It is now mid-term of the four year tenure for all those who came to power on May 29^th, 2007 and it must be time for some reflections, both by those with direct mandate and those, like us, who are in the corridors of power by association with those so mandated. I, therefore, conceptualize our types as witnesses to power in the same way Abba Dabo conceptualized being Chief Press Secretary to Shagari. In doing this, I am not ignorant of my recent categorization by a newspaper as a power broker around Governor Sule Lamido. Perhaps, for my own ego, I should leave the categorization unchallenged even though I still wonder what exactly it is to be powerful. My assumption is that we live in a country where the primitive nature of capitalism makes people to automatically equate proximity to those who wield power with being powerful, mostly in a prebendal sense. But as another political appointee, I am, properly speaking, a mere witness to power and that’s the reality about which I reflect upon here.

I locate the immediate prompter for this reflection in a recent discussion. On a visit to the University of Maiduguri last month, I thought I should pay intellectual homage to Kyari Tijani, the philosopher-Journalist and Professor of Political Science in the university, (UNIMAID). Naturally, our discussion centered on the mass media, an area on which he had many interesting things to say. One of the things he said which intrigued me sharply was his contention that many of the things the press reports today are not reported because they are newsworthy but because the media is fulfilling the propaganda requirement of its elite patrons. The culture of commissioning projects and the commissioning event becoming a media event is a proof of his argument, he said.

It was an observation I felt right in my bone, being a Media Adviser to a Nigerian governor. Could it be that I am, consciously or unconsciously, part of the promoters of media elitism in spite of the people-centricism upon which the Lamido regime built its legitimacy?

The truth of the matter is that his poser was never new to me. Somehow, I had ‘debated’ the problematic within my moral and ideological canvass before assuming duty as Special Adviser on Media Affairs to the Jigawa Governor.  This debate took place in October 2005 with a comrade member of the House of Representatives then who warned me against taking any appointment at the state level if it is not the position of the Secretary to the State Government. He particularly warned me against ever accepting to be Commissioner for Information because “most of these governors get into trouble with one set of workers or another and you, a comrade, would find yourself denouncing workers as the Information Commissioner”.

At the time of this ‘debate’, none of us could imagine myself becoming anything in any state of the federation other than Benue State. Therefore, when the Jigawa job came nearly two years after this discussion, it shattered its ‘consensus’. Apart from a sense of personal gratitude and attachment to Lamido, the fact of having already served him as Personal Assistant when he was Foreign Affairs Minister and, above all, he (Lamido) being a comrade in his own right meant that some of the issues in the previous ‘debate’ did not arise.

Still, Professor Tijani’s contention remains a poser of mighty ideological and moral import for some of us. For, there is something like a dilemma here. The mass media, as an institution of the civil society, has crucial role to play in the emancipation of Nigeria. I, for one, would not want to trivialize the obvious potentials of this sector. 

On the other hand, I am Media Adviser to someone whose news making capacity and credentials, by whatever definition, should be about the highest in the entire Nigeria. There is absolutely no journalist who knows his onions who would not find himself writing endlessly if he works with Lamido. I find myself doing so, not as a Media Adviser propagating the Lamido regime but essentially because I just can’t fail to take a journalistic note of his intuitive flair, the spiciness, the bluntness, the dramatic somersaults, the relay of toughness and the child-like tenderness, the flashes of brilliance and the bursts of sophism, the riot of the global and the rural mindedness, the intrusive and the withdrawn, the genial and the rugged, the distant and the involving, the ‘foolhardiness’ and yet, the calculatedness, the daring but survivalist maneuvers and so on and so forth. I am sociologically interested in the way in which these extremes combine and the consequences they produce.

But beyond this psycho-dynamic profile is a thick heritage that pushes out the pronouncements, actions and inactions that are, in themselves, the stuff of the media. I am referring to the fact that Sule Lamido has been a graduate of Kalakuta Republic, (detainees of military regimes); a seasoned politician rather than a military product in politics, a claimant to the ideological heritage of Democratic Humanism and remains the guy who has challenged his own leaders and came out the hero for it but whom no subordinate has successfully challenged yet. He is not a local politician but the governor who, by age, experience and exposure, has had the most concrete engagement with the national space, having traversed commerce, the federal legislature, party leadership/bureaucracy, Agricultural banking, Constitutional Conferences, Foreign Affairs Ministership, etc .

All these showed very clearly in the quality and canvass of his Inaugural Address on May 29^th, 2007. Mr Governor is, thus, rightly seen as one of those who would make it happen if Nigeria is to progress. He has only one major fault. He is too much of a politician, so much so that his transition to statesmanship, corresponding to his age and experience, is such a slow process, taking so long.

The Media Adviser to a governor like this cannot but have a media strategy that is more systematic, detailed and conceptually grounded, in fact, clockwork and digital, both in content and narrative strategy. Since June 4^th, 2007 when I assumed duty, this is what I think have been doing, ever watching out against crassness, pedestrianism, monotony and ordinaririness.  Whether one has been successful or not is open to debate but the fact that I have no moral or ideological guilt about it tells me that I might be contextually right, warts and all.

Of course, the idea of systematic, clockwork, digital media publicity can be a source of tension and unhappiness. There are many, many reasons for this, including the very nature of Sule Lamido which he himself manifested recently when he told his newly appointed Commissioner for Health to pose and answer for himself, “How do I work with Sule Lamido”, a typically Lamidoseque admission of his unorthodox ways.

The truth is that his penchant for the unorthodox can get in the way of the in-put/out-put matrix and sometimes, aides rebel, individually or collectively. But how far can you go in rebellion against someone with Lamido’s debating or wits advantage, his age and authority gap and against someone who can tell you that as a governor, he has the right to make a mistake. In the end, Lamido combines the singular advantage of being the problem and also the answer, not only to those around him but even to the Nigerian establishment and, certainly, to global diplomacy when he was there.

Beyond the Lamido persona is the fact of the very lean level of media representation in Jigawa State. It is certainly too lean to carry the Lamido weight. In all, there are no more than five correspondents who are regular staff of their papers. The rest are stringers filling the space for newspaper houses that say that they do not sell enough to keep a regular correspondent in the state. There is something wrong about stringers in the Nigerian context unlike in the Western world where stringers are some of the best and the brightest.

In addition to this is the threat from the crisis of excellence. I don’t know any Special Adviser on Media Affairs to anyone who will not be happy when certain journalists come to interview his or her boss. This would not be because of big titles of such journalists or which media houses they came from but because they are also analytical. And because they are analytical, they can add value to whatever backgrounds they are given by we, the madmen and specialists or the Government House gate-keepers, if you like. This is why lack of analytical competence is, in my view, the gravest threat to journalism in Nigeria today because it then means that many journalists are not in the position to moderate the inter-face between power and the people. This is the point Professor Tijani must be making.

A reporter seeks an interview with the governor, not on an issue or media specific basis as it should be. Anyway, he gets before His Excellency and his or her first question is, “Sir, I can see that you have done very well. How do you feel about such great achievement in just 12 months?” Haba! And the uninspiring conversation goes on like that for one or two hours unless a spicy one like Lamido forces a recast of the embarrassing question by yabbing the journalist.

Rarely do we get the journalism redeeming type of interview that Ijeoma Nwogwugwu of Thisday, for example, conducted with Lamido in the wake of recent EFCC palaver. In the course of the interview, Ijeoma shot His Excellency with the question, “Your Excellency, are you corrupt?” And the governor answered her, certainly to the glory of the journalist, his or her paper, the moral standing of the governor and public belief in the interview instrument in journalism.

These problems do not, however, invalidate the imperative for structured publicity for a Lamido of a newsmaker in the information age. I have three reasons for this.

One is the fact that power must be rationalized/‘mystified’ and expanded, particularly the powers of a performing government like Lamido’s. Two is the need for the kind of details about actions and programmes of such a government so as to narrow the alienation of the people from the government.

The two reasons above justify the kind of government publicity that are derisively regarded as propaganda even though the word propaganda does not mean falsehood or exaggeration but a restatement of the fundamentals. In Jigawa in the last two years, there is nothing that has been promoted in the media that one would not find concretely on the ground.

The third reason is the communication-development nexus. The media adviser’s job, in much of Africa, is about development communication because it is at the point of the commissioning of one project or the other that the government comes to itself as far as the populace is concerned. The commissioning of a project tells a different story from the pervasive notion that politicians are basically narcissistic even though the representation of such commissioning events have been burdened by the embarrassing one-dimensionality and uncreative monotony of government owned media which makes a caricature of governors in reality.