Ahmed Yahaya Joe
14 October 2008
opinion
Kano — Chances are that when Scott McClellan was the White House Press Secretary like his present-day Nigerian counterpart, he was made to swear an oath not to reveal any classified information that might be inimical to his then employer.
While his Aso Villa professional colleague is still in office living alongside the inevitable demons associated with political appointments such as his, Mr McClellan is in an enviable stage of his own life exorcising those he accumulated at Pennsylvania Avenue. Maintaining secrecy in affairs of state is a delicate balance between the demands of the conscience of the bureaucrats concerned, the morality of the issues at stake and public probity. All these have come into play in McClellan's recently-published account of his high office stewardship titled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Deception.
There is often a thin line between partisan interests, personal agenda and national security but the American political system unlike ours has shown that it is resilient enough to dispassionately and clearly delineate them. On June 17th 1972, a burglary took place at the Democratic National Committee offices located at the Watergate Complex, the subsequent trail of investigation led right into the Oval Office culminating in the disgraceful exit of Richard Nixon from the U.S. Presidency in 1974.
The different levels of security clearance of what might be termed as classified information vary from one bureaucrat to the other. Documents and other sources that have national security implications range from those tagged CONFIDENTIAL, unauthorised disclosure of which can cause "damage" to a myriad of interests, those marked TOP SECRET that can cause "serious damage" and those marked TOP SECRET that can cause "exceptionally grave damage" when disclosed unofficially.
In a servant-leadership such as ours, the obsession with secrecy needs not assume a Pyongyang "Dear Leader" dimension and border on Joseph Stalin's dictum of "fear being the mechanics of administration" as the recent nationally-televised oath-swearing of Villa aides seems to suggest both to the appointees and the rest of the nation. In Myanmar (Burma), the government has such a bizarre sense of secrecy that forecasting the weather outside official channels is considered a major threat to public order; it is best left to the imagination the penalty of for instance speculating on the truth of an official bungling of the reasons behind a 17-day absence of its military junta head.
If John McCain ever gets elected, he would have the most public and accessed medical records any U.S. President has ever had. This is apart from the well-known facts of his medical history that include his having both arms and his right leg at the knee broken, stabbed with a bayonet twice and his shoulder smashed with a rifle butt as a POW during the Vietnam War. Not to be outdone is the outgoing president who has publicly acknowledged that he has had several potentially-cancerous "actinic keratoses" treated during his two terms in office.
The Pentagon regularly "embeds" journalists including those from foreign countries cameras and all with its combatant and support units in both Iraq and Afghanistan for unadulterated frontline insight that can adversely affect its operations but nevertheless lead to far-reaching reforms as in the Abu Ghraib detention facility scandal. That country knows that investigative journalists and their ever inquisitive readers are naturally inclined to source information "by any means necessary", so obliging them official versions reduces the impact of undue sensationalism and misguided speculation which any administration understandably abhors, especially as ours that finds it extraordinarily herculean to promptly reconstitute its cabinet weeks after publicly declaring its intention to do so.
The nation of Israel that is in a permanent state of war with its neighbours does not leave press censorship to its information ministry or the MOSSAD; rather, the military is largely involved. Even at that, it does not "spike "news items or storm local press houses for seditious items that are solely attributed to foreign news organisations (See Territory of Lies by Wolf Blitzer, formerly the Washington Bureau Chief of The Jerusalem Post now a CNN anchor).
The quantum leap in the standard of living in China is largely attributed to the fallout of the Tiananmen Square repression and its worldwide press condemnation. The ever imaginative Chinese Politburo responded by expanding economic opportunities and unleashing its record-high foreign reserves to facilitate domestic growth for its overwhelming populace while still tenaciously limiting civil liberties. Many Nigerians would not mind trading places across the globe as we endlessly await any semblance of the tangible dividends of the 7-point agenda.
Jonathan Jay Pollard was up to his arrest in 1984 a U.S. Naval Intelligence operative with a high security clearance. He was found guilty for spying for Israel and sentenced to life; in jail he still remains unrepentant positing that he had "moral grounds" to betray his country. The definition of moral grounds as shown in the McClellan publication transcends the transient kind of loyalty that will make the great farmer of Otta squirm in understanding and recoil with probable regret over the absence of reciprocal loyalty of his esteemed ward engineered on the nation. As with the Pollard case, the lack of remorse is what our government should prepare to confront in comeuppance despite all its damage control measures to turn its top echelon trappings into a hermit's cavern. Our nation should please be spared another round of deliberate and reckless "learning process".
The success of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal was not hinged on its novelty but on the trust of its presidential "fireside chats" and the widespread openness created with a global economic meltdown imminent, the Aso Villa spin doctors couldn't have a better case study to emulate. The mischievous imagination of our security gumshoes range from the last administration's "security breach" saga when a principal suspect escaped from Nigeria's most secure premises in Abuja to the 1985 Preliminary Special Investigative Panel circumstantial reports that indicted and subsequently recommended for court martial some of our brightest military officers for 'meeting to plan a coup" in the ever busy and very public lobby of the Lagos Sheraton (http://www.gamji.com/nowa7.htm).
Nobody is suggesting that in trying to operate an open government, the incumbent Yar'adua administration should throw away discretion and the caution of holding its aces close; it is merely being prompted to be less economical with the truth about its serial sloppiness and increasing policy somersaults which no administered oath can effectively hide. As the title of Mr McClellan's book suggests, there is more that go on along the corridors of power that voters never imagine. The former White House aide who was born on Valentine's Day in 1968 was Bush's travelling press secretary during the 2000 presidential campaign and he is therefore not your average come and chop opportunist whose book advance was a mere $75,000 before reaching the number one position on the sales chart of amazon.com.
In the book, he accuses the Bush Administration of "self-deception" and a "permanent campaign approach" to governance instead of making the best choices. During the uproar that followed the book's release, he was called to testify before a House Committee where in classic doublespeak, he both exonerated and came short of calling his former boss a liar. Before his abrupt resignation in 2006, he must have been under tremendous moral dilemma not to reveal anything. Now two years later, he is saying everything. This valuable lesson and far-reaching implications should not be lost on Aso Villa's chief tenant.
For failing to distinguish between the president's health and the health of the Presidency probably in abeyance to the prolonged lack of a health minister in the nation, Channels Television got a belated jackboot treatment that had remote antecedents when its chief executive anchored a Presidential Media Chat last May. Whoever is the Nigerian equivalent of Karl Rove should keep at the back of his mind Raymond Dokpesi's swipe at the Obasanjo administration during the recent DaarSat launch.
The founding Prime Minister of Singapore now "Senior Minister" Lee Kwan Yew is no doubt a visionary but with an "authoritarian streak". Taciturn, frugal and austere, he fits into the mould of an exemplary servant-leader without claiming to be so. While in office, he got parliament to promulgate the infamous ISA (Internal Security Act) because of his Kremlin-like obsession for secrecy, which he remarkably used to hound that resource-scarce island that even imports its drinking water from neighbouring Malaysia to develop into a world class economy and be one of the safest, cleanest and most efficiently run countries in the world with a per capita income of $35,000.
Many Nigerian glasnost or not wouldn't mind that kind of leadership but only with a similar success story to lift us out of the less than the $1000 per capital income level that Nigeria and Singapore had in common in the 1960s; a statistical nightmare we are still shamelessly stuck with. By the way, the overriding need for our clearly-overwhelmed and largely-unprepared leadership to move our nation out of this morass is no secret that needs any oath.
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