The Bile of Ray Ekpu
Ray Ekpu, Nigeria’s master journalist, accomplished craftsman and one of the exemplary columnists that the nation has produced, has drawn the ire of many of his younger colleagues with his caustic dismissal of the notable tradition of anti-state writing known as guerrilla journalism. In an otherwise finely wrought tribute and homage to his fallen colleague, comrade in arms and bosom friend, Dan Agbese, Ekpu threw caution to the winds when he reached the subject matter, launching into a tempestuous tirade against guerrilla journalism . As for its practitioners, he dismissed them all as frauds and psychologically impaired entities who are not worthy of the sacred mantle of journalism.
Many who knew the master columnist in his prime are horrified by this wild confetti of lies, illogicalities, inaccuracies and outright falsities. It may well be that Ray Ekpu has been badly tripped by a series of recent personal bereavements which have affected his normally sunny and cheery disposition; his capacity for stoic equanimity in the face of pressing tribulations. Or it may well be that Ray is smarting from the psychological trauma inflicted on him in some very public encounters by some juvenile disruptors of the journalistic status quo in the not too remote past.
Dismissing a social phenomenon for its juvenile antics and its occasional resort to delinquent fabrications does not, and cannot, equate to denying its existence. Ray Ekpu does not even offer an argument. He offers a rant. Like guerrilla warfare, its more famous genetic cousin, guerrilla journalism is a response to particular developments in the society which demand urgent countervailing action. It is not born of moral precepts or ethical exhortations. It is a logical outflow and direct consequence of certain developments in the society and the contradictions spawned.
You do not need to like the troika of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin to appreciate the extravagant saga of human heroism that the Russian Revolution is. Without ever stepping into any military school Leon Trotsky became a general of the Red Army repeatedly routing the rump of the Russian Imperial Army and its western imperialist cohorts in a stunning demonstration of superhuman bravery and audacity. How about the epic march of Mao’s ragtag largely peasant army which allowed them to overwhelm the Kuomintang forces, sending the leadership scampering across the Taiwanese Straits? This is not to discount the storied confrontation of the apartheid regime by the African National Congress which was founded in 1912 but did not come to power until 1994. In all these nations, we witness the dramatic collision of human agency and will with one side boldly staking its claim to hegemonic domination while another set of actors push forward to oppose it. This confrontation of altars is the motor and driving impetus of human history.
In every department of human endeavor be it religion, royalty, politics, economics, law, academics, music, culture, industry and of course the important substratum of communication, we witness this unceasing struggle for hegemonic domination among opposing forces which often results in the overthrow and dethronement of extant reality or the tense accommodation of contrasting and countervailing visions of society until the material basis of one tendency is subverted from within by emergent realities. This is what is currently unfolding in the north of the nation as the Boko Haram insurrection, religious insurgency and various bandit groups stake a bold claim while the ruins of the old feudal order insist on supervising its own funeral with the help of foreign mercenaries.
The anticolonial struggle in Nigeria and the brutal pacification of the tribes of the lower and upper Niger by Lord Lugard and his honchos gave birth to an anticolonial press centred around the emergent Yoruba coastal aristocracy in Lagos. They fought the colonial masters with their pen setting the stage for an intellectual demystification of the entire colonial project in Nigeria. They gave as much as they got from Lord Lugard and his brother. So outraged was Lugard by their presumed arrogance matched only by their supercilious airs and merciless condescension that he dismissed them as “uppity niggers”.
MJC Echeruo, the notable Nigerian scholar, captured the sizzling and scintillating drama very memorably in his book, Victorian Lagos. Their relentless criticism and sharp rebuff of the colonial agenda in Nigeria forced Lugard and his imperialist cohorts from one unforced error to another until the military overreach of the Adubi war which suborned the burgeoning Egba city-state but which also led to the terminal recall of Lugard after suffering another nervous breakdown. It was the last time anybody ever heard of him.
This anti- colonial animus of a section of the Nigerian press set the tone and stage for the emergence of a radical segment of the press after independence in 1960. But with the conservative Daily Times and a slew of regional newspapers ruling the roost, the influence waned dramatically. The political inheritors of the new nation also realized that they have a lot at stake and that there is a lot to gain in preserving the system. Radicalism became a smear word and a progressive party like the Action Group had a tough time explaining the beneficence of some its key programmes to the wider masses. Corruption and mismanagement didn’t need to be explained. They assume a trans-national efficacy. The radical press went into hibernation.
The Rapture of Gani Fawehinmi
But as it so ever happens in nature and history, the moment of distress and destruction is also the moment regeneration kicks in. On the first day of November, 1983, that is about forty two years ago at the terrace of the ground floor of the middle block of the Humanities Complex of the then University of Ife, I met a group of students clustered around the tall, gangling figure of Femi Ojudu himself a final year student of mine. They were poring over an article in the edition of the Guardian newspaper of that day. Femi looked up and saw me, probably alerted about my approach. “We are discussing your article which came out this morning”, the future guerrilla journalist and future senator of the federal republic informed yours sincerely in a polite and admiring manner.
Talking about politics and ideology, students of the much storied university remain among the most politicized and radicalized in the country. It is wired into their DNA. As a student, yours sincerely remember being at the vanguard of a student uprising in which the Vice-Chancellor, H A Oluwasanmi himself, was abducted and taken hostage. In his very last interview, the man in whose honour the university was named after and who remains the nation’s ultimate symbol of political integrity, administrative wizardry and economic genius had informed his interviewer that if he were to come back in thirty years and Nigeria were still to be a bastion of injustice, inequity and massive inequality, he would be found at the head of the stone-throwing mob.
But back to the article in question. 1983 was the last year of grace for the old Nigerian political class. The scandalously rigged elections of that year were the icing on the cake of infamy. Despite the glitz and glamour, the intellectual sophistication and stylistic razzmatazz, the newly established Guardian newspaper proved to be part of the establishment and its cerebral foremen nothing but organic intellectuals of a decadent postcolonial state. Avant- Garde technique was in the service of Derriere- Garde retrogressive and reactionary politics. Titled, The Guardian and the state of the nation, the article accused The Guardian of cold complicity and collusion with the mess taking hold of the country.
Submitted at the end of September of that year, The Guardian Nomenklatura sat on it for about five weeks wondering what to do with the parcel bomb until it decided to publish a well-reasoned and weighty rejoinder written by its helmsman, Stanley Macebuh, vigorously defending the values and virtues of liberal ideology and politics. It was titled, The Liberal Society and its Enemies. It provoked a rash of rejoinders from angry nationals particularly from the university communities. Yours sincerely kept his cool until an excellent opportunity presented itself which was the passing of Raymond Aron, the great French conservative intellectual. In the tribute, simply titled For Raymond Aron, yours sincerely heaped praises on the French titan as a true defender of liberty and equality. What was left strategically unsaid was more devastating of the liberal poseurs at the Guardian in a society of deep inequality and illiberal politics. Sixteen days after the article was published on December 14th, 1983, the military swept the Second Republic into the trashcan of history.
Now fast forward to ten years after the encounter with Femi Ojudu and his fellow students. On a cold evening in early November 1993, yours sincerely, chaperoned by Seye Kehinde, slipped into the Ikeja GRA neighborhood of Gani Fawehinmi to commiserate with him on his recent ordeal in the hands of the government. It was another period of uncertainty for the nation, this time emanating from military misrule. The military, having exhausted their military and political possibility, had testily withdrawn to the barracks. But with the goggled general still on the prowl, everybody knew that this was a ruse to allow things to cool down. But civil society, now better organized and better educated than it was ten years before, had mounted ferocious and bloody challenges to military dictatorship.
The newspaper industry suffered a severe setback as a result of summary proscriptions, seizures and illegal court summons. Many suffered ruination. A few that could not bear the military affront chose to go underground. Most notable were Tempo, a fiery, irrepressible tabloid which gave the military authorities sleepless nights, and The News magazine which heroically refused to be proscribed by the junta. They were now edited by politically conscious radicalized students of the eighties: Messrs Bayo Onanuga from the University of Lagos, Babafemi Ojudu, Dapo Olorunyomi, Idowu Obasa, Kunle Ajibade, Seye Kehinde and their foot-soldiers such as Ebenezer Obadare all from the old University of Ife and later on Obafemi Awolowo University. This was the origin of the underground press Nigeria and what became known as Guerrilla Journalism.
This is the tradition of heroic resistance to tyranny that our good friend, Ray Ekpu, pooh-poohed and assailed with merciless assiduity. It is worth recalling that on that night, Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, patriot extraordinary, legal colossus and Ondo nobleman, received us with extravagant cordiality and conviviality. Turning to yours sincerely he gushed with child-like excitement: Ah, you see, all those things you are writing, we were reading them in Guje. There was even a time an inmate snatched my copy of Tempo only for him to drop it in the pit latrine. We cleaned it up to continue our reading”.
But like a scene out of the Theatre of Chaos, we had hardly settled down to merriment when one of the political apparitions haunting the nation at that point in time suddenly materialized out of the shadows resplendent in overflowing lace agbada and lugging a hefty sack brimming with files of the membership of the infamous ABN. “This is Alhaji Abimbola Davies and he has brought a comprehensive list of the membership of his organization. The list will shock Nigerians. When I put all of them in the dock, they will collapse with terminal exhaustion”, Gani vowed. Reeling out otherwise sacred names, the files revealed the extent of the elite conspiracy against Abiola’s mandate.
Luckily for the conspirators, it did not come to that. Abacha’s creeping coup swept away the hideous contrivance known as the Interim National Government about a fortnight after. Thereafter, the goggled despot bared his fangs against the press and went after the underground papers in particular. Kunle Ajibade was summarily impounded as he made his way out of a safe house. He spent the better part of two years cooling his heels in horrific incarceration. Femi Ojudu was also nabbed and was sent to Abacha’s Gulag where he survived by drinking his own urine. The duo of Bayo Onanuga and Dapo Olorunyomi outpaced and outwitted the security services until it became a bridge too far. They fled abroad. Bagaudo Kaltho was not so lucky. He was grilled to death by Abacha’s goons.
The severity and enormity of Abacha’s repressive rule particularly his anti-press animus are better imagined. In March 1996, yours sincerely wrote an op-ed piece for Africa Today on the state of the nation . The edition was summarily confiscated on getting to Nigeria by security agents. In a chance encounter at Abuja Airport with Kayode Soyinka, the publisher of the London-based magazine, a minister of Yoruba origins serving in Abacha’s government gleefully told Soyinka that although he was a gentleman, he should blame himself for turning over the page of his magazine to rebels, rabid subversives and past masters of agitprop. Such was the dread with which the guerrilla journalists were held that at a meeting before the falcon fled the falconer, General Oladipo Diya asked Bayo Onanuga, his fellow Ijebuman, whether it was true that his papers were published inside the American Embassy. The truth was more mundane and pedestrian.
When Gani Fawehinmi was cynically accused of always playing to the gallery in his crusade for justice in Nigeria, he retorted that his interlocutors should also submit themselves to arrest and brutal detention over a hundred times by succeeding military despots so that they can confirm how easy it was to play to the gallery. Let it also be with guerrilla the journalists. They were antithetical forces responding to a particular historical thesis of military brutality and misrule. They faced guns without being fazed and challenged the notion that brute force should supersede rational consensus in the affairs of humanity. With their brazen bravery, they wrote their names into the political folklore of their people.
Post-Guerrila and the American Unibomber
It is possible that a strict and straight laced professional like Ekpu might have been riled and irritated by the swiftness and ease of transition of some guerrilla journalists from underdogs to top dogs. This is the normal case when a society faces some transitional turbulence. Dismissing the Babangida transition as a charade, the late Professor Oyeleye Oyediran noted that the class project of cooptation opened up tremendously with many new recruits clambering on the bandwagon. But this is what has happened with every transition in Nigeria from colonial to postcolonial .Nobody remembers that SL Akintola, Antony Enahoro, H.O Davies, Ernest Ikoli and many others were fierce anti-colonial journalists who found their way to the power podium.
Brave identification with a power project makes them sterling recruits. What is important and provident is to hold the feet of the new entrants to power to fire. As history has shown us, the Nigerian political public is so mercurial and inquisitorial that it does not allow heroic antecedents to get in the way of current infractions. Check our history. Those who are calling for a return of guerrilla journalism are completely misdirected. That development has served its cause. No two historical conjunctures can be alike. Since the departure of the military, the Nigerian society has opened up. God must forbid the return of a draconian military dictator who will have to be fought on new terms and not on the old paradigm of cockroach journalism. We live in totally uncharted times particularly in the epoch of the grim American global unibomber. What now faces the nation is far more dangerous with the American intervention. Unless the Nigerian political elites get far more serious and stitch something together and on time too, we may be facing a post-Yugoslavian apocalyptic meltdown. God bless the nation.
