Saturday, May 30, 2020
Gambari: Embrace and Alienation of an Outsider on the Inside
Friday, May 29, 2020
When Did You Discover Buhari Was a Fraud?
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Trump NOT a Christian. Here’re 7 Proofs
Monday, May 25, 2020
COVID-19 Shows Wholly Online Education Has No Future
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Video of Young Senator Biden Fighting for South African Blacks in US Senate
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History of Abacha’s Theft is Being Rewritten Before Our Eyes
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In her historical fictional narrative titled “The Lost
Sisterhood,” Danish-Canadian writer Anne Fortier quotes one of her characters
as saying that “those who control the present can rewrite the past.” This is
playing out right before us in what I called the curious posthumous deodorization of Abacha’s grand larceny in a May 7, 2020 social
media update.
Loyalists and
beneficiaries of Sani Abacha’s dictatorship control Nigeria’s present, and they
are trying to exploit this privilege to rewrite the sordid past of their
benefactor while the rest of the country is fixated on other issues.
Muhammadu Buhari has always been invested in cleansing
Abacha’s appallingly grubby reputation as a murderous larcener. During the 10th-year-rememberance
anniversary of Abacha in Kano in June 2008, for instance, Muhammadu Buhari remarked
that, contrary to settled narratives in the Nigerian public sphere, Abacha
never stole from Nigeria.
This 2008 Buhari declaration birthed a fringe, outlandish
but nonetheless popular narrative in northern Nigeria that Abacha’s reputation
as a ruthless crook who stole billions of Nigeria’s patrimony and salted it
away in Euro-American financial institutions was the handiwork of Olusegun
Obasanjo who was taking a posthumous pound of flesh from Abacha for imprisoning
him.
In the aftermath of the unrelenting repatriation of what has
now been called the “Abacha loot” from Western banks, a new farcical story line
was fabricated, which is that Abacha actually “saved” the money for Nigeria for
a rainy day!
Apart from Buhari’s public defense of Abacha’s larceny in
2008, the posthumous discursive purification of Abacha’s image as a greedy,
conscienceless thief was largely informal and took place on the margins of
polite society.
Abubakar Malami, Buhari’s Attorney General and Minister of
Justice, officialized the revisionism of Abacha’s thievery. In a May 4, 2020 tweet, Malami described repatriated
Abacha loot as “Abacha assets.” “I am happy to confirm that the Federal
Republic of Nigeria on Monday 4th May, 2020 received $311,797,866.11
of the Abacha assets repatriated from the United States and the Bailiwick of
Jersey,” he wrote.
The change from “Abacha loot” to “Abacha assets” was a willful
rhetorical move designed to lend official credence to the hitherto fringy,
informal but nevertheless robust narrative that Abacha didn’t steal Nigeria’s
money.
Led by Sahara Reporter’s Omoyele Sowore, Nigerians on social
media pounced on Malami’s tweet and compelled him to retract his incompetent
attempt at revisionism. In a woolly, shamefaced, error-ridden retraction, Malami said, “It is to be noted that by way of antecedence [sic] that
Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami,
SAN has been consistently describing the recovered funds as ‘Abacha loot’ at
several fora during the process of recovery of the looted funds, particularly
before the eventual repatriation of the funds.”
But it didn’t stop there. Buba Galadima, a former Buhari protégé
who is now at loggerheads with him because he has been shut out of the orbit of
governance, has taken off from where Malami backed off. In a May 17, 2020 interview
with The Nation, he said the estimated $5 billion Sani Abacha stole
from Nigeria's trough was actually "saved" for Nigeria—on the advice
of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein—in anticipation of US sanction against Nigeria so
that "even if Nigeria's account was blocked by the US, there won't be
panic."
Galadima, who was Director General of the National Maritime
Authority during the Abacha junta, said the notion that Abacha stole from Nigeria’s
till is “based on ignorance.” When an editor forwarded excerpts of the
interview to me on WhatsApp, I’d dismissed it as fabricated. I was wrong.
As I pointed out on social media on May 17, the idea that the
Abacha loot was “saved” for Nigeria stands logic on its head, considering that
Abacha "saved" some of that money in the US whose impending blockage
he was allegedly plotting against. How do you "hide" something from
someone by "saving" it in his house?
Plus, even Buhari, the choirmaster of the Abacha sanitization
chorus, has grudgingly conceded that his former boss stole from Nigeria’s public
treasury. For example, in an April 27, 2016 tweet, Buhari said, “Nigeria is
awaiting receipt from Swiss Govt. of $320 million, identified as illegally
taken from Nigeria under Abacha.”
“Illegally taken” is merely a synonym for stealing. In a
February 4, 2020 statement from the US Embassy in Nigeria about the
repatriation of the “Abacha loot” from US banks, the US government was unambiguous
in stating how the money got to its banks.
“The monies were laundered by [Abacha’s] family, including
his sons Ibrahim and Mohammed, and a number of close associates,” the statement from the US reads. “The laundering operation extended to the
United States and European jurisdictions such as the UK, France, Germany,
Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg.”
One of those associates who helped Abacha launder huge sums of
money is Kebbi State Governor Atiku Bagudu to whom the Buhari regime wanted to
hand over $100 million of the recovered money, according to Bloomberg, but for
the resistance of the US government. If the money was “saved” for Nigeria, why
did Buhari want to hand over some of it to a person who has been identified as an
accomplice in its theft?
The US Department of Justice identified Bagudu as one of
Abacha’s network of proteges that, “embezzled, misappropriated and extorted
billions from the government of Nigeria.”
It isn’t only the US that unequivocally describes the repatriated
funds as the product of Abacha’s criminal despoliation of Nigeria’s resources. In
a June 12, 2017 Radio France International report titled “Swiss make deal with Nigeria on final payout for Abacha loot,” we learn that “The
cash was originally frozen in Luxembourg and confiscated by the Swiss as part
of a criminal investigation into Abba Abacha, Sani Abacha’s son. Switzerland
had already returned some 700 million dollars following appeals by Nigeria.”
In a “Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative - Asset Recovery Watch” bulletin, there’s also a case
against “Family of former President Sani Abacha,” where we read that, “In 2006,
the World Bank was involved in a similar framework, providing institutional
support for the return and use of approx. $723 million in public funds that had
been corruptly diverted by General Abacha.”
Not all the money Abacha stole has been recovered. Of the $5
billion that Abacha looted and squirreled away—or "saved" for
Nigeria, to use Galadimian logic—in the banks of countries that wanted to
"block" Nigeria's money, $3.624 billion has been recovered so far.
Can Galadima help Nigeria recover the rest of the money since he appears to
know where the money has been "saved"?
The purveyors of the transparently fraudulent narrative that
Abacha “saved” money for Nigeria in foreign banks which his detractors have
decided to call “loot” should be told that they can’t rewrite history.
People, mostly young northerners who hadn’t come of age when
Abacha’s evil regime reigned, have sent me private messages asking that I help
stop the “demonization” of Abacha. For them, it’s a regional and religious
project. But that’s misguided. Islam teaches us to be fair, just, and truthful.
It doesn’t teach us to lie to salvage the image of a dead thief among us.
The unvarnished truth is that Abacha did NOT save money for Nigeria; he STOLE from it with conscienceless glee. It’s distressing that one has to even say this in spite of the clear evidence that stares us in the face.
Monday, May 18, 2020
Gambari: “Off the Record” is a Journalist’s Worst Nightmare
By Farooq Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In journalism, there are broadly 5 kinds of attributions for
news sources: “on the record,” “not for attribution,” “background,” “deep
background,” and “off the record.”
The best possible outcome for a journalistic conversation
with sources is “on the record,” which means every information can be used, and
the source of the information can be identified. The next best option is “not
for attribution,” which means the journalist may use the information but should
neither quote nor identify the source, usually for fear of job loss and
retribution from people who’ll be negatively impacted by the revelation of the
information.
Then you have “background,” which is similar to “not for
attribution,” but where the reporter is given the latitude to use vague attributional
identifiers such as “a close presidency source.” This is broad enough to
conceal the identity of the source but close enough to give the reader a sense
of where the source emanated from.
“Deep background” occurs when a confidential source tells a
reporter they can’t use the information and may never even use imprecise
identifiers like “a close presidency source” because the pool of people with
knowledge of the information is small enough that the source can be narrowed
down and identified.
The source shares the information with a reporter as “deep background”
only so that the reporter may use it to pursue other leads. If there’s massive
stealing going on everywhere in the Presidential Villa, for instance, and the
source has intimate familiarity only with the malfeasance in Aso Rock Clinic, the
source may share the information as “deep background” so that the reporter can
use it as a guide to investigate other wings of the Presidential Villa.
Finally, you have “off the record,” the absolute worst fate
a journalistic conversation with a source can suffer. It basically means the
reporter cannot use the information at all, cannot identify the source by any
means, and cannot use the information to pursue other leads.
Usually, the source shares the information with the reporter
only because of the personal relationship that exists between them. Most
ethical journalists choose not to betray sources who request “off-the-record” privileges.
Violating the terms of the request, which we call “burning your sources,” can
endanger the life of the sources at worst and dry up your source of information
at best.
After my column on Ibrahim Gambari was published, someone
who has privileged access to him (and who is also personally known to me) called
to share more information that affirms, contextualizes, extends, and in a few
cases contradicts what I wrote. He shared many pieces of information as “background,”
some as “deep background,” and yet others as “off the record.”
My quandary is that some other sources independently shared
his “off-the-record” information with me, but I have no way of convincing him
that he isn’t the only source of the information, so I’ll let time reveal
everything.
Related Articles:
Real Reason the Buhari Cabal Picked Gambari as CoS
Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential Babysitter Who Won’t be as Powerful as Abba Kyari
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Real Reason the Buhari Cabal Picked Gambari as CoS
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Few appointments have generated as much excitement— and entranced
the imagination of Nigerians— as the appointment of Ibrahim Agboola Gambari as Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff.
The Emir of Ilorin thanked Buhari for it even though there
is no record of him publicly thanking Olusegun Obasanjo when Abdullahi
Mohammed, another Ilorin son, was appointed Obasanjo’s Chief of Staff in 1999—and
reappointed by Umar Musa Yar’adua in 2007.
The Northern Governors’ Forum also congratulated Gambari on his appointment even though they had never congratulated
two previous northerners who had occupied the position.
And then you have mostly Yoruba irredentists who are intensely
apoplectic about Gambari’s appointment for both legitimate and utterly asinine
reasons.
The office of the Chief of Staff to the president, an
ordinarily unremarkable secretarial job in the presidency, is attracting this quantum
of outsized attention because of what it became when Abba Kyari held it.
As I noted in my May 13, 2020 social media update titled “Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential Babysitter Who Won’t be as Powerful as Abba Kyari,” “The only reason the position of CoS to the President has become
uncharacteristically visible in the last five years is that Buhari is both too
cognitively incapacitated and too splendidly incompetent to function as
president, so he needs a proxy or, as I pointed out in my April 22 status
update, ‘a babysitter, a political and intellectual babysitter.’
“As a military dictator, Tunde Idiagbon was Buhari’s
political babysitter from 1983 to 1985. The late Salihijo Ahmad’s Afri-Projects
Consortium (APC), was ‘the sole manager of the PTF projects,’ according to Ray
Ekpu’s June 5, 2018 article titled, ‘Petroleum Trust Fraud.’ In other words,
Buhari couldn’t even manage a government agency as small as the PTF without
needing babysitting. Of course, most people know that since 2015 until his death,
Abba Kyari was Buhari’s proxy.
“Mamman Daura, on whom Buhari is intellectually and
emotionally dependent, ‘created’ Abba Kyari for Buhari but Kyari later grew
into a Frankenstein that almost devoured his ‘creator.’ Daura wants no repeat
of that and sees a potentially dutiful factotum in Gambari who was Buhari’s
external affairs minister from 1984 to 1985.”
In other words, Gambari was appointed CoS precisely because
the intellectual and political powerhouse behind the Buhari regime chose to
return the office to its previous lusterless, clerical drudgery. The Buhari
cabal initially proposed a northern Christian as a replacement for Kyari to ensure
that the position is stripped of the atypical influence Kyari brought to it—and
to bring a little dash of token diversity to the Presidential Villa.
They later chickened out and settled for Gambari because,
although he is a brilliant, globally connected scholar-administrator, he is
also notoriously malleable, manipulatable, and usable. (Anyone who can defend
Abacha’s tyranny and deride Ken Saro-Wiwa and his comrades as “common criminals”
in the aftermath of their horrendous judicial slaughter can do and defend anything.)
Most importantly,
although he self-identifies as the descendant of a Sokoto Fulani man who migrated
to Ilorin in the early 1800s, he is too culturally removed from members of the Aso
Rock cabal to be an insider.
In Nigeria—and elsewhere—identity is performed mostly
through language. Gambari doesn’t speak Hausa. When he appeared in the
Presidential Villa on Wednesday, for instance, Buhari’s protocol officers
welcomed him in Hausa, but he responded to them in English.
When the Presidential
Villa correspondent of an international Hausa broadcasting station asked to get
a soundbite from him in Hausa, he said he wasn’t proficient enough in the
language to give one. This isn’t surprising for people who have studied his biography.
Gambari spent his formative years in Ilorin and Lagos where he
was exposed to only Yoruba and English. When he came to Ahmadu Bello University
in Zaria as a senior lecturer in 1977, he was already in his 30s by which time
the window of opportunity to learn a new language had closed for him. So he
will always be an outsider on the inside.
This is particularly significant because Buhari has difficulty
forming deep informal interpersonal relationships with people who don’t speak
Hausa. In my October 21, 2017 column titled, “World Bank, Buhari, and Presidential Subnationalism,” I referenced this trait of socio-linguistic
insularity in Buhari.
I wrote: “Buhari’s interpersonal discomfort with, and
perhaps contempt for, Nigerians who are different from him—often expressed
through awkward snubs and linguistic exclusivism—go way back. On page 512 of
Ambassador Olusola Sanu’s 2016 autobiography titled Audacity on the Bound: A
Diplomatic Odyssey, for instance, we encounter this trait:
‘I was asked by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs… to
accompany Major-General Buhari on a trip to West Germany when he was Petroleum
Minister in 1978,’ he wrote. ‘During the flight, to and fro, [he] did not say a
word to me even when we sat side by side in the first-class compartment of the
plane. When we got to Germany and went to the Nigerian Ambassador’s residence,
[he] spoke entirely in Hausa throughout with the Ambassador-in-post. He did not
speak to me throughout the trip. I was deeply hurt and disappointed.’”
As far as Buhari and his handlers are concerned, Gambari is only
a little more culturally familiar than Sanu because of his Muslim faith. The
fact that they settled for him to lend a veneer of “diversity” to the face of
the presidency is all the proof you need to know that they don’t regard him as
one of them.
In other words, people who are congratulating Gambari because
they think he’d be another Abba Kyari who would overstep the bounds of his
office and represent Nigeria abroad to negotiate deals, invite the INEC
chairman to his office and tell him how to conduct elections, remove the Chief
Justice of Nigeria and replace him with a dunce that is amenable to his wiles,
determine who gets a government appointment and who is excluded, etc. would be
disappointed.
And Yoruba irredentists who are imputing motives to, and
delegitimizing, his middle name because they think he’d be another Abba Kyari
should have their hackles down. He doesn’t bear Agboola because he needs the validation
of Yoruba people in the southwest. He bears it because there is no Ilorin person
who doesn’t bear a Yoruba name.
In a two-part column I wrote in August 2018 titled, “Ilorin is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism,” I said, “I
know of no Ilorin person, whatever his or her ancestral provenance, who does
not have a Yoruba given name.”
The current emir of Ilorin, who is the son of Ibrahim
Gambari’s older brother, was known as Kolapo throughout his professional
career. He only became “Ibrahim” after his ascendancy to the Ilorin emirship.
Although Tunde Idiagbon traced patrilineal descent from Fulani ancestors, he
never identified with his Muslim given name, Abdulbaki, throughout his life. In
fact, he gave all his children Yoruba names: Adekunle, Babatunde, Ronke, Mope,
and Bola.
Contrary to what Gambari’s Yoruba critics allege, Yoruba
names are the authentic appellative identities of Ilorin people. Their Muslim—and
sometimes Fulani—first names are often, but not always, opportunistic appellative appendages to court
the acceptance of political power wielders from the far north.
I have lost count of the number of times my Ilorin friends’
parents unintentionally disowned their children when I went to look for them in
their homes using their Muslim names as their only identifiers. They recognized
their children only when a younger relative who understood the people I was
describing identified them by their Yoruba given names.
What both the cheerleaders and critics of Gambari are
missing is that he was appointed to his position because the people who “own”
the Buhari regime have decided to return the position to its former
unremarkable, pre-Abba Kyari state. Let Gambari be.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential Babysitter Who Won’t be as Powerful as Abba Kyari
Saturday, May 9, 2020
8 Free Education Lessons for “Gambari Progressives Society” on KWASU VC
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Today's back-page column in the Saturday Tribune may not appeal to a mass audience, but it's important nonetheless. It tackles a group of ignorant, regressive rubes known as "Gambari Progressive Society" who have zero knowledge about how the university works but who are lyrical in their ignorance. The column also exposes the real etymology of the term "Gambari." Enjoy:
I recently became aware of a press statement by an Ilorin
group that calls itself “Gambari Progressive Society.” The press statement attempted
to justify the discriminatory and widely condemned appointment of Professor Muhammed
Mustapha Akanbi as Vice Chancellor of Kwara State University by maligning Professor
Sakah Saidu Mahmud who came first in the interview for the job and who was
acting VC after the expiration of the tenure of the past VC.
In smearing Professor Mahmud, the association revealed egregious
ignorance, particularly of the American university system after which KWASU is
modelled. Let me educate them—and hopefully educate others who swim in the same
ocean of ignorance as they do.
1. The association said it took Professor Mahmud 10 years to
complete his Ph.D. and that it took Professor Akanbi two years to complete his.
It then implied that the length of time it takes to complete doctoral studies
has a bearing on competence. Here’s why they got it wrong.
Akanbi has a UK PhD; Mahmud has a US PhD. The UK has no
coursework for doctoral studies. It’s just research. In the US, doctoral coursework
alone takes between two and three years. At the end of doctoral coursework,
students take a comprehensive exam, typically in their third year. Some people
take up to a year to prepare for the exam after coursework.
After students pass the comprehensive exams, they take
another year to write up their proposal and defend it, after which they start
work on their dissertations. For most humanities and social science courses, getting
a PhD takes between five and seven years.
But Mahmud’s case was different. His doctoral dissertation
was an ambitious comparison of post-independence Nigeria and early Meiji Japan,
which required him to live in Japan, learn the Japanese language, and acquire
sufficient proficiency in the language to be able to read and make sense of
primary sources in it. That lengthened his studies.
He should be praised, not ridiculed, for his admirably
challenging but ultimately rewarding scholarly adventure. How many people can
learn a completely different language as adults and conduct research in it?
2. The association said Mahmud was elevated from Lecturer I
to Professor. This is flat-out false. He left Transylvania University as an
Associate Professor, which is equivalent to a Reader in the British system. The
American university system has no rank called “Lecturer I.”
He was overdue for the rank of full professor at
Transylvania University, but he didn’t apply for it, which is common in the US
and Canada. Being full professor (equivalent to professor in the British
system) is no big deal. It doesn’t increase your pay by much, doesn’t change
your title (unlike in the British system where being addressed as “Professor” confers
titular privilege), and requires a lot of mind-numbing paperwork.
Many accomplished, tenured academics don’t apply for full
professorship. For instance, when Professor Donna Strickland of the University
of Waterloo won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, people were surprised that
she wasn’t a full professor. She was an Associate Professor. In an October 7, 2018 interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education,
she said she had "never applied" for a full professorship even though
she was qualified for it because "it doesn't carry necessarily a pay
raise… I never filled out the paperwork… I do what I want to do and that wasn't
worth doing."
3. The association belittled Mahmud for not having graduated
a PhD student and suggested that scholars who don’t supervise PhD students
can’t be professors. First, Mahmud supervised two PhD students to completion at
KWASU. Second, Transylvania University, where he spent most of his professional
life in the US, is a liberal arts institution that is focused on undergraduate
education.
In the US, different universities have different missions.
Universities that are called “liberal arts colleges” emphasize undergraduate
education. They may have a few master’s degree programs, but they hardly have
any PhD programs. There are comparatively few doctorate-granting institutions
in the US.
To suggest that scholars can’t be full professors until they
have mentored PhD students is to betray ignorance of how the university system
works.
At Transylvania University, which was established in 1780
and has the distinction of being the oldest university in the state of Kentucky
and the 16th oldest in the US, academics are judged mostly by the
quality of their teaching. While research is important, it isn’t the main
criterion for promotion. In 2003, Mahmud was voted Transylvania University’s
“Outstanding Faculty of the Year” based mostly on the excellence of his
teaching—and, of course, the quality of his research and service. (“Faculty” is
the generic term for a university teacher in US academe).
4. The association inflated Akanbi’s publication count to 90
and undercounted Mahmud’s. It then went ahead to imply that, based on their
publication records, Akanbi is more qualified than Mahmud to be KWASU VC. But Akanbi’s
Google Scholar profile page shows that he has 14 published articles, seven of which
are co-authored, and most of which were published in local journals with lax or
zero standards. Mahmud’s two single-authored books alone—not to talk of his
other journal articles and book chapters— eclipse Akanbi’s entire publication
record. But that’s even irrelevant.
5. The main issue is still that Akanbi came third in the judgement
of the (Ilorin-dominated) committee set up to fill the position of KWASU VC. He
scored a measly 63.2 % against Mahmud’s 86.4%. Professor Mohammed Gana Yisa
scored 74%. But, somehow, in the “wisdom” of the Kwara State governor, the
third became the first.
6. How can a regressive association that defends injustice
and champions the perpetration of unfair advantages to undeserving people because
of where they come from call itself “progressive”? The association must not
know what “progressive” really means. KWASU is owned and funded by the whole of
Kwara State, but the school’s VC, registrar, pro-chancellor, and visitor are
all from Ilorin. How can an association that calls itself “progressive” defend
that?
7. The association said Mahmud’s invidious exclusion was
justified because he would be 72 years old when his five-year term would
expire. But the job ad for the position didn’t identify age as a disqualifying
criterion. In any case, the previous VC, who is from Ilorin, served two terms
of 10 years, even though vice chancellors are by law allowed one nonrenewable
term. If it didn’t matter that the law was circumvented in the past, why would
an additional two years into Mahmud’s term after his official retirement age
matter? It’s unjust to shift the goalpost after the goal has been scored.
8. Finally, the association’s divisive rhetoric that
suggests that “Kwara south” and “Kwara north” are uniting to oppose Ilorin
ignores the fact that Ilorin is peopled by a mixture of ethnic groups from both
regions of the state. Contemporary Ilorin people are the product of the fusion
of Yoruba, Fulani, Baatonu, Nupe, Hausa, etc. people. No one from any part of
Kwara can hate Ilorin people without hating him or herself because Ilorin
people embody the state’s diversity. In any case, the association suggested
that the previous VC, who is from Ilorin, wanted Mahmud to succeed him. What
does that tell them?
The fact that Yoruba people in Kwara south and non-Yoruba people
in Kwara north (which includes the Baatonu, the Nupe, and the Bokobaru people)
are united in opposing the appointment of Akanbi as KWASU’s VC, which is
unexampled in the history of the state, says something.
Interestingly, the word “Gambari” is a Baatonu word, which
originally occurs in the language as Gambaru. It literally means “language of
someplace.” “Gam” means someplace and “barum” means language in the Baatonu
language, which Yoruba people call Bariba. Gambaru initially referred to any
ethnic group that the Baatonu people didn’t know, but it later came to be
associated with the Hausa. (Gambarum is the language and Gambaru is the people,
the plural form of which is Gambarusu).
Oyo people, who are the southern neighbors of the Baatonu, borrowed
Gambaru and changed it to Gambari, which is the adjectival form of Gambaru in
the Baatonu language. It’s supremely ironic that people who call themselves “Gambari”
are antagonizing a Baatonu man whose only “offense” is that he dared to be indignant
at being cheated out of what was rightly his.
Reactions: |
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Curious Posthumous Deodorization of Abacha’s Grand Larceny
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Dangote, Premium Times, and Journalistic Ethics
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Many journalists have asked me to share my thoughts on Premium Times’ ethical entanglements with a recent botched Dangote story. Two high-flying Premium Times reporters by the names of Samuel Ogundipe and Nicholas Ibekwe came across a memo from Dangote’s company informing its staff that the “lockdown period will be regarded as part of leave period and therefore annual leave consuming.”
In other words, if the lockdown period exceeds the duration of the annual leave the company’s workers are normally entitled to, they won’t be paid. Apparently, workers were alarmed by this and decided to leak the memo to Premium Times, one of Nigeria’s leading investigative news platforms.
When Ogundipe and Ibekwe reached out to the Dangote Group about the memo, the company’s spokesperson dismissed it as “fake.” Although many online publications have already published the memo (because workers in the company anonymously confirmed its authenticity), Premium Times’ editors chose to err on the side of caution and “killed” the story. I have a problem with that, but that’s not the point at issue now.
Since the story had effectively been “killed” by Premium Times editors, Ogundipe came on Twitter to reflect on the memo. He wondered aloud how the rhetoric of “fake news” is invoked by companies, governments, politicians, etc. to delegitimize legitimate stories. He also wanted to crowdsource the authentication of the memo.
The usual suspects predictably maligned him. And, here’s where it gets interesting, Premium Times’ well-regarded and globally garlanded Editor-in-Chief by the name of Musikilu Mojeed implicitly endorsed one of the tweets that criticized Ogundipe’s decision to publicly reflect on the memo.
“Thank you very much, Ruona, for calling our attention to this. This is actually a violation of @PremiumTimesng Social Media Behavioural Guideline for staff. We are already reviewing this. We will take appropriate administrative action,” he wrote in response to a tweet to which neither he nor Premium Times was tagged.
Now, the issue is, is it ethical for reporters to publicly discuss a story that has been killed by their news organization? Yes, it is, especially if the story is already public knowledge. The Dangote memo wasn’t exclusive to Premium Times. Even I got it on WhatsApp.
I searched for Premium Times’s Social Media Guidelines for its staff on Google and couldn’t find it, but if the guidelines forbid reporters from crowdsourcing stories and from publicly reflecting on story ideas that have been abandoned, then it’s behind the times and need to be updated.
I teach media ethics and can say this. In the early 2000s, before the advent of social media, the American news media were leery of blogs. In fact, by 2003, reporters who had blogs were either fired or told to stop. But by the late 2000s, which is co-extensive with the birth and flowering of social media, blogging and social media became integrated into the business of reporting. The Associated Press Social Media guidelines, which I teach, would have no problems with Ogundipe’s tweet.
Ogundipe’s tweet— which shares a screenshot of the Dangote memo, reveals why a story wasn’t written about it, and wonders aloud if “people are now taking advantage of ‘fake news’ to deny anythin?”— isn’t unethical or inappropriate by even the most wildly elastic stretch of journalistic ethics.
That was why Mojeed’s unsolicited reply to an inconsequential tweet, which basically amounted to publicly and unjustifiably humiliating his reporter, puzzled me. How do you publicly threaten to take “administrative action” against a reporter—and a smart, prolific, gutsy, go-getting one at that!—for something as innocuous as what he shared on Twitter?
Premium Times is one of only a few news outlets still doing real journalism in Nigeria. It would be sad if it undermines itself—and Nigerian journalism—through avoidable self-cannibalism.