Lai Mohammed, NBC and Channels Television
Many journalists have criticised the action of NBC saying it was a very inglorious attempt to muzzle the media in Nigeria.
Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Nigeria's Information Minister since 2015 ordinarily should have nothing to do with that ministry. You wonder why? His training is in law, but he spent his whole career working in a job he never trained for. He was the public relations person for the defunct Nigeria Airways. And if you were an adult in the inglorious years of Nigeria Airways that had to die because of mismanagement, fraud and incompetence, you should know that government outfit really had a very bad press and ugly public perception. Does that mean that Lai Mohammed did not do his job very well? Not necessarily because public relations is no cure for bad management. But since 2015 when General Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria, picked Lai Mohammed as his information minister, the performance of the information minister has been less fancied by the Nigerians who he is appointed to serve. Like the defunct Nigeria Airways, General Muhammadu Buhari has been a bad product that is difficult to sell. To serve his master, Nigerians believe that Lai Mohammed has had many times to tell obvious lies. He is one of the most detested and most criticized ministers in the current administration.
Minister Lai Mohammed went recently to Washington D.C. USA to paint the recently concluded elections in Nigeria in a very bright colour. He had come to Washington DC; he told the press as he moved from one media house to another that he had come to give the balance of the news they had received about the recent elections in Nigeria. He had come to tell them that since Nigeria began conducting elections to choose its leaders there has not been anyone as fair, free and credible as the recent one. Yet, over 109 Nigerians reportedly died during the violence that attended the presidential and national assembly elections held on February 25, and significantly more than that number died in the March 18 governorship and state assemblies’ election. The election-related deaths have been recorded across Nigeria in the build-up to the 2023 general election, a pro-democracy think-thank, CDD, said last Friday. The organisation said its tracker recorded the deaths between 1 January and 10 March.
In Lagos State alone thugs were deployed to intimidate and repress voters. Many voters were wounded and thugs carted away ballot boxes and the bimodal voters’ accreditation system, BVAS, while the security agents looked the other way. The elections for which INEC received a whooping 450 billion naira and the promise to ensure electronic transmission of results via the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) was abandoned midway on the day of presidential and national assembly elections and INEC had to resort to manual counting of votes which resulted in high-level rigging never before witnessed in Nigeria's election. Votes were rather allocated to help certain candidates win. It is important to state that the IReV is a platform created by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to provide real-time transmission of election results from polling units to the central collation centre.
In Lagos, through the revelation and hurricane of the current election cycle, Peter Gregory Obi, candidate of the Labour Party, won and defeated the political godfather of Lagos politics, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, the candidate of All Progressives Congress, APC, the party in control of the federal government, a Peoples Democratic Party, PDP spokesperson told Nigerians that from the reports compiled from their situation room, Obi should have almost doubled the votes that were allocated to him. If Obi had been given his due vote, his win over Tinubu would have been a landslide rather than the narrow margin it was made to be.
The great threat to Tinubu's oligarchy in Lagos during the presidential election is the reason for the large-scale deployment of thugs by Musiliu Akinsanya commonly known as MC Oluomo, the chairman of the Lagos state-created and backed Motor Parks Management agency. That Park Management agency was created to help Oluomo retain his grip on former NURTW, the union for transport workers in Lagos when it was challenged by a rival section of it that threatened to dislodge its head, Oluomo. Oluomo allegedly has always been the political enforcer and backup for Tinubu's electoral rigging machinery in Lagos. As usual, the park’s manager came in handy to bail out the Tinubu oligarchy from electoral failure. But that meant the wounding and shooting of some voters in Lagos who were subsequently disenfranchised.
In Ibadan, Oyo State three persons were shot dead a day before the gubernatorial and assembly elections by a rival political party as the PDP which control the government of the state conducted its walk round the streets. Up to the time of writing this story, it is not known what has been done to the death of these three persons. In Rivers state, gory accounts of massive rigging were given by the press which alleged connivance of security agents. In Kaduna State, about 165 persons were arrested while transferring money to the accounts of voters to buy their votes, yet the Minister of Information told the press in Washington that it was the most credible and fairest election ever held in Nigeria. The minister perhaps forget that the world is in an age where everything that happened during that sham of elections was instantly watched and recorded as they happened.
While Lai Mohammed was dishing out disinformation in Washington, his agent the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC was repressing Channels Television, a local television station, the most professional that has won several awards as the best television station in the nation for a continual fifteen years, by slamming it with a fine of 5 million naira. NBC was responding to a petition written to it by Bayo Onanuga, himself a former Managing Director of defunct 'The News', a weekly magazine that did much of guerilla journalism in a very fierce fight against the military regime of the virulent dictator, General Sanni Abacha. Bayo Onanuga is the current head of Media for the Tinubu campaign organization. Bayo has an ongoing war with Arise Television, a television station that is seen to be very critical of Bayo's principal and the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. NBC slammed those 5 million naira fine on Channels without hearing the side of the television station. It acted only on the strength of Bayo Onanuga's petition. Many journalists have criticised the action of NBC saying it was a very inglorious attempt to muzzle the media in Nigeria.
Bayo Onanuga charged the Channels Television for not curtailing the running mate of Peter Obi in the presidential election, Datti Baba Ahmed who had said it would be the end of democracy if Bola Tinubu, the president-elect was sworn in on 29 May 2023. Some journalists have wondered how possible it is to curtail a man that was invited to air his view on a controversial election, especially in a live telecast. Some said the host of the program, Seun Okinbaloye, made strenuous efforts to control Datti Baba Ahmed even to the point of being rude to him. Yet NBC will not look to the efforts of Seun Okinbaloye, it went ahead without hearing Seun and instead slammed a 5 million naira fine on the television station.
But Channels Television has fought back through Seun saying boldly it will not agree to be silenced, and that it will continue to serve its audience with robust and balanced journalism. It has been argued that the only thing Channels Television would have done is to invite the running mate of Tinubu to speak also. That, they say will fulfill the demand for balance in reporting. Some journalists have also said it is wrong to use a government-owned agency to watch and regulate the media. They are calling for a body operated by journalists. They say only journalists in a free environment can objectively watch the practice of journalism. This perhaps informed the setting up recently of a Media Complaints Commission made up of seasoned journalists by the different bodies of the media.
Whatever happens, it is certain that the Nigerian press will not give up on their tradition of freedom. It is also certain that they will censure their colleague who has now abandoned them and working against them, Bayo Onanuga. Some have wondered what kind of toxic environment Bayo Onanuga will generate for the media if he ends up as either the information minister in Tinubu’s cabinet or his chief media aide.
Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos