Fourth Estate of awards
By Ikenna Emewu (e-mail: ikenna@sunnewsonline.com)
Saturday, July 04, 2009

Is it possible the nation is bleeding from several points of injury? Could we say there are indications that whatever bug that plagues the society has actually eaten off all its essential parts. Every side keeps falling in line with the rest in function so much so that you would only wonder when the final crash would come.
What I have observed in the media, the Fourth Estate of the realm, and the unofficial fourth arm of government recently – since about four years ago triggers the alarm antenna. Something must be going terribly wrong.

It has been a frenzied season of awards for all manner of people on all manner of issues by all manner of media houses. It is not a selective thing. It is a collective that seem to work in a haste to get a piece of the vanishing common wealth that takes flight into private custodies of the privileged few. I am not talking of a media house extending a single award per time, but a bevy of awards to characters you would not actually define their bearing. Check out and find that the awards never go to any professional or commoner or the average citizen that has made it well. The list of awardees must come from the politicians, top notch business moguls, sleaze giants and questionable citizens.

You could imagine the irony of a media giving presidents and past presidents what is called ‘Life Time Award’. For what? Is the award based on good governance to this nation? If that is true, where are the justifying facts? It so irritates that you would ask if the media in other parts of the world have turned to award mills for the ruling class. Ironically, one of such media organizations that write only society gossips and never report what goes on in government every year extends ‘leadership awards’ to publicity-seeking politicians.

What leadership do they know about? And gullible as the politicians are, every lazy award is celebrated.
In Nigeria and other countries, the media has constitutional mandate to perform a function. The law may not have created the media, as per specifically defining that … there shall be a media for the nation, bla, bla, bla as it did for the Nigeria Police, the courts etc. But it assigns it a role that has never been in dispute. In the Nigeria Constitution, section 22 especially, section 39 etc. capture these duties and roles. The reason is because the media informs the people on what goes on especially in government and the public office.

The sector is like one standing in the gap between the people and the government. Like the spirit of the social contract between the two sectors that make up the society, it therefore bears a moral burden to keep away from acts that would compromise the neutrality that would facilitate its function.

Some ten years ago as a judicial reporter, I had a friend, Babatunde Oshilaja. He is a lawyer who engaged in an almost endless battle against the government and its agencies over compensation for kerosene explosion victims. This human rights lawyer was wont on recalling the role the media played in the trying days of Nigeria. He often also lamented how lawyers comprised by teaching the military how to manufacture ouster clause decrees to stifle justice and shut out the powers of the judiciary. That is also another pointer to the role of the media and the impact.

But watchers must have seen the haste with which the media wants to sell these virtues to adopt a tradition of unfounded awards. They come in hordes and multiples. In the media award blitz, everyone politician is an award winner. The most annoying is the endless list of awards given to governors. Each geopolitical zone has designated awards. Every item – water, power supply, health, education, agriculture, insurance, child development etc have awards from where the 36 governors are shuffled in a lucky dip pool and one taken in one area or the other by the contrivance of the award merchant. Don’t ask me the criteria for the selection. It could be anything – from profit, profligacy, politics, perversion, persuasion, inducement etc. But what worries and confuses me is why the same media that lampoons the government turns around to dish out awards to the actors.

Something then should be wrong somewhere. That thing that is wrong is that someone is not telling the truth or acting accordingly. It is either the media is lying against people in power the way it writes or reports their failures or the awards are not sincere and something changes hands. These are enough to gag the media and promote patronizing reporting and bias.

It really beats my imagination how every public officer wins a media award every now and then. During such award carnivals, an intimidating crowd of the cream of the society is gathered for their plaques and Nigerian politicians in their style even over value these things.
It is so funny that even a year old newspaper can organize a jamboree to hand out awards in assessment of a two-year administration which started before it was given birth to. This may be the reason the quality is drastically dropping.

Because the papers must survive, some newspapers may well be re-christened ‘advertpapers’. I know and assume newspaper means paper about news. That was in the days of old because so many papers have maintained a policy of having gloss coloured adverts decorating their first five pages. There is nothing wrong in adverts, for the purposes of clarity. It is an integral part of the newspaper. But adverts taking over the first five or six pages of a paper everyday leaves a bad imprint in the fields of professionalism.

You buy a paper for news only to find that the news is just secondary, after a major preference for adverts in vantage pages.
Yes, newspaper sales in Nigeria are deplorable and most of these things are done for the sake of survival because no newspaper medium for instance gets sustained through only sales because Nigerians don’t read.

But I think most players are trying to survive through an alarming formula. Most of us still believe if there is a policy by the newspaper house to give preference to news in those early pages, the advertiser would not refuse to bring business. I used to know a certain dominant paper as a boy that at a point became better known as ‘obituary paper’. That was part of the death it suffered when others came to the scene with news.

So, if we insist the politicians deserve awards as the media gives them every now and then, that also means Nigeria has arrived. There are no more problems here, or private citizens like you and I cause the ones that exist. If that is the case, then we have to tender unreserved apologies to the government for our earlier position and maybe start chanting their praises for a wonderful world they have created here.
When it is impossible for us to justify this position of having great government and political players, then we have to sincerely look inwards and ask the value of these awards and the sincerity that gives birth to them.

Abeokuta strip tease

Last week, a reader of this column decided to have his day at me. And he wrote that I did a good essay on the health sector in bad language. He also wondered why the Nigerian journalist only employs vile language against the government, which according to him does not obtain in the media outside Nigeria.
My humble self wondered if the problem of Nigerian leadership is because the media employs ‘bad’ language or the bad language is caused by bad leadership. The writer sounded like a typical PDP member or one that at least benefits from the booty.

But before I could search long for a befitting answer to this reader of mine, a ready answer came in an Abeokuta strip tease. Indeed, I understood better this week from the Abeokuta drama why the Nigerian politician says there is no morality in politics. That is why lawmaking for the good people of Ogun State needs posing nude and swearing to oath of cultism as criteria. Nigerians, I hope you have seen the caliber of lawmakers you have, and why you also have peculiar laws from them. That is someone’s father and husband.

My good friend and reader of my pieces have Nigerian journalists to blame for that may be. It is the bad language that made the lawmaker(s) pose nude to desperately be there and supervise the sharing of the monthly booty from Abuja.

Shamelessly, the accused persons, including the one already caught in the act boldly showed their faces in the TV explaining how it happened.
Where and how it happened was not even necessary. We already knew occultists supervise our common interest here. Otherwise, there should have been some little sanity. Meanwhile, we are re-branding Nigeria, and all of us should say the Abeokuta strip tease was patriotic. Them no get shame