Of heroes and courtesans

This minute, journalism adorns political theatre’s oaken mask. To fulfill this function, the press dissembles into a masked party, teeming of woody characters; verminous, sharp-contoured, like malformed statuettes.

From the general elections to Walter Onnoghen-gate scandal, the corruptible journalist takes sides. But he is never on the citizenry’s side. Like the corrupt jurist, lawyer and law enforcer, he lends his services to the highest bidder.

He constantly engages at the feet and filth attic of his corrupt principal. Sophistry and malice leaps from his forked tongue as he attacks his puppeteer’s perceived detractors.

Masquerading as a moralist, he turns pliable and servile, a deformation of Castiglione’s courtier. He projects with slavish plasticity, his puppeteer’s whim and wile. His identity is self-evacuated as he persistently unfurls like a glove to the puppeteer’s palm.

Like Castiglione’s male harlots, his self abasement is unmanly and amoral. He elevates bum over forelock in a flagrant rite of political sodomy. This is no worthy portrait of the Nigerian journalist. Yet it is.

Even as we must ennoble the few, ethical natives without a dent or smudge to their repute.

Just recently, the Head of TVC News, Babajide Kolade-Otitoju, had to re-educate a print journalist and Editor of a national newspaper on the politics of the Onnoghen-gate scandal.

While the Editor spewed wildly and incoherently, accusing the Federal Government of bullying a supposedly virtuous judiciary, to the consternation of viewers in real time, Otitoju painstakingly schooled him, highlighting the shallowness of his thought-process.

Dumb-founded, the Editor, eventually agreed with Otitoju’s logic. Looking vapid, he stuttered a feeble plea, urging the press to counsel Buhari to let the embattled jurist go, scot free.

The dissembling of the Editor’s intellect was so painful to watch, particularly, as viewers mauled him via social media posts in real time. It was, however, entertaining, given his hitherto manic sentimentality.

The newspaper editor, no doubt, personifies reprobate segments of the press. The blame for the manifestation of his ilk is attributable to a dishonest society and the Nigerian press’ ideological crookedness.

Certain editors of powerful news platforms, reporters and online media have become prejudiced. Like Ogege, the spirit of embroidered woe, they have turned serpents, sleeping in Nigeria’s undergrowth, to merge with the hue of the prevailing wild. They forget that when Nigeria eventually submerges in the mire of bestial elements, even the press will be cannibalised.

The journalist, whatever, his designation, should flaunt no trait of the fawning page nor should he become the smooth flatterer and intellectual thug, twisting and turning with changing circumstance.

He shouldn’t be insanely reactive, nor should his words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of a corrupt politician, bank chief, jurist or some other puppeteer’s reprobate wile.

He should never be a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy. He should be a heroic shiner of light and truth, a respectable, poster icon of quintessential journalism.

The corruptible journalist, however, becomes the fig that lets down the leaf; the memory of twigs where thickets maul seedlings into trunks of bitterness.

This imagery discounts the essence of the sacrifices made by foremost journalists among Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen and founding fathers.

Before they joined politics and attained the status of heroes, Anthony Enahoro was a journalist; Herbert Macaulay was an engineer, journalist and publisher; Obafemi Awolowo was a journalist, lawyer and astute entrepreneur, and Nnamdi Azikiwe was a journalist and teacher.

Despite their foibles, these men had in common, the fighter spirit of heroes and a prideful belief in the supremacy of the collective and a higher purpose. Thus at a crucial point, they deployed journalism to serve national interest.

Do contemporary journalists serve national interest? Today, do we have journalist-statesmen? Are Nigerian journalists worthy of the appellation, “Heroic shiners of light and truth?”

For instance, journalists and media houses know that the Muhammadu Buhari/Yemi Osinbajo team trumps rivals by integrity, political capital, resolve and ethical bent. But like most societal segments, they are too bitter over the incumbent government’s presumed pedantry and ‘stinginess.’

Spurred by greed, religious, ethnic bigotries, they choose to ignore the perils of re-electing the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), touting Buhari’s failure to resolve in four years, devastation inflicted on Nigeria, by the PDP during its 16-year leadership.

Many would accuse me of supporting Buhari/Osinbajo. Yeah. Your grief is welcome, and your vitriol, highly appreciated. We are at that juncture, where we have to choose the lesser of competing evils. Were Kingsley Moghalu of a more powerful platform, he would probably pose stronger opposition than a frantic and confused PDP.

The Nigerian press celebrates incarnations of humanity’s debris because doing otherwise could be suicidal. Politicians own the media. And tycoons determine the news. They place advertisements and pay the salaries of the men and women by whose professionalism or otherwise Nigeria accesses her news and information needs. Thus the quality of journalism you get.

It is foolhardy, for instance, to expect a journalist who hasn’t received salary in eight months, to be objective about a news story involving a commoner and a politician. The commoner will ignite his conscience with tears but the politician will silence it with hefty ‘brown envelopes.’

It is deceitful to anticipate fairness, honesty, integrity and accuracy from mainstream and online media, whose existence and continuity are determined by the whims of dishonest politicians and business moguls.

But the Nigerian society demands purity and impartiality from the press all the same.

In Nigeria, where voters are continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalises on obvious handicaps: their impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, and overt sentimentality, it becomes increasingly difficult to nurture and enable a fair, vibrant press from among such human segment.

Despite its faults, society conveniently picks on a scapegoat, the press. The journalist is expected to serve as the conscience and moral compass of the society, challenging the government and checking the excesses of the ruling class, selflessly and uncompromisingly.

As utopian fantasies go, these are noble expectations of the journalist but the Nigerian society ignores its cultural shift from conventional morality to unbridled hedonism. It assumes, hypocritically, that the press will continually give it honest and developmental news even as every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s critical mob.

The public, comprising big business, the government, and civil societies among other mob segments, vilify any journalist or news medium that seeks to truly educate and engage, rather than entertain and perpetuate their biased definitions of reality.

Society’s decadent patronage of the press seeks to stall journalism’s satiric commentary on its failings and predatory personae.

As bankruptcy looms, upholding integrity is akin to committing career suicide hence journalism’s submission to the leash of shady expediences, a profanation of ancestor cult.

To the disillusioned journalist, there is no dependable relief in ‘ethical practice’ with its priestly creed and hierarchies.

Rather they see prospects and decorum in the honouring of reprobate nature. The journalist thus turns defender of the corrupt. Like the Delphic oracle, he would not fade in ethical entrancement.