By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
A meta-editorial is an editorial about an editorial, which
is both bizarre and unprofessional in journalism. But Daily Trust wrote
one about the Punch Newspaper’s widely and rapidly shared December 11, 2019
editorial titled, “Buhari’s lawlessness: Our stand.”
On December 19, Daily Trust, which has now positioned
itself as an extension of Lai Mohammed’s Ministry of Information and Pro-regime
Propaganda, counterposed Punch’s editorial in an editorial titled “That PUNCH editorial.” As an alumnus of Daily Trust, I was mortified, but not
altogether surprised, by the unprofessionalism and ignorance of the meta-editorial.
The Daily Trust said “PUNCH went overboard” in
describing “an elected government as a ‘regime’ and to refuse to recognize the
president by his statutory title.” It characterized this as “an attempt to
delegitimise an elected president and the government he heads.” This is both uninformed
and inaccurate.
Punch’s editorial doesn’t say it “will refuse to
recognize the president by his statutory title.” It actually addresses him as “the
president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari.” That’s tame. I think it doesn’t go
far enough in calling attention to Buhari’s moral illegitimacy. I took a
decision to never address him as president after May 29 because he unquestionably
stole the 2019 election. Whenever it’s morphologically inevitable to use the
term “president” when I talk about him, I insert scare quotes around it.
So contrary to Daily Trust’s claim in its meta-editorial,
Punch calls Buhari “president”; it just doesn’t deploy the term as a
titular prefix to his name.
Again, the Daily Trust meta-editorial betrayed insufficient
familiarity with the semantic and pragmatic boundaries of the term “regime.”
Although there’s undeniably an undertone of disparagement in calling a
government a regime, the term is polysemic and isn’t even strong enough to
describe Buhari’s fascist absolutism.
Here is the notation for “regime” in The
Associated Press Stylebook, the most widely used style guide in
American newsrooms and that journalism professors use to teach students: “The
word regime is a synonym for political system: a democratic regime,
an authoritarian regime. It may also mean the period in which a person or
system was in power, often with a negative connotation: Gadhafi’s regime,
the Nazi regime.”
A junta is different from a regime. The Associated Press
Stylebook defines a junta as “a group or council that often rules after a coup:
a military junta controls the nation. A junta becomes a
government after it establishes a system of political administration.”
What Punch should have called the Buhari autocracy is
a “junta” to signpost its military-style descent into the low-water mark of
lawlessness. The Daily Trust would then at least be defending Buhari
from a position of knowledge.
At any rate, as I pointed out on social media in my widely shared preliminary response to Daily Trust, the decision to prefix
“Major General” instead of “president” to Buhari’s name and to call the
government he heads a “regime” is merely a stylistic choice, which newspapers
all over the world exercise regularly.
The Associated Press,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all other major
newspapers in the world update their style guides every year—and publish the
changes for public consumption—in response to changes in language use and in
the political environment. It’s a newspaper’s inviolable prerogative to tweak
its style guide.
And how does a newspaper’s stylistic choice to signalize the
habitual subversion of democratic ethos by a government, which Daily Trust
itself grudgingly conceded, “delegitimize” the government? That’s woolly
reasoning. A newspaper has no judicial power to confer or withhold legitimacy on
any government. Buhari won’t cease to be “president” because the Punch
calls him a “Major General.” Nor will Nigerians stop to recognize the
government he pretends to head because the Punch calls it a “regime.”
Newspapers are not the conferrers of “legitimacy.”
Instead of writing an editorial about another newspaper’s
editorial, why not write your own independent editorial to lend symbolic
authority to your favorite tyrant's autocracy? Punch may be Nigeria’s
most widely read newspaper but isn’t THE Newspaper of Nigeria; it’s one of
several newspapers in the country. Why fixate on what it chooses to do with its
symbolic resources?
It bespeaks crippling professional insecurity, even deep-seated
inferiority complex, for one newspaper to take another’s editorial seriously
enough to respond to it in an editorial.
Most important, though, this is particularly hypocritical coming
from a newspaper that stopped my column for no other reason than that it said I
was too consistently censorious of the Buhari regime’s failings. Before then, I
had received several official communications from the Editor-in-Chief subtly
and not too subtly importuning me to either stop writing about Buhari or to
“tone down” the stridency of my critiques of his regime. That’s a worse
betrayal of the basic principles of journalistic integrity than Daily Trust
is incorrectly accusing Punch of.
For instance, a memo I received from Daily Trust’s
Editor-in-Chief on May 17, 2018 titled “Reminder on Column Writing” discouraged
"elegance of prose" and "heavy criticisms" and requested
columnists to not "use derogatory or abusive language which could irritate
and provoke those you criticize in your pieces," among other puzzlingly barefaced
attempts to police the thoughts and erase the stylistic identities of columnists.
In his call to tell
me my column had been stopped in late 2018, the Editor-in-Chief was frank
enough to confess that those priceless gems of wisdom were directed at me and
were meant to protect Buhari and his government from my unceasingly critical
scrutiny. Note that no such memos were ever sent to columnists when Obasanjo,
Yar'adua, and Jonathan held sway—and whom I didn’t spare.
It's obvious that the authors of the memo have zero understanding
of what a newspaper column means. There's nowhere in the world that newspaper
columnists are told how to write and how not to write, what to write about and
what not to write about. That's offensively unprofessional infantilization of
accomplished professionals.
Each time I read the "guidelines," which used to
be sent every few months, I always felt like I was in kindergarten—or, more
appropriately, that a kindergartner was teaching me a subject I had a PhD in. I
frankly would have left on my own even if my column hadn't been stopped. It had
become clear to me that Daily Trust was no longer a legitimate newspaper
that provided a space for a broad diversity of viewpoints; it's now a pro-regime
propaganda house irrevocably committed to featherbedding Buhari's ferociously escalating
monocracy.
In the service of this agenda, the paper has had occasions
to refuse to publish columns that it considered too critical of the Buhari
regime. Let me give just one recent example.
Sonala Olumhense is a storied, fearless, evenhanded, widely
read syndicated columnist whose Sunday column Daily Trust has been
publishing since Goodluck Jonathan was in power, perhaps because he used to be
very critical of Jonathan even though they’re both from the same geo-cultural
region. (In other words, Daily Trust likes people who’re critical of
“their own,” but resents me for being critical of “my own.”)
Olumhense’s December 1 column titled “As nepotism soldiers on” only appeared in the Punch; Daily Trust declined to publish
it because it's a witheringly searing critique of Buhari’s growing,
unprecedented nepotism, which I wrote about in my November 23, 2019 column
titled “Government of Buhari’s Family, By His Family, and For His Family.” Daily
Trust couldn’t stomach it. This has happened to other columnists, such as
gifted satirist Tunde Asaju who has been instructed not to write about Buhari’s
family again and to discontinue his brilliantly witty, irreverent anti-regime
satire.
A newspaper with such compromised standards has no moral
right to preach to another paper about professional journalistic neutrality—or
about journalism at all. Daily Trust’s practice of telling its
columnists what to write and how to write is one of the most audaciously
egregious vandalism of journalistic ethics I’ve ever encountered anywhere in
the world.
Daily Trust's motto used to be, "Trust is a
burden." Obviously, over time, the burden of trust became too ponderous
for it to shoulder, so it dropped it like it's hot. Now it wants every
newspaper in Nigeria, including the Punch, to be like it: a servile,
ignorant, unreflective, and uncritical comforter of fascism.
