NEARLY a year ago when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners began to search through a massive trove of 11.9 million secret financial documents (now popularly known as Pandora Papers), making sense of it, and finding the most important stories, it turned out as one of the most difficult challenges in years. Ziva Branstetter, Corporate Accountability Editor of Washington Post, USA, who led about 60 reporters of the organization in the project, describes the task as “akin to steering a small boat launched into an ocean”. Very tough.
But it was exactly what investigative journalism looks like. It has turned out to be a groundbreaking global investigation. For the records, the Pandora Papers was larger than the Panama Papers of 2016, and much bigger than the Paradise Papers of 2017. Each leak attempted to drive home same message: that the rule of law is not applied equally to all, that offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.
The leak is all about how global elite, from 90 countries, including 14 world leaders reportedly hide their wealth in secret system to avoid tax and accountability. However, many of the leaders “indicted” by the Pandora Papers have denied its veracity, thereby putting a huge question mark on the credibility of the entire project. All the same, many news outlets across the globe published the juicy stories. Premium Times, a Nigerian online medium found something delightful with one of the individuals mentioned in the report, Mr. Peter Obi, former governor of Anambra state, and the Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 general elections.
Ordinarily, nothing is wrong in any news outlet publishing such groundbreaking information. But everything is wrong when a news outlet embarks on dysfunctional journalism, abandons objectivity and balance, and goes into editorializing and full-throated attack on the reputation of an individual mentioned in a report. That’s where Premium Times (once a reliable online news outlet) lost me, and I suspect, many of its readers. It smells like a hatchet job, politically motivated. It’s pure malice prepense.
You see, Premium Times knew it was on a mission, and its message was simple: attack a man’s reputation, and you may succeed in damaging him irreparably. As Prof.Brook Harrington, the author of “Capital without Border: Wealth and the one percent”, wrote in The New York Times, October 8, 2021, “when reputation matters, leaks like the Pandora Papers can be very effective”. In other words, what the Premium Times set out to achieve is to smear Obi’s name and let the reputational impact or cost weigh heavily on him. In clear terms, Premium Times report lacks purity of purpose. The headline: “Inside Obi’s secret businesses and how he broke the law”, smacks of high-tech lynching, a smoking gun loaded with mischief. It wasn’t a natural mistake. No one is without fault, but among politicians and businesspeople, Obi remains a pillar of integrity. If life is a marathon, and politics the test of it, Obi braced the tape in flourish and got the prize that goes with it. It’s a prize in leadership. His tenure as governor was a glorious one. Which was why ThisDay newspapers, a few years ago, honoured him with the “Governor of the decade”. It was not for nothing. Obi left a hefty N75bn, and $156million in the treasury of Anambra state. All with supporting documents that have not been refuted. He never borrowed, never owed civil servants, nor any contractor, something that has become the ‘new normal’ for the present set of governors in the country. That did not please his political opponents.
Premium Times should have been more interested in knowing the assets, shares and property that Obi allegedly purchased through the offshore companies and trusts. That’s what real investigative journalism entails. It should have also informed Nigerians how Anambra funds, or that of any public institution associated with Obi, was wired to the offshore companies. Or were the monies moved through the clouds? Is it illegal to buy assets in one’s family name? These are the same issues raised against Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele and former Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, in the Panama Papers, five years ago. The mud didn’t stick.
Obi has since made the point clear: “I broke no law, whether in the form of diversion of public funds or any other manner, during and after my stewardship as Governor of Anambra state”. There’s no scintilla of evidence of breaking the law. This is a man, according to versified records, pays an average of N60 million annually in Personal Income Tax (PIT). As Obi said, “I can explain every wealth that I have, everybody knows I am not an extravagant fellow. I am not somebody who earns money and throws it away”, he told the Niche (a reliable online news outlet) and AriseTv, yesterday.
Anybody who knows Obi can attest that he has solid reputation, an advocate of probity and transparency in governance, a man not given to cheap lies, an open-minded person who is in politics, but not given to the weaseling ways of your typical politician. He does not preach water and hide to drink champagne. It’s on this virtue that he made his marks in business and politics. On the day Obi handed over to Obiano, March, 2014, Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, said, “I am proud of Peter. He has proved that people from the private sector can do well in politics”. Former Finance Minister and current Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Dr.Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said: “Obi is the true face of Igbo man. His prudence, humility, intelligence, are exemplary. You can quarrel with his approach to governance, but you cannot fault the result”.
That is the priceless asset Premium Times is aiming to destroy. But make no mistake about it: this is not the first time Obi had been on the ropes orchestrated by fiendish fellows. In 2009, less than a year to his reelection, a grand conspiracy surfaced in the media. It was about how one of “Obi’s aides was caught with N2.5bn along Lagos/Benin expressway”. What was the money meant for? The accusers said it was to buy “firearms” ahead of the 2010 governorship election. Later they said the aide was laundering money for Obi. As it turned out, it was the mother of all lies, planted by one of the governorship candidates in that election. Watch this: With the 2023 elections fast approaching, Premium Times report may not be unconnected with a grand plot to stop Obi, if indeed, he has any presidential ambition. This one may also fail.
It reminds me of the character in Robert Graves novel, Claudius. Claudius is an inquisitive character who asked his grandmother, Livia, whether she preferred “slow poisons or quick ones” to dispose of a rival. She said she preferred “repeated doses of slow, tasteless poison which will give the effect of consumption”. The message is: In massive doses, negative publicity can destroy any hard-earned reputation. This could be the kind of forces Obi may be up against.