A
group of people had a bright idea to start a company some years ago. But they
did not have enough money. The capital outlay was in millions of dollars. They
asked people to buy into this company and thousands of people bought shares of
this company believing that the outfit had a future and their investments would
yield multiple dividends over time. However, the company declared losses every
year and the stakeholders were aghast. They feared for their investments. They
elected a new CEO and ordered him to conduct a full audit of the company. The
auditors discovered that the company had been making a lot of money, but the
money was stolen by the directors and the former CEO’s of the company. The
thieves, when arrested and confronted with evidence, did not want the
stakeholders to be informed of the theft. They engaged the services of lawyers
to help them keep the story from the stakeholders. They insisted that their
story should not be shared in the monthly bulletin of the company. They did not
want anyone to know of the damage they had caused to the company. They claimed
they had their rights to privacy. Now the company is on the brink of a collapse
and the stakeholders have no idea what will become of their investments. Many
of them have been impoverished. This is the story of Nigeria.
Nigerian
officials caught in the web of corruption and their lawyers have invented a new
phrase, “Media Justice,” which in other words means that when caught, the
sordid operations of the thieves and robbers of our commonwealth are, in their
opinion, prejudicially exposed by the media. They claim that public opinion
evoked by these exposures impinge on the rights of their clients and may
influence outcomes of judgment. Their logic is that if they stole in secrecy,
they should be made to account for their actions in secrecy. They do not want
the public to know what they did and what punishment they have been able to
bargain with the courts.
And
many of the Nigerian mainstream media, either for fear, or intimidation or even
corruption at their own level seem to have bought into this logic. It is not
uncommon to see ambiguous reports of an arrest by the anti-corruption
authorities of “a highly placed official
(names withheld) of a Federal Agency..bla bla”. In some cases, pictures of such arrested
officials, with their eyes covered by a black bar accompany these worthless
reports. The Nigerian mainstream media hardly investigate corruption cases
despite being given a free hand by President Buhari to investigate and report
anomalies in the Nigerian system. Rather, they prefer to feed on the crumbs of
the hard work of uncompromised online outlets. I doubt if the daily sales of
all newspapers in Nigeria outmatch the daily number of views of say, Sahara
Reporters.
The
looters of our commonwealth, their lawyers and the compromised mainstream media
who seek secrecy of arrest and trial of commonwealth thieves seem to be intent
on redefining democracy. Their intention is the usurpation of the role of the
public as the employer of the entire system of governance to whom reports of
good and bad should be regularly rendered by the press. They want to use the
guise of the rights of thieves to thwart the rights of the public to know what
has been happening to our commonwealth. They seek to deconstruct the rights of
180 million of us to benefit the looters.
Unfortunately,
the public is divided in its demand for exposure of thieves. It operates on the
fault lines of religion, ethnicity and clanship. Corruption and robbery of our
commonwealth are seen as an ethnic right and very often, the religious and
ethnic bigots throw away their rights as citizens who need to be informed and
accounted to, and seek to protect one of theirs caught with his/her hand in the
commonwealth till. They claim persecution of the thief either because he/she
belongs to an ethnic group or a particular religion. They do not want them
exposed. The impact of the robbery of the commonwealth on their rights as
citizens as well as on the quality of their lives is lost on them. They prefer
handouts from thieves to organized development of Nigeria. To paraphrase Ngugi
wa Thiong’o, the engineers of ethnic and religious fault lines have succeeded
in dis-membering the nation and re-membering it into ethnic and religious
agglomerations sustained by gratuitous gifts of thieves.
What
do these thieves and their lawyers call “Media
Trial”? Is it the process of informing
the stakeholders of the Nigerian commonwealth that these thieves have been
denuding our common grass? The Encarta dictionary defines trial as a “formal legal process: a formal
examination of the facts and law in a civil or criminal action before a court
of law in order to determine an issue.” No press in the world can engage in
this process. It is not their vocation. However, it is their vocation to report
on the “formal legal process” and it
is the right of the stakeholders to be informed about the process.
The
so-called media trial cannot and should not also be misrepresented as public
trial. A public trial ends in lynching and so far, none of their clients has
being lynched because of press exposures. The citizens have the right to be
informed and to follow the process in our courts to the logical conclusion of
retrieving our monies and seeing off the thieves to jail.
And
we the people must jettison the dark glasses of ethnicity and religion in order
to collectively ask for our dividends.
No comments:
Post a Comment