Obituarists beware. Reports about the death of column and columnist are wildly exaggerated. Snooper is alive and kicking. The celebrations are premature, not to say immature. Despite the announcement of a short exit, the disappearance of this column has given rise to wild speculations. A version had it that Snooper has disappeared in a Stalinist purge. Another held that the columnist lost out in a bitter power struggle and had been banished to the outer periphery of political Siberia. When yours sincerely appeared briefly in public sporting dark goggles, it was noted that he was recovering from the beating of his life.
It was the late Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe who famously warned some foolhardy journalists taking potshots at him to learn from the fate of their predecessors. K. O ominously hinted that when a particularly newspaper and its editor were busy attacking him, he decided to ignore them. But six months later—according to K.O’s inimitable lingo—both the paper and the editor folded up! Talk of a chilling retribution and restitution.
Still, it is with some trepidation that Snooper returns to these labours. The more things do not change in Nigeria, the more they appear to change. Nigeria reminds one of an old movie with new actors. One is left with a permanent feeling of Déjà vu. Since the script and the storyline remain the same, the great surprise is that one is often surprised, particularly by the new actors’ eerie fidelity to futility. There is no pedological alchemy that will turn cassava to yam. You must reap what you sow.
And so like a captive audience watching an old movie in a dilapidated cinema house, we are sometimes forced to applaud out of sheer ennui or polite perplexity. The actors know that the audience cannot leave just like that, and the audience know that the show must go on if only to preserve both the order of illusion and the illusion of order in a collapsing theatre. To break the historic deadlock and this engrossing illusionist fantasia will take a great surge of the human will to create anew.
So it is , then, that in a manner reminiscent of a gramophone record with the stylus stuck in a groove, we keep repeating ourselves even as we keep reenacting old scenes. Dear readers, the title of this column is not a new one. The original copyright belongs to an audacious and daring icon of resistance to tyranny. Our man was plucked from the rostrum as he was about to address a crowd only to be frog-marched to detention and jail. When he returned to the same rostrum a few years later, he began with the defiant words: “As I Was Saying!”.
Twenty five and half years after Snooper first used this title in a column for Newswatch,it is appearing again. This was in March 1988 after military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, de-proscribed the great trending magazine. In a feat of extreme daring and feckless audacity, Newswatch had published the entire report of the Political Bureau set up by the military junta to midwife the transition to democratic rule. So incensed was General Babangida by this fundamental challenge to the predilection of military rule to secrecy and stealth that he summarily proscribed the magazine. After public pressure, the proscription was changed to a six-month ban. It was a crippling blow to a magazine that was yet to recover from the assassination of its founding helmsman, Dele Giwa.
In Nigeria, comedy often interlaces with tragedy. For Snooper, the most hilarious aspect of the tragedy of proscription came in a little known incident which took place right inside the cavernous bowel of autocracy known as Dodan Barracks. While the nation waited with bated breath for the military’s response to Newswatch’s temerity, the young Dele Olojede, as at then a staffer with the magazine, sought an interview with Duro Onabule, Babangida’s press secretary.
Onabule calmly obliged. After the interview and as Olojede was making his way out of Dodan Barracks, the man known as double chief called out to him. “By the way, where are you going to publish that?” Unknown to Olojede, his magazine had been proscribed by the military junta but the news had not been aired. Onabule should know.
This incident showcases the awesome powers of a military oligarchy to not only to manage information but also to dominate its environment. But it also showcases the inch by inch, column by column, toe to toe and barricade after barricade nature of the protracted and costly struggle to rid Nigeria of military despotism and its noxious effluvium. Newswatch editors, to mark the magazine’s de-proscrption, published a rare editorial which courageously lambasted the tyranny and arbitrary nature of military rule and its stifling and suffocating breaches of the fundamental rights of the citizens. It was titled: Jogging in the Jungle.
It is sad to note that a quarter of a century after, we are still jogging in the jungle of arbitrary and whimsical rule. The actors might have changed, but the script and story line remain the same. Despite the formal termination of military rule, succeeding civilian regimes have been characterised by paranoid secrecy, historic heists, lack of accountability, flagrant denial of the fundamental rights of citizens to freedom of association and a predilection for autistic and brutish violence against the populace. Despite oases of liberation and human advancement, we have, in the main, merely exchanged a civilian tyranny for military despotism.
Looking back, it is hard not to feel a tinge of weary disappointment and terminal depression. It is hard not to feel that all the costly sacrifices have been in vain; that those who have died have died for nothing. But we must never allow temporary disappointment to lead to a permanent paralysis of the political will. We must always be guided by the longer and larger perspective. Nation-building is a permanent work in process, full of stunning advances and stinging reversals. It is important for people who come after us to know that there were people who were permanently and defiantly on their feet until they fell, like Babarinde Oluwide Omojola recently. So, folks, as I was saying…….
