A Postmortem On Dele Giwa’s Mangled Body – TheNigerialawyer

By Festus Adedayo

Since that dark Sunday morning on October 19, 1986
when renowned journalist, Dele Giwa, was parcel-bombed by a
God-knows-who, Nigerian journalism, Nigeria and
government-journalism relationship have not recovered from that
nightmarish experience. And in diverse regards. First, because it
was a novel manner of assassination, the killing of Giwa opened the
floodgate for subsequent demystification of the oppression of
journalists in Nigeria. For the Ibrahim Babangida military
government which was the first suspect in the killing, Giwa’s death
demanded new methods of arresting critical journalists without
slamming any chains around their feet. Babangida thereafter sent
for Antonio Gramsci, Italian activists who taught world rulers on
how to covertly manipulate and shape thoughts and ideas of the
people, get critics to eat off rulers’ tables without the latter
shedding a single pint of their blood.

Dele Giwa represented the finest brew of Nigerian journalism of
the consequential post-Second Republic combat-of-the-military-class
era. Born Sunmonu Oladele ‘Baines’ Giwa in 1947, he hailed from a
very poor family of a father who was a hired hand in Oba Adesoji
Aderemi, Ooni of Ife’s palace and rose to becoming a colossus of
the written words. After earning a degree from Brooklyn
College in 1975, Giwa worked for four years with The New
York Times as a news assistant and thereafter came
back home to work for the influential Daily
Times. In 1984, he pulled his galaxy of media friends
to establish the Newswatch magazine, a move
that was said to equal Nnamdi Azikiwe’s unique and remarkable entry
into newspaper press journalism in 1937 with his West
African Pilot. It was colourful as well as embodying
the critical ingredients of journalism at the time when military
autocracy had dragged on for interminably long period and at a time
when the verve for democratic renaissance was sweeping round the
globe. It was thus not surprising that the hostile and investigate
bents of the Newswatch, Giwa’s piercingly
critical Parallax Snap column, as well as
the unpardonably unsparing stings of his colleagues’ pens would
lead to the fatal assassination that Giwa suffered in the hands of
his traducers.

The thirty-third anniversary of Giwa’s assassination is however
not a moment to engage in puerile revisionism, buck-passing on what
was or was not responsible for his murder but an opportunity to
critically look at current trends in journalism practice, the state
of Giwa’s kind of journalism and the vanishing crop of Giwa-type
journalists in the Nigeria of today. In other words, let us
literally slice the flesh of this avant-garde journalism icon in a
post-mortem, perhaps we could find what detains the practice of the
profession for this long. More importantly, with Giwa’s gruesome
murder, we should ask ourselves whether there has been a let in
government/press hostile relationship and what is the fare of
current civilian government in its interface with the press?

While not engaging in needless revisionism, it must be said that
it is a colossal shame that, 33 years after Giwa’s murder, the
Nigerian state has waffled in telling the world who actually
murdered the journalist. Unresolved murders have unfolded into one
another, its culmination being the murder of Nigeria’s Attorney
General in 2001 without identified culprits till today.

Anyway, the Nigerian press has had a ding-dong history from the
colonial period. With a remarkable pedigree as predating the
Nigerian state, having been in existence since the establishment of
the printing press in 1846, with the first printing press
which was installed by the Presbyterian Church in Calabar and eight
years after, precisely in 1854, the establishment by the Reverend
Henry Townsend of the Church Missionary Society (CSM) who
inaugurated a printing school in Abeokuta and four years later,
founded the Iwe
Irohin (Iwe Irohin fun awon ara Egba ati
Yoruba), the Nigerian press is unarguably older than
Nigeria which came into being in 1914, almost a decade after. The
press acquitted itself very well in the fight against the sit-tight
inclination of colonial overlords and fought colonial orthodoxy
with a remarkable zeal and positioned the newspaper press on
an enviable pedestal. It did this until it gradually became an
important factor in colonial society and politics in West Africa.
Galaxy of immortal stars of Nigerian press like Robert
Campbell, a West Indian businessman who had settled in Lagos,
through his publishing of
the Anglo-African newspaper which he
founded in 1863, down to a flurry of newspapers which came on the
scene in subsequence, made the early press to constitute a
formidable bulwark against colonialists. All in all, a total of
fifty-one newspapers were established between Lagos
Times newspaper of 1880 and 1937 when Azikiwe came on
board with Pilot.

The First Republic became a downward slope for the newspaper
press which had made such a promising landmark on the sand of time.
Without any let, the Nigerian press mutated from the glory of the
anti-colonial struggle into a battleground for power struggles
among politicians. It was so bad that critical reviews of the press
of the time hold the press of the time responsible for the collapse
of that Republic.

After the collapse, the press went into its vanguard role again.
From 1966 to 1979, the Nigerian newspaper press, which had now had
a sprinkle of state-owned radio and television stations, held the
military accountable to its promises. It was no coincidence that
journalist Amachere had his head shaved by military administrator,
Diette Spiff for standing up to the military top-brass. But
immediately the military vacated the dais and politicians took over
in 1979, the press morphed from being an avant-garde into a
mouthpiece of political opportunism. Truth became multi-faceted,
depending on which medium you held in your hands. The press only
regained its composure when the military struck again in 1983, a
battle it fought all through the Muhammadu Buhari/Babangida/Abacha
years until the military returned into the barracks in 1999.

I have gone into this long history to show that the press has
been oscillating from the noble, the selfish, the fissiparous, to
the ambivalent since its establishment in 1854. A two-pronged
estimation of the press of the Giwa era is available among analysts
of the time. The Giwas emerged as the doyen of the crop that is
pejoratively referred to as the Benz
Editors. The “flotsam and jetsam” classification of
the “press boys,” pioneered by Obafemi Awolowo, died with the
advent of the Giwas in the 1980s. They were editors who held
bachelor degrees from America, UK and Nigerian universities who
could not settle for the fringe lifestyles of the journalists of
the immediate past era. They drove Mercedez Benz cars, lived in big
houses and could not be pushed around. Not only did they change the
face of the newspaper press, they changed its tenor as well,
bringing foreign inputs into the practice.

Journalism practice of the current Fourth Republic, from 1999
till now, is the lowest in content and form, since its advent. It
has suffered serious bombshells from artillery fire of allied
forces of economic downturn, gross incompetence of practitioners,
manifest dissembling of the Nigeria that used to be an Eldorado in
the eyes of forefather practitioners and other forces. The advent
of the social media is the final nail on the coffin of a Nigerian
press that was before now gasping for breath. As it is now, media
practice is comatose, waiting for the pronouncement of its death by
a fidgeting medic and its internment by the pallbearers.

The first major instigator of the death of the Nigerian media
today is the absence of Nigeria or the death of Nigeria in the ears
of Nigerians. Media practice in the immediate post-colony reckoned
that there was one country called Nigeria that gummed her people
together, to which the practitioners needed “to be faithful, loyal
and honest.” Today, practitioners have found out that that was the
greatest scam of the century and indeed, there was no country that
needed anybody’s faithfulness or loyalty. Rather than Nigeria to
whom the early press and its practitioners paid obeisance, the god
of the personal belly is the most recent god to which practitioners
give propitiations. When they see how governments after governments
preach the gospel of ethnic ascendancy, how looting of treasuries
has become abiding credo of governance, media practitioners
suddenly become apostates of those lofty dreams.

Second is that there is a consistent worship of mediocrity in
Nigeria which is also becoming an abiding pattern. You do not need
to strive for excellence in a Nigeria where governments appoint the
worst of us to superintend over the best of us. A president or
governor or minister could appoint his sexual liaison as minister –
sorry, I remove that – as commissioner or adviser and we will live
happily ever thereafter. We live in a Nigeria where sex symbols in
BBNaija are rewarded with multiple of millions while First Class
graduates get mere applauses. There are no scholarships from
government as incentives to the remarkable among us any longer and
falsifications rule the universities now like a panjandrum. It is
this set of falsifiers, who exchange moans on top of lecturers for
certificates, who are the reporters who write the stories in the
Nigerian press that we hypocritically expect to benchmark the
resilience pens of the Amachrees and the lush journalism of the
Peter Enahoros. In other words, when you pick a copy of a Nigerian
newspaper or you hear a radio/TV broadcaster talk, no one needs to
tell you that a holocaust is afoot in the Nigerian press.

The parlous economy has brought a survival-of-the-fittest and
elimination of the weakest into journalism. Media houses are
gasping for breath, sparsely pay salaries and cannot afford
refresher courses for practitioners. Mediocrity is ruling the
airwaves of the newsroom. Governments after governments and the
corporate world, aware of this emasculation, are exploring this to
their advantage. Rather than the brown
envelope malady, what I call corporate corruption is
the rule rather than the exception in the media. Since he who pays
the piper calls the tune, advertisers and governments who control
huge advert bucks easily decree negative news from the list of
materials to communicate to the public.

Except with its sudden resurgence in the Buhari era, physical
emasculation of journalists by clamping them in detention had paled
remarkably. Nor do we witness the assassination of the Giwa type.
Government/press relations are no longer marked by constructive
engagements but cat and mouse relationship. Perhaps, a reflection
of the inability to process the depth of media involvement in
policy decisions, this government has not only succeeded in dulling
the robust, though adversarial, interface of government and the
press, it has remarkably demystified the press, making any onlooker
to wonder if the lofty roles of the press of yore were not
hyped.

The most fatal blow to media practice in Nigeria, and I dare
say, the world, is the social media. Unbeknown to it, the rest of
the world envied the press’ art of purveying information messages
through its media outlets. Immediately the social media became
activated, it became a fertile ground for all manner of persons to
become press icons. Being an uncensored turf with licence for licit
and illicit communication, the social media has become renowned for
fake news, puerile murder of journalism rules and ultimately, the
graveyard of the sacred and old journalism profession. It is so bad
that traditional media is going extinct. That is the memory that
Giwa’s death, 33 years after, spurns in the air.

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