PUNCH
After alleging his life and family were in danger, FirstNews editor, Segun Olatunji, walked out on his job and the messy situation of Nigeria’s state security agents going feral on him. Their actions were not out of character. When a situation embarrasses one of the country’s many self-important “big men,” violence is always their resort. In this case, the big man with a punctured ego is the president’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila. FirstNews had written an unflattering story bordering on corruption and abuse of office about him, a civic action that turned out to be a mistake on the part of journalists who took the fact of Nigeria’s democracy as self-evident. For now, one cannot definitively state whether the case peaked with the editor’s resignation.
Some military men were said to have arrested Olatunji from his Lagos home. According to Olatunji’s narration of accounts, they arrested his wife and used her as bait to get to him. They (officers of the Army, Air Force and Defence Intelligence Agency!) burst into his home, bundled him into a van parked outside his house, and whisked him away. They blindfolded him and transported him to Abuja in a military helicopter. They also detained and tortured him. When confronted, they at first denied their involvement in his arrest. It was thanks to a sustained media campaign that Olatunji was later released. It probably helped too that the FirstNews management also apologised to Gbajabiamila stating that their report contained “falsehoods and fabricated stories handed out to us as facts by a misleading source.” Trouble is, in situations like this, you never know what constitutes a genuine apology and what was obtained under duress.
Several commentators have already addressed the issue of the journalist’s abduction. What I am curious about is the role of Gbajabiamila in all of these. Is he satisfied with the outcome? Is this how he is going to be resolving issues going forward? Notably, he was silent all through the saga (or maybe I just never came across his statement on the issue). However, we are Nigerians enough to know that the state agents would not deploy that much resources to arrest a single journalist if they were not acting on “orders from above.” The fact that he was publicly silent does not absolve his fangs of this venom.
As you might know, Gbajabiamilia is a trained lawyer with many years of practice in the United States. Yes, his career was blighted by professional misconduct but he was still a practitioner. Back home in Nigeria, he cut his political teeth by working among the breed of activists/intellectuals whose perpetual claims on the public never surpass their glorious days of challenging military despots. It is consequential of how we (mis-)attribute our freedom from autocratic government to these people that someone like Gbajabiamila eventually rose to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In short, Gbajabiamila is a man whose professional career and political credentials have been defined by the law—the rule of law, advocacy against an unruly order, and the making of the law.
So, why would a man like that fight supposed libel/slander through means that repudiate the law? Why did he abjure the path of pursuing a civil case and instead opt for the very “Gestapo” military techniques that negate the ethos of Nigeria as a democratic society? I am genuinely curious if, at any time during Olatunji’s saga, Gbajabiamila was struck by the irony of a lawyer/lawmaker defending his supposed integrity using brute despotic tactics. Is this not another instance of Nigeria as the quintessential Orwellian animal farm?
There are many disasters in Nigeria today, and Olatunji’s abduction illustrates some of them: those who boast they fought for democracy were never fully convinced of democracy’s true potential; those presently vested with power do not believe in the country enough to let us attain our true potential. At every turn, and every opportunity they get, they subvert our chances of becoming the nation where “peace and justice shall reign.” As it turns out, even the man who has worked with the law all his life does not even believe in the law enough to let the law take its course. He could have gotten FirstNews to apologise if he had filed a civil case in the court, won, and the judge ordered a retraction. Instead, he took a shortcut. For a country where insecurity is perpetually rife, security agents sure wasted resources to make a spectacle of the vindictiveness of self-vindication.
