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Adaptive leadership strategies in an uncertain time

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2 years ago

Good governance should ordinarily not be difficult to define. Generally it refers to transparency, responsiveness, accountability and performance. A government that works. A government that works for the people yet balances its acts in such a way that the middle and the upper classes do not feel left out either. Realistically, good governance also refers to the recognition of the superior place of perception over governance. I am not calling for an abdication of governance, what I say is that perception is an extension of Governance, to the extent that you create an awareness system that allows the masses to know and understand why certain actions are being taken, deferred or jettisoned altogether.

In spite of efforts by International bodies and the West to set a standard of behaviour to be categorized as good governance, there are numerous challenges and barriers that can hinder attempts at Good governance. Some of these challenges are corruption, lack of will to implement the rule of law, ineffective delegation of responsibilities, lack of gut and courage to take decisive decisions and inability to follow through a course of action.

The relationship between government and the media is as old as mankind itself and to the extent that a given Administration needs the support and understanding of those it governs, the media is Key. The story of the Nigerian media had been a gallant one because since 1859 when Iwe Iroyin Yoruba the first newspaper in Nigeria was published in Abeokuta, Journalism in Nigeria has been a major stakeholder in the governance apparatus. Indeed the clamour for Nigeria’s Independence was led by the media.

Better put, the struggle for Nigeria’s independence was orchestrated by the returnee Intelligentsia including former slaves, but it was essentially led by the media. It is therefore a no- brainer or trite as the lawyers would say, that the preponderance of Nigerian war of independence was fought not on the streets but on the pages of newspapers. And that is a factual bragging right for Nigeria because indeed, countries like South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and some others fought brutal wars where thousands of men, women and children were killed, to drive out the colonialists but in Nigeria we drove them away through the power of the pen. This singular act is perhaps the noblest contribution anyone can claim to the existence of Nigeria, our current embarrassing situation notwithstanding.

Without ambiguity, it can be asserted that democracy and political changes are deeply rooted in the binoculars of the media. Almost 70 years after Iwe Iroyin Yoruba, the Daily Times of Nigeria was established in June 1925 and together with other newspapers like the Zikist Daily Express and the West African Pilot became torns in the flesh of the colonialists. By 1949, Chief obafemi Awolowo established the Nigerian Tribune and added to the mounting pressure on the colonialists with scarthing, and skilled essays from the likes of Lateef Jakande, Bisi Onabanjo popularly called Ayekooto and others. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, fresh with a trail of university degrees from the United States and a large dose of confidence acquired therefrom, together with the likes of Herbert Macaulay, Mbonu Ojike, Anthony Enahoro and a few other cerebral ones forced the White men to accept Federalism in the 1951 Constitution and the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954 which vested a lot of powers to the Regions.

This development introduced renewed vigour which allowed democratic militancy to fester particularly through the media. In the Northern region, the clamour was not as frenetic as it was in the south but the giant woke from its slumber when a newspaper called The Northern Citizen was replaced by the New Nigerian which brazenly fought her interest in the post-independence era. One major achievement of the New Nigerian Newspaper was that it successfully instigated the military coup that toppled the Aquiyi Ironsi tenure that was adjudged to be largely an Igbo coup. The Newspaper openly called for the May 29, 1966 northern riot otherwise called the Pogrom and consequently replaced Ironsi with Yakubu Gowon one of their own. Such is the awesome power of the media.

Paradoxically after independence, the power of the media became an Albatross of sort as subsequent administration in Nigeria particularly the military started being wary and suspicious of the media. The unspoken alarm was that if the media, particularly the privately owned media are allowed to continue to rampage with its unfettered influence, it might turn against them as was successfully done with the colonialists and later with the popular and charismatic Yakubu Gowon. The honeymoon ended when the media started picking consistent holes in his policies such that when he was overthrown, he had been sufficiently weakened and no pressure group protested throughout the land.

The military’s fear came to manifest during All Africa Games in 1973. The federal government was in control of only the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation NBC TV in Lagos but thought it would be a good image laundering if it could showcase the game to the entire nation and the world. The NBC owned by the federal government had no such equipment to perform the feat but all the independent regional broadcast stations harnessed their resources and pulled it off with international coverage to boot! There and then, the plans to curtail the perceived dangerous trend of the powerful regional stations thickened but Yakubu Gowon could not execute the plan until he was overthrown two years later.

One of the first things the Murtala/Obasanjo regime did was the Takeover of all broadcast stations in the country including the Daily Times of Nigeria and the New Nigerian newspapers. In retrospect this was a reincarnation of the spectre of 1962 when the then Federal government banned the Daily Times and the West African Pilot because of their apparent support for Chief Obafemi Awolowo during the crisis in the West. The fear of the media apparently was the beginning of wisdom. The leaders of the country at the time must have been hell bent to stifle the oxygen of the media otherwise how would you consider muffling the Almighty Daily Times that was at the time selling close to half a million copies per day while the Sunday edition was rolling in excess of a quarter of a million copies. Or the famed Western Nigeria television Station WNTV first established by Chief obafemi Awolowo in 1959 and those of kaduna, the East and the Mid west? Since that singular anti-democratic move by the Military federal government, the media industry had never been the same again.

The Daily Times literally went under, The New Nigerian went moribund and the private broadcast stations took the shine off NTA. As a direct result of this experience, every government wanted to have a media it can call its own and which will be its own mouthpiece. While the Nigerian Tribune still played a pivotal role in the West, the Daily Sketch came on board in 1965 to defend the Chief SL Akintola’s government which was being harassed by partisan surrounding media.

By the time General Gowon created 12 states, the South-East had the Chronicle newspaper, Enugu had Daily Star, Plateau State had The Triumph and River State had the Tide newspaper. The proliferation of media establishment came with its own challenges. For instance in Port-Harcourt, where a 28-year-old Diette Spiff was military governor, he ordered the head of a Tide newspaper columnist to be shaven with a broken bottle. The offence of Mr Amachree was that he published a column that embarrassed the governor on his birthday! Such was the despotic nature of the challenges the media have had to ward off, sometimes unsuccessfully and often times at a cost especially under the military regime.

The media and indeed the populace were outraged, and invectives poured out of the pens of journalists. Though the young governor was sufficiently upset by the clamour, it was not enough to unseat him. About eight years after that unkind episode, one of the most prolific columnists the world ever produced, Chief Tola Adeniyi almost lost his life. He was churning out about a dozen columns every week at the period for a very long time.

At the tail end of military rule in 1978, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tarfa was posted to Oyo State as a military administrator and he decided to carry horsewhip about flogging traffic offenders and anyone else who caught his fancy. Tola Adeniyi wrote a scathing column in the Nigerian Tribune describing the primitive mentality of Tarfa’s gesture. The title of the piece was ‘What will Paul Tarfa be remembered for?’ For good measure, an incensed Paul Tarfa ordered that Tola Adeniyi be brought to him dead or alive and he meant it but for General Abisoye who was the GOC 2nd Div who came to the rescue.

The Nigerian media often displays professional openness but bares its fang when necessary. In 1976 when the Brigadier David Jemibewon constructed the Secretariat Agodi Fly Over, the media extended kind and fawning words to describe the project but when it was announced that only the governor and his entourage could use the Fly-Over, all hell broke loose and frontline columnists like Areoye Oyebola, Tola Adeniyi and Labanji Bolaji lambasted the governor for such egregious effrontery until he finally reversed the unpopular decision. While it is true that the media has been longsuffering in its relationship with government, the media in the end had been the major factor that sent the military back to the barracks and discouraged the ambitious officers to view coup D’etat as an unprofitable venture. But all these were achieved at a cost: anguish and blood.

One of the most ludicrous laws ever to pass through the land was the notorious Decree 2 of 1984. The Buhari/Idiagbon fledgling administration was finding governance very tough. To compound issues both of them had very short temper and were prone to spontaneous policy guffaws. The media became predatory and the Duo could not take it anymore. I represented my Station at the first press conference at Dodan Barracks in 1984 where Gen Buhari sent the warning signal and said categorically that he would Interfere with the freedom of speech in Nigeria with Decree 2, all you need to do to go to jail was to report anything that government considered embarrassing! My colleagues at the time Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson went to jail for reporting the names of Nigeria’s new ambassadors a day before the list was released. Not that the information was untrue but that the media pre-empted government and failed to wait for the official version. Many more gruesome episodes followed like the Dele Giwa assassination, closure of media houses, and incarceration of journalists and so on. In all these, the Nigerian media has been proven to weather the storm, remain tenacious and succeeded in the end.

The only problem is that it is a continuing battle for as long as government and the media would have to co-exist.

The media and the GSM experience

At this point you will allow me to localise my thoughts before I delve into other international examples of media collaboration or disenchantment with governments. It is a well-known political parlance that all politics are local; therefore, I will take liberty and cite as a case in point the present Oyo State government as an example of a relatively seamless relationship with the media between the media and attempt to explore some salient justification as reasons for this. No government or administration in the world sets out to be a failure. By nature, all men aspire to greatness and by extension their enterprises either in government, private sector or persona l lives. But certain actions or inactions collude to configure a person or Administration for Failure or for Success. Some administrations nail their own coffins from certain initial steps taken as a result of lack of courage, focus or a combination of both. Conversely, some governments deploy the very opposite of these hinderances, that is, courage, research and focus, to conquer challenges and even use uncommon personal examples to send the right signals. As useful and inseparable as the media is to any administration, the Fate of that administration depends in the main, in the hands of the stakeholders.

The collaborative co-habitation between the media and government is very vital but the point must be emphasised that it is not the hood that makes the monk, but the monk himself. The media does not set out to deliberately seek to rule by setting the narrative, because that is not its job; the media merely fills the void where there is a Lacuna of bad governance. Words like ‘Adversary Journalism’ popularised by Mr Ayo Ogunlade while he was serving as Minister of Information in General Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration or retorts like ‘Nattering Nabobs of Negativism’ made popular by Spiro Agnew, President Richard Nixon’s vice during the Watergate scandal. Vituperations like these only come about when there are clear cases of malfeasances in governance. But there is relative peace or to use the word in vogue, the media calms down when an administration places due diligence on accountability, transparency, efficiency and courage.

From the inside, I have been an informed watcher of the present administration in Oyo State, right from inception and it has not taken me too long to discover that the symbiotic camaraderie that exists between the two divides, that is government and the media can easily be explained away. I am not saying there are no skirmishes, of course there will always be, but the truth is those skirmishes are no more than molehills. The media, which all over the world often perfects the art of magnifying perception over governance, this same media was sold on the maverick personality of Governor Seyi Makinde right from the inception of his administration. And I will go into the specifics.

First of all, the media was enamoured by his unrelenting pressing style at campaign rallies even six weeks to the 2019 election when his main opponents had finally unravelled and he was obviously coasting home to victory and everybody knew it and yet he kept pressing. A journalist came up to me at Igbetti and asked Oga, why don’t you ask your principal to take it easy, does he want INEC to announce his name before election day? But Governor Seyi Makinde at the time and now has his attention focused on legacy. Shakespeare said, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood leads on to success.’ There are, to my mind, five defining moments, five actions that have defined the Governor Seyi Makinde’s administration so far.

On May 27, 2019, Governor Makinde stunned the nation when in a rare show of accountability and selfassuredness he publicly declared over 48bn as his personal asset. Newsrooms across the country were on overdrive and phone lines of local correspondents in Ibadan were buzzing. Many politicians paid lip services to such declaration and often go to court to seek protection not to have them published. But on that day, journalists all over the country were served a hot rich meal when all they asked for was mere snack. It was a classic perception coup. In recent memory, only Chief Lateef Jakande did anything similar 46 years ago and with due deference to the former Lagos State governor, the values of both declarations was millions of miles apart.
His audacious management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Oyo State. States including the federal government reversed themselves to imitate his approach and, in the end only 202 registered deaths were recorded in Oyo state the lowest in the country.
LAUTECH: This issue became so unnecessarily combustible and even politicised amongst same-party governors during which we witnessed the indecorous gubernatorial spat between 2007-2011 and unkept promises that characterised the period between 2011-2019. LAUTECH became decrepit until GSM came to the rescue and successfully negotiated the sole ownership of the Institution. And what is more, as I talk to you LAUTECH has been selected the best state university in Nigeria by the World ranking Webometrics in the UK. A university that was clothed in filthy rag is now leading the pack in sartorial elegance. And by the way, he met one and a half university and turned it into three.
The same quiet diplomatese and deftness the governor employed when the embarrassing betrayal surfaced and he had to ease out his former deputy governor without a shouting match, even when the former deputy governor was looking for one.
You must remember the Shasha market inferno and its explosive tribal underpinnings which had already loomed large until that divine wisdom was breathed unto the governor once again. As you have correctly observed, even the Adogba mosque debacle and the magical GSM salary payment every 25th of each month didn’t qualify to be among the five defining actions. All these while the media was watching not as mere spectators but obviously impressed as stakeholders in the recording of events of profound challenges and the aesthetics of solving them.

At the expense of courting the wrath of clergy men here present, I crave your indulgence to paraphrase Proverbs 16 verse 7 which reads thus, ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,’ he maketh even the media to be at Peace with him.’ Remember I said paraphrase!

The media at war

The truth must be told that there are times when the media mistook personal issues with a certain governor or president for corporate matters. For instance, having a dislike or an axe to grind with a particular leader should not translate to destroying the state. There must be that objective understanding to be able to differentiate between the extent the journalist can go in having his pound of flesh and destroying a government.

During the Falkland war in 1981\82, there was no love lost between many Tory leaders and the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and many journalists across the aisle were no fans of the Iron Lady. But the moment there was a collective threat to the interest of Great Britain, every interest group rallied. The British media and particularly the BBC where I was undergoing a course at the time led the war of disinformation to deliberately mislead the Argentinians and restore the Union Jack in Falkland Island again. Britain won the war.

I recall that the media collaboration at a time of national crisis did not fully abate the enmity between the Prime minister and the BBC DG. Thatcher put a call through to him and said, ‘Sir Ian Trethowan, you are an enemy within Gate.’ But the patriotic job had been done. Similarly the Nigerian media has never been found less patriotic in situations of national crisis either during the events that led to the civil war, the war itself, political crisis of different colouration or the recent Covid pandemic. The Rwandan genocide was another massive challenge to the media which unfortunately helped conflagrate the crisis but mercifully assisted a great deal in bringing about amity but by then, over 800,000 died in less than two months in 1994. The Liberian crises was intricate and complex, and the two civil wars saw many journalists tortured and killed including my brilliant colleague Tayo Awotusin from the Television service of oyo state days. But in the end, the media played its role to bring about peace in that ravaged country. The media played a significant role in the eventual arrest of Lawrence Aninih, the notorious armed robber who tormented Edo and Delta States for over two years. He got carried away by the Robin Hood flavour and the invincibility which the media used to garnish his image.

Aninih let his guard down and was caught and during his trial, he got so enamoured with Journalists that before he died, police officers and my colleagues said he was my friend because he was always looking out for the Ibadan Man.

The relationship between the government and the media will continue to be tenuous and fluid and the reason is not farfetched. While government will be more comfortable with the media reporting its own narrative the way government wants it, the media will push for liberty to decide on how best to treat a given story or else it falls into the temptation of what award winner, Chimamanda Adichie, calls ‘The Danger of the Single Story’. Finally, in spite of the accolade poured on Governor Seyi Makinde by the Minister of Works, Senator Dave Umahi 35 days ago, describing him as Nigeria’s Law of Evidence and Witness in alleviating the sufferings of the masses, the governor himself knows as we say in golf that, ‘The best shot is the next one’.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!

•Prince Oyelade, Honourable Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Oyo State, delivered this paper at the Omituntun 2.0 leadership retreat recently.

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