)
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