(Portrait of the Nigerian journalist in 2017)
This year as all others, we pretended to have answers to everything. Did we? This year, we spat words and ate them, like the dog that waddles back to gobble its vomit.
This year, we quoted Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali, Awolowo,Maitama Sule, Ojukwu, among others, to garnish our columns while we silenced true-born dissent on our news pages and networks, lest we incur the ire of irate benefactors.
I tender unreserved apology to the few media and journalists who lived up to full measure in the spirit of integrity, social responsibility and unimpeachable ethics. They remain Nigerian journalism’s shining lights in a wilderness of vice.
Yet this is the year we ennobled the thieving statesman and denied the patriot the plaudits we save for noble compatriots. This is the year we celebrated underachievers as the best of overachievers. This year, we celebrated the vanities of dim-witted celebrities on front-pages of our national newspapers.
Here goes the year we exhausted newsprint and priceless airtime to glamorize the shenanigans of “society bigwigs and dim wigs” although we cannot tell and still cannot tell, the simplest manifestations of our news practice, on say, the vendor who markets the newspaper or the child-labourer to whom Universal Basic Education (UBE) remains an everlasting fantasy.
This year, we feted the northern mafia, eastern cabal, western gerontocracy, and south-south uprising, as usual, even as they undermined our collective dreams of progress.
Beyond our elegant words and brazen manifestations of high character, our practice is modeled after some greedy few’s cartography of citizenship than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. Hence our misinterpretation of the social contract between the media and the society we serve.
Thus this year as all others, we hid behind interviews, ‘big interviews,’ to abdicate our responsibilities to the Nigerian public. Then we taught the public to digest perversion because we know if we treat them to such depravity, we would get more adverts and keep smiling to the banks.
This year as all others, we turned a blind eye and conveniently lost our voice as creatures running the three arms of government squandered public fund to feed their gluttony. We watched unperturbed as most of our colleagues ennobled and defended with their lives, the rights of the ruling class to pilfer our chests and rob us silly because leaders of men like them deserve to eat and dwell like no ordinary man.
This year, the ruling class afflicted our lives with ineptitude and savagery. In response, we cried ourselves hoarse, twisting logic and lip service, for and against our favourite public officer; eventually, we lost our voices to bigotry and confusion.
This is the year in which our brothers in the north-east tirelessly blew to death, our mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, in the market place, schools, on the playground, in the bedrooms and houses of worship, in the name of politics and religion. This year, our brothers in the south-east determinedly kidnapped our wives and daughters, mothers and fathers, sons and heirs apparent, for a ransom, in pursuit of unearned affluence. This is the year in which our brothers in the southwest habitually mortgaged our future on the altar of politics, personal and sectarian greed. This year as all others, we refused to dissect these maladies in the interest of our nation thus helping the world to understand why we are regarded as the inheritors in whose hands the heritage dies.
This year, we affirmed that we are amoral and somewhat intellectually challenged courtesy our ethnic and intellectual bigotry.
This year, we failed to actualize press freedom because it was socio-politically incorrect to do so. This year as all others, we failed to acknowledge that our survival or death as a nation is undeniably entwined with the tenor of practice and citizenship of the Nigerian press.
This year as all others, I make a case for re-sensitization of the Nigerian press. It is time we dismembered our clan of the charlatan.
In spite of everything, we choose to play god. That is why “dogs don’t eat dogs” in our Fourth Estate although it’s okay if we eat the entrails of a few ordinary Nigerians like the unfortunate adulterer caught pants down even as we underreport thieving bankers stealing from the poor to enrich rogue CEOs and the ruling class.
I hope we find the courage to report; “The Rot in the Media” and that for every kobo looted by government, from public and private coffers, the press gets its share. Dateline: media parleys, press conferences and governors’ roundtables.
This year as all others, I suggest humaneness and high ethics, to improve our welfare and standard of delivery. It’s time we asked: “Who is a journalist?” and aspire to an untainted definition of it. It’s about time we redefined what level of knowledge, qualification and professionalism is expected of a journalist. It’s time we ascertained what manner of passion channels the direction of our news practice.
This year as all others, I suggest we ditch politicians who treat us as disposable pawns in their grand theme of schemes. Come 2018, shall we service depravity of folk for whom our pens write melodies, instead of maladies impoverished folk are dying to have us publicize that they might fare better?
In 2018, shall we remain intellectual hit men for every hoodlum with deep pocket? Shall we become cliff-hangers to take portraits of looters and celebrity-nincompoops with promising smiles? Shall we remain the media managers that pay poorly even as we label expatriate firms slave-drivers?
Next year, will the masses stare at our cover pages resignedly, knowing they would never feel or hear the infinitesimal clangor of freed hope because we remain aberrations of their desperate circumstances? Shall we continue to speak from both sides of the mouth? Shall we continue to eat like “idiots” at the feast of the one who calls us “idiot?”
