Honorable members of the board, it is a pleasure to welcome you to this inaugural meeting of The Nation Journalism Foundation. We live in very interesting times when events happen at a furious and breakneck speed, often inducing generalized apprehension and an eerie sense of disorientation among the populace and the ruling classes themselves. It has been said that journalism is history in a hurry. But we live in a world where unfolding events themselves in their wild improbability and sheer impossibility make history itself feels like fiction in a hurry. In such circumstances, history, however outlandish and improbable it appears, remains the infallible guide and guardrails.
It seems like yesterday, but it is coming almost twenty years ago when this writer delivered an inaugural address on May, 6th, 2006 at the launch of Sahara Reporters at the Empire State Building in New York. The address was titled, The Blogger As Nemesis. In our detailed analysis, we drew attention to the emergence of blogging as a profession in Nigeria, a development which we thought would put paid to the dominance of official news and information and the complicity and collusion of the mainstream media, sections of which had played a heroic role in the termination of military rule, with official lies and mendacity.
Almost twenty years after, we can look back with the benefit of hindsight and through the prism of our current perplexities and perturbation as a nation to that particular period of our national life. It was coming to the end of the Obasanjo post-military dispensation. The euphoria about seeing off the military to the barracks was beginning to wear off. New national contradictions had made their way to the centre stage. In fairness to the Owu-born general, he had run a fairly competent if not visionary economy. Obasanjo’s project of formal demilitarization was also brilliantly executed with the support of old military acolytes like General Theophilus Danjuma.
It was in the next phase of deepening the democratic process that Obasanjo came a sad cropper. In fairness to the general, you cannot give what you don’t have. The general was particularly ill-equipped for this task. He had already stoked the fire of future instability through the perplexed levity with which he handled the sharia challenge to his suzerainty and his heavy-handed devastation of Odi and Zaki Biam communities. Despite setting up the EFCC as a proactive corruption-fighting organization, the issue of the third term gambit, and the outlandish bribery that went with this, set the tone for the political and economic malfeasance that has dogged the Fourth Republic. After that, Obasanjo was a spent force waiting to unleash the final damage to the country in the form of a succession programme that lacked both integrity and fairness. The remaining time also afforded him the opportunity to complete the electoral brutalization of his own people.
The address at the Empire State Building at the launch of Sahara Reporters presages and projects the rise of the impish and intrepid former Student Union leader to the portals of global superstardom in the crucible of disruptive communication and instant news dissemination. At that point in time, Sowore was not a trained journalist. Neither was he known to have taken any internship in any newspaper house. And it was not as if he was a lone moral exemplar in a dark void. He was merely cuing in, shrewdly and probably intuitively, to the shattering of the old canons of journalism by the advent of disruptive developments such as the rise of the internet, the abolition of the old notions of time and space by globalization, the irruptions of new modes of mass communication which bypass the ancient, fossilized newsroom and its archaic and decaying typesetters as well as the arrival of the new phenomenon known as Citizens’ Journalism.
It is as rowdy and disrespecting of the old order and its institutional restraints as anybody can imagine. Anybody with an access to a computer and an upmarket phone is a prospective journalist. And anybody with a modern laptop is a publisher in waiting. For a postcolonial society which had just managed to throw off the yoke of military tyranny in the course of a long transition to modernity, it has been quite a journey from the epoch of Public Letter-writers who served as the solitary channel for communicating private grievances to the colonial authority to the age of bloggers who can call out anybody on anything.
That bright and clear New York morning, the Empire State Building where the launch of Sahara Reporters took place was sparsely populated. Although fairly well-known as a student union leader, particularly famous for wrestling the late Admiral Joseph Okhai Akhigbe to the ground over a dispute about examination timetable while the latter moonlighted as a Law student at the University of Lagos, he was yet to enter proper national consciousness at that point in time. The place was filled with Sowore acolytes and a few die-hard admirers. Yours sincerely was in the habit of infiltrating Sowore into complacent and complaisant ancient Yoruba circles in seedy dimly lit drinking joints of Brooklyn and Queens in New York for dueling matches over political developments back in Nigeria which were as rowdy as they were filled with friendly imprecations and joyous expletives.
Taking one to the airport later that year, Sowore noted cryptically that the Yoruba were withdrawing their intellectuals and that something was cooking. What was cooking was an inch-by-inch Normandy Beach-like operation to retrieve the region from General Obasanjo’s electoral blunderbuss. It ended four years later as Rauf Aregbesola triumphantly reclaimed his stolen mandate. Meanwhile in the intervening eighteen years, Sowore had transformed himself from a democratic street fighter, a sophomore samurai, an equal opportunity protester to the baron of disruptive communication, a master of insurrectionary journalism and globally lionized star of the post-military protest in Nigeria whose exploits and derring-do at the behest of his nation are permanently etched in the memories of his contemporaries.
One may of course disagree with Sowore’s method and tactics, his rather ill-conceived notion of revolution as Espresso Coffee. But it is a measure of the young man’s amazing transformation and emergent national stature that a few days back, he successfully called out the nation’s premier crime bursting agency over its decision to conceal the identity of the nation’s biggest ever would be landlord. To be sure in doing this, the EFCC might be acting under some furtive gambit of secret negotiation to achieve maximum result but in a nation tired of official collusion and complicity with humongous crimes against the commonwealth, it was no surprise that it blew in its face. This is how far we have come in the battle against state criminality, and we may have the advent of citizens’ journalism and disruptive countervailing disclosure of information to thank for this development.
Going forward, it should now be clear and straightforward that we can no longer rely on fighting state criminality and economic heists committed against the nation by relying on old methods and methodology. Because Nigeria is struggling to be free of the hegemonic shackles of an entrenched plundering ethos derived from harmful worldviews that have kept the nation in a permanent state of normless levitations, it is going to be a hard slog, a brutal toe to toe contention. We are in for a long revolution. Contrary to Sowore’s own notion of instant revolutions characterized by brisk victories and irreversible gains, a long revolution is often accompanied by momentous slides and reversible momentum. Battles you thought had been fought and won simply come back to haunt you in another guise. Instant revolutionaries of yesterday dissolve into thin air. The shambolic state of Labour Party and its now motorized bicycle riders ought to serve as a telling reminder that ersatz revolutions not based on acute and accurate reading of the totality of circumstances of a multi-ethnic nation are dead before arrival.
The current political hostilities over tax reforms are nothing but coded battles for the political and economic modernization of the country. They are just the tip of a huge iceberg, and it is imperative that economic modernization is accompanied by political modernization, otherwise modernization is imperiled by counter-modernizing forces in their hegemonic resilience and resplendency. Unless the modernizing forces thrown up by the contradictions of the moment manage to discover the pan-Nigerian concert needed to impose a modernizing hegemony on the current chaotic ensemble, nothing can be guaranteed.
This is why there is something fortuitous and fortunate about the coming of The Nation’s Journalism Foundation at this particular time. Eighteen years into the advent of Sowore and Sahara Reporters, the political situation appears more complicated while the reality is even more colorful in Nigeria. Although powerful blows have been struck against the ramparts of authoritarian misrule and savage despotism, their Praetorian Guard remain intact. The full arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the debut of even more sophisticated modes of faking reality (Deep Fake) have led to a deepening of doubt about official disclosures and the officiality of any disclosure itself.
While the living tremble in fear, even the dead are rattled in apprehension. In the fierce struggle to debase and defame reality, actual reality appears unrealizable, a mere approximation of the real thing. We have arrived at the post-public preview or purview as the case may be. Who in his right mind would have believed that it is possible for an Accountant General of a federation to steal almost the entire federal coffer under his care, or that a serving official would build for himself an estate of over seven hundred duplexes while invoking the bible? Actual reality is unrealistic, as Franz Kafka will put it.
This is the intriguing environment in which The Nation’s Foundation for Journalism will operate. There is a plethora of other organizations operating in the field. It will strive to distinguish itself by refining its own operative parameters. Based on its antecedents, it cannot, and will not, project itself as an adversarial antithesis to the state. Rather, it will promote active dialogue with state and non-state actors, seek occasional interactive engagement with officialdom, open its portals to countervailing views as long as they operate within the bounds of decency and decorum and actively seek the maximum welfare of traditional journalists through constant workshops, interdisciplinary training with relevant national and international agencies and programmes of retraining and retooling as well as exposure to emerging trends in the profession.
The present generation can only do its best, hoping to pass the baton to future generations. Thank you all.
•Being a welcome address to the inaugural meeting of the Board of Trustees, The Nation Journalism Foundation by the Chairman of the board, Professor Adebayo Williams held on Wednesday, 4th December 2024.
Adebayo Williams