Abdulhamid Babatunde
3 October 2008
opinion
Recent reports emanating from the all pervading Western media machines about the various stages of illness and death of the North Korean President Kim Il Sung which was copiously regurgitated in the Nigerian press should have given the editorial gurus behind the morbid journalism targeting our own dear President Umar Musa Yar'adua more than the creeps.
According to the Western media spin-doctors, the absence of the Korean leader from an important national event meant the man was either dead or dying and they proceeded to dish out all manner of stories in the name of news.
A top American intelligence spook had even detected a paralytic stroke as the terminal illness bedevilling the Korean President, while another noted that the President had not appeared in public since August and this was immediately highlighted as a headline to lend credence to the morbid imaginations of the editors of CNN, BBC, AFP and a host of other Western media machines. Of course the North Koreans were only bemused at the bewilderment that must have overcome the rest of the world. An official of the Korean Presidency who casually dismissed the reports added that it was not surprising because the Western media usually tell lies about North Korea. The North Korean President's story was thereafter dropped as surreptitiously as it broke.
It has long been observed that despite the loud claims to patriotic instincts by our editorial armchair critics, who use and abuse the privilege of writing columns in national newspapers, they are in fact almost irretrievably incubated by the psychological mind set of their Western counterparts in covering their adopted foes such as North Korea and Cuba. Our local columnists who have gone even to ungodly extents in literally writing President Yar'adua out of life since he became Nigeria's President share a common political prejudice against him because of the spilt milk of disputed Presidential election outcome. No more, no less. The mere fact of a disputed election , which the said President was widely acclaimed to be least interested in eing a part of, should certainly not attract such wickedly jaundiced projections of untimely death due to perceived frustration of political and personal interests.
Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar'adua's decision to submit to overtures and pressures that he should forgo not just his demonstrated disinterest, but also shrug off the clear and present risks of inheriting the remains of OBJ's rampaging Presidency, methinks marks President Umaru Yar'adua with the desirable distinctions of selflessness and patriotism. There is no sane Nigerian today who would, even with hindsight, justify a preference for any of the other PDP pirates who were preying on the Presidential vacancy, an issue on which even the vilified OBJ played a positive and- paradoxically- messianic role by inexplicably rejecting his boys in their hour of need. Certainly, Nigeria is better off in the hands of Yar'adua, than we could ever expect it to be in the claws of the Odilis and the Iboris! So in wishing Yar'adua dead, our cadaver columnists have outplayed their American maestros in the sinister art of morbid journalism by targeting their own leader and not a foreign foe.
From the antecedents of those conducting the campaign of death against President Yar'adua, it is quite evident that they indeed harbour both political and personal prejudices against their prey. Further analysis even throws up confirmatory factors on the mainly mercenary instincts that trigger the poison pens into action, evidence of which can be easily sourced in the columns themselves. It is definitely beyond doubt that each and everyone of those wishing the President dead and canvassing this inhuman desire in their paper domains has a barely concealed preference for at least one those who were not destined to be President and Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria as from May 29,2007. This is quite understandable of course, since one man's meat can still be another's poison, but it is irrational to crave for a nihilistic upsetting of the nation's applecart because your meat didn't make it to the grill house.
Such an uncompromising stance after the fact of a de facto incumbency as constitutionally prescribed smacks of inordinate rejection of reality, which is quite contrary to the tenets of both journalism and politics and more attributable to a psycho-mania disguised as intellect. Ensconced in their air-conditioned ICT-compliant offices, far removed from the harsh realities of the newsroom community, it is tempting for the super-editors to tempt chaos and calamity as they pursue a reverie of ego-trips into what could have been that is not. So if it will take a dead President to give life to their aborted but still vaulting urge to have their principals in power, let it be ! We should forgo the certainty of relative peace and stability, law and order prevailing in the country, for the uncertain prospects of a sudden power vacuum amidst hordes of defeated, disgraced and desperate power-seekers. Comrades, dig the pit of wickedness shallow, lest you fall in!
The pessimistic permutations being spun in these editorial nightmares concerning the health of President Yar'adua are untypical of Nigerian culture, where the sick are prayed for and their death is the last thing to be wished for. These sympathetic sentiments are considered morally correct, even by the animists who go to bizarre lengths to rescue and resuscitate the sick and dying. The President has sustained the psychological trauma of explaining that, like any other human being, he is not immune to illness and that his life and health, again like any other mortal, is by the exclusive Grace of Allah. Yet they continue demanding that he should tell them more. Certainly illness, no matter how severe-or exaggerated for that matter- is not an automatic death sentence, other wise many a columnist would not have wielded the pen!
It is the same deadly writers who recalled similar aspersion on the health of Governor Umaru Musa Yar'adua and his capacity to govern, even though it only served as an ironic backdrop to the heroic impact of his eight year tenure in Katsina State. Not one of those trying to prematurely bury the President with their pens in order to write him off as incapable of leading the nation, can deny the sheer energy of his thought and action as Governor of Katsina State by the time he was leaving office. They have often conceded that his legacy of transparent performance in the development of Katsina State, when the vogue was to chop and go, must have been the mystery factor that swayed OBJ's attention to him.
Now, they are convinced it was his frail health that attracted OBJ! From the time President Yar'adua was sworn in, the focus of the death-wishing pen-pushers has been on his every sneeze at home, while every trip abroad is an emergency evacuation to the ICU of a foreign hospital. It is the newspaper editors who know it all. But if they stopped at what they claimed to know, rather than veering into wishful reporting, they could have spared the majority impoverished and disempowered Nigerians the additional ordeal of reading the instalment obituary of their President. The fact that Mr President always returns to the country on his two feet and takes on the affairs of state with his characteristic calm, collected and calculating carriage has in no way dampened the editors' graveyard obsession.
It is pertinent to observe that the intensity of the death-wish journalism emanating from the so-called opposition press has increased significantly with the disappointing outcome of the election petitions filed against President Yar'adua's election. Initially, the campaign of calumny was hinged on the perceived defects of his election which had been supposedly compiled with such precision as to guarantee its annulment. At that time, editorial columns read like judicial pronouncements and all sorts of twists were given to sub-judicial issues in flagrant violation of ethics of an otherwise noble profession. The judiciary was practically overrun by rampaging writers zealously pushing the case of their petitioning principals. The same judiciary which had been earlier portrayed as fearless and incorruptible got thoroughly castigated for going contrary to their expectations and demands. When sober analysis by legal experts cast further doubts on the strength of their petitions and it looked like the appeal would suffer similar fate, the focus turned on President Yar'adua's slowness. But good plans to redeem our ravaged nation as promised by President Yar'adua must necessarily be patiently awaited as did the people of Katsina State. The impatient ones just want to complete the destruction of Nigeria. Now we have got to the extreme stage of morbid journalism whereby the President is declared medically unfit for office by quacks in journalists' suits who will soon vent their venom on the legislature for ignoring their calls for impeachment processes to begin. They are clearly steeped in the blasphemy of questioning God Almighty's negation of their nihilism.
As Mr President lives through these uncharitable times being contrived and canvassed by media executives brandishing dagger-pens, he may take solace in recalling that the late Owelle of Onitsha, former President of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe suffered even greater indignity through media murder when, at the height of the frenzy, his death was pronounced and his obituary published by the same breed of press undertakers, even as God was healing him back to good health. God also answered Zik's anguished prayer that those who wished him dead so callously would not themselves live to witness his God-appointed death. The consolation of the cadaver columnists on the other hand is that Mr President would definitely pray instead that they may live long enough to witness the planned positive transformation of this country which he is, insha Allah, ordained to achieve even by the end of his first term of four years. It is just too bad for them that President Umaru Musa Yar'adua does not belong to any of the mafia who reach out to media executives while wreaking havoc on the nation and its pauperised people. Long live the President!
Babatunde is a journalist in Kaduna.
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