Question: What is the name of the Nigerian man who attacked President Olusegun Obasanjo with his bare fists on November 9, 2010?
Question: What is the name of the Nigerian man who attacked President Olusegun Obasanjo with his bare fists on November 9, 2010?
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I asked this question of several Nigerians last week. Nobody knew the answer, but everyone remembered well the story. It is of our former maximum ruler trying to drive out of Murtala Muhammad Airport in Lagos following a trip somewhere. As he pulls away in an expensive SUV, accompanied by “security,” an unknown man emerges from the shadows, pulls Obasanjo’s door open and sets upon him with his fists.
Apart from the predictable pummeling the assailant received from Obasanjo’s protectors on the spot as they subdued and arrested him, nothing has been heard of him ever since.
There are two reasons for my curiousity. The first: ignorance. I honestly did not know the man’s identity. Assault is frowned upon by the law; upon a former Head of Government the calibre of Obasanjo, it is the definition of suicide.
The second reason for my enquiry was more important: I wanted to highlight the question mark dangling over my own trade, journalism.
The news business thrives on the unusual, the unknown and the unheard-of. No Nigerian that I know or have heard of has ever set about such a complicated personality as Obasanjo in public. Most Nigerians do it every day, I know: with their tongues or in their dreams, or safely behind their wives. Nollywood producers probably attempt it in screenplay classes.
But in real life—with fists, in broad daylight—and in full view of killer policemen angry they are not on street corners collecting their customary N20 domestic “visas?
Our mystery man did it. He allegedly detonated an avalanche of punches—not on the meek Shehu Shagari or the unflappable Yakubu Gowon--but on the simmering volcano, Obasanjo.
Some reports described the man as being “angry” or “frustrated,” but there were really no details. No interviews. No follow-up.
We do not even know if he was even a Nigerian. We do not know if he is still alive. A man who spent hours outwitting Obasanjo’s federal and private security in order to accomplish the expressway equivalent of jumping out of an aircraft at 30,000 feet without a parachute. A thousand newspapers and magazines and radio and television stations, and yet the nation does know the name of a man who—and this is 2010—put his own life on the line in other to say something.
Well, perhaps he was not pressing his right to speak—“America is watching,” they claim he said, but we do not know because the Nigerian journalist failed to find out.
At least one report suggested the man may have been insane, but that was probably an interpretation, because it sounds logical to suggest only a lunatic would attack Obasanjo with killer fists in public.
Insane? Perhaps. But in a country such as Nigeria, given the putrid smell emanating on a daily basis from the corridors of power and privilege in Nigeria, there is really little good reason for anyone to be in good health.
But here we are, in 2010, and a Nigerian is ripped away from ripping a former leader apart with his bare hands, and we do not even know who he is.
We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know if they tortured him to death. It is inconceivable that the American public would not have been told who Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab was, where he came from, what his motives were, or what happened after he was removed from Detroit Airport on Christmas Day last year.
Our journalism trumpets a professional conscience, and every year, a battery of editors and reporters receive pseudo-performance awards and titles, and yet they do not even know or care whether a mysterious citizen with an extraordinary story is alive or dead. No matter what any of us may feel about Obasanjo, he was twice ruler of Nigeria. We cannot answer the elementary reader/viewer/listener query: What happened next after a man assaulted him?
That is perhaps why, over the years cynical citizens have learned to answer such questions for themselves. Nigerians have learned the lesson that nobody is of any consequence if he is poor and unknown. An unwritten law states that such people do not deserve the precious attention of journalism or the law. Only the well-placed and well-heeled matter.
How important are power, money and position? Let me count one way: President Goodluck Jonathan is found trying to bribe a pressure group with a $50,000 gift.
Fifty thousand dollars is enough money to provide several Nigerian villages with water; to send many indigent Nigerians through the university; to implement the Millennium Development Goals targets on maternal and child health for two Nigerian states.
Stunned by the mountain of $100 bills and no less by the presumptuousness of Mr. Jonathan, the Save
Nigeria Group delegation politely returns the money, an unusual gesture that then generated the ridiculous argument as to whether the money was a bribe or was what the government shamelessly called “Transport Fare. (TF)”
Remember, we are talking about the leading Nigerian evils of money and power at the highest level it is possible to beg, borrow or steal. Now, if anyone in Nigeria knows anything about TF, it is the journalist. While not everyone accepts such gratification, it is a safe bet that many have been offered. Only recently, Ibrahim Bademasi Babangida was reported to have given a N10 million TF to an army of journalists which flocked to his Minna beehive at midnight.
I am not sure where IBB’s journalists were supposed to have been going. I suspect, however, that if you have ever—EVER— accepted TF, the tendency would be to argue that what Mr. Jonathan put before Pastor Tunde Bakare and the SNG delegation at Aso Rock two weeks ago was not a bribe.
But it was. It was worst bribe there is, for many reasons. Unless Jonathan routinely writes “Bribe,” “Suya,” “Isiewu,” “Transport Fare,” “Accommodation” and similar labels on outgoing gifts, it certainly was a bribe, as all the others would be different kinds of inducement.
Next, the money did not even belong to the giver. I am sure that unless Jonathan has a mint in his bedroom in which he prints US dollar bills, the money did not come from his pockets. Every Nigerian knows, instinctively, that it was government money that was being diverted from government coffers and projects and budget to fuel Jonathan’s election bid and feed Nigeria’s notorious corruption monster.
If it came from his pocket, then not only have his pockets bloated beyond explanation, he ought to explain why the leader of a nation the currency of which is the Naira—and who cannot legally operate a foreign account—is dispensing private largesse in foreign currency at the seat of the Nigerian government.
But whether it was private or public money, the $50,000 is worse than a bribe: it was bait. The objective of bait is always to compromise that which is baited. Fishermen bait fish to catch fish. Hunters bait game in order to kill game. Jonathan was baiting the SNG; he was not transporting his visitors anywhere.
Similarly, politicians and businessmen do not give journalists “Transport Fare” in order to guarantee they actually travel; it is code language. The trouble with “TF” is that once accepted, it becomes a standard for both giver and receiver: an unspoken agreement for expectation and repetition. In other words, “TF” is code for bribe; it is the bait that keeps on baiting.
That may explain what Nigerian journalism did—or did not do—when the $50,000 challenge came up: it looked left, right, then away. It did not even identify a problem. Nobody even asked him, on the basis of principle, to resign.
Jonathan—the Central Bank firmly located in his hip pocket¬—is rich and powerful, and he simply claimed his free pass and a passing grade. That is why he has carried on in the past two weeks as though he did not breach the boundaries of ethics or law on November 29. What he accomplished, however, is to solidify our reputation as a nation where corruption is a legitimate industry. While his speechwriters have him denouncing corruption, he routinely contradicts himself, often publicly and embarrassingly.
Only months ago, he was defining his mission as purification, but under his watch, we now see growing putrefaction. His dollar-denominated corruption is a new low, and our complicit, and our journalism of expediency is a key reason for it. Nigeria will never rise beyond the quality of its journalism or the determination of its journalists not to protect the powerful at the expense of the weak, or favour convenience over truth.
The man who cornered Obasanjo in his own car was at once a man and a mouse. But how many similar stories are we never going to know?
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