As a professional group, Nigerian editors take their commitment to that slippery eel called good governance quite seriously. Take my word for it. After all, the constitution expressly imposes on the mass media the constitutional duty to hold the government accountable to the people. No mean constitutional burden to bear and even a heavier one to discharge in a country of big men and women who rule by their whims and caprices, irrespective of what the laws and the constitution say.
In less than a year from now, Nigeria will conduct its fifth general elections to return or replace some of the big people in the executive and the legislative branches of government. The politicians are already in the ring. Even the blind can see that we face a clear and present danger of suffocating in piles of posters and billboards. On the positive side, these posters and billboards serve two important purposes. They announce the election season and they are the most visible faces of uncoordinated beautification projects in our towns and cities today.
But is everything all right with our democracy? The question looms, casting an inky shadow on the beautiful posters and billboards. The Nigerian Guild of Editors believes that we still face some critical challenges in our quest, genuine or dishonest, to get it right. The Guild convened a four-day All Nigerian Editors Conference in Katsina last week. The president of the Guild, Mr. Femi Adesina, assembled a good cast of the young with a sprinkling of some superannuated men like yours sincerely to examine two of these critical challenges: credible elections and good governance and the role of the editor.
We listened to articulate men and women make important points about these challenges. But I came away with this ominously hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I think we are dealing here with a lethal mix of facts and fiction. As a professional conveyor of information, the editor does have a role in how the country and the rest of the world view the conduct of our elections. But does an editor have the capacity to police the conduct of our elections to ensure that all votes count and the elections are generally accepted as free, fair and credible? The fiction is that he does. The fact is less glamorous. Politicians who rig elections have never been frightened by the presence of an editor. And they never will.
Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, the well-known banker, delivered the keynote address at the conference. Interestingly, the sub-title of his speech was: How editors can promote credible elections and enhance good governance in Nigeria. I found his speech fair and even sympathetic to editors and the news media. But he too could not resist the tendency to assume that editors “…. hold the key to the conduct of credible elections in this country next year, as well as enhancing good governance in our society.”
He probably intended to massage the huge ego of all editors. If so, not bad. Perhaps, more importantly, he sought to underline the fact that editors, even more than the electoral umpire and the courts of law, must carry the watering can when things go wrong with the conduct of our elections and how we are governed or misgoverned. You should recognise that as the inelegantly phrased whipping boy syndrome. I find that argument patently unfair for that reason.
We all desire and crave credible elections and good governance but I do not think editors hold the key to the attainment of this slippery national political ideal. If the politicians remain unabashedly committed to the cynical rape of our democracy, what can the editors do? I am afraid, the answer is nothing. Or, to put it less starkly, very little.
On a good day, our public officers and the very important people feel generous enough to acknowledge that our editors are much more than press boys open to cynical manipulation by them. But their generosity fits in with their tendency to blame anyone but themselves when things go wrong. The problem is that we expect editors to watch over the conduct of our elections and police governance in a vacuum. As far as politics are concerned, this country is a jungle. There are no rules in the game of politics. Where they exist, they are treated as absolute nuisance by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
I think it would help our editors if we are agree on what makes for credible elections and good governance. A working definition of the terms would help. Alhaji Umaru offered some help here. He defines a “credible election as the process of recruiting leaders for elective offices in a ‘free and fair atmosphere.” Rather bald but it just goes to show that a credible election, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.
He also offered us the definition of good governance provided by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation as something worth thinking about. The foundation defines good governance as “the provision of the political, social and economic goods that a citizen has the right to expect from his or her state and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens.”
Should our editors accept this as the basis for judging how we are governed? I raised this issue at the conference but Ms. Ayo Obe did not think we should put ourselves in a straitjacket. Maybe she had a point but if we must have a basis for judging credible elections and good governance. If the editor must play more than a passive role in them, we cannot ignore acceptable working definitions of the terms. It would make it much easier for us to know when there are breaches.
Our editors face two critical challenges both of which boil down to the fatally flawed leadership recruitment process. Firstly, the electoral process is fatally flawed. It does not take rocket science to know that a flawed process cannot produce a perfect result, no matter how free and fair the conduct of an election might be. An election rigged in advance cannot put a good face on the electoral process. INEC, the electoral umpire, is not even the primary custodian of our electoral process. To be charitable about this, the commission exists to conduct elections. If a political party fields a Chinese national as a presidential candidate, the commission has no right to refuse to so field him. I have paraphrased the INEC man at the conference. Few electoral umpires are as powerless as our own INEC. Electioneering campaigns are legally treated as merely the process leading to the casting of votes on election day. In other countries, they are veritable instruments in the leadership recruitment process. To substitute posters and billboards for this importance process takes away from the people their right to interrogate those who seek to rule them in the two branches of government.
Secondly, our editors must rise to the critical challenge of interrogating individuals thrown up by the system. Our system turns up unknown political quantities in every election season. We do not really know those who rule us. Ministers and commissioners escape this necessary scrutiny. We need to know these strange fellows thrown up by the system. The failure of our editors to perform this vital role has seen the election of criminals of every hue in the executive and the legislative branches of government. Thus at every level of government, we are saddled with men and women most of whom have no demonstrable competence in their core areas of service delivery.
Putting these crying defects together, Alhaji Mutallab argued that “we have a long way to go for Nigeria to attain global reckoning among countries where citizens are accorded the political, social and economic rights they expect from their state.”
I agree.
