The
First Dr. Onuma Onwuka Oreh Memorial Lecture
By Okey Ndibe, on Friday,
June 17, 2011 at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka
**********
Permit me to begin
by expressing my profound admiration for the family, friends and
colleagues of the late Dr. Onuma Onwuka Oreh for their decision to honor
his memory by instituting this lecture series. In a country with a poor
history of celebrating stellar citizens and noble work, one must commend
the Department of Mass Communication, the Faculty of Arts, and the Vice
Chancellor of the University of Nigeria for enthusiastically supporting
this event, and working to ensure its success. Your individual and
collective contributions are a tribute to the loftiness of your social
vision. An institution reveals itself in who and what it upholds and
honors. In honoring the exemplary work that Dr. Oreh did as a scholar
and citizen, this university has demonstrated fidelity to refined
values.
For me, it is nothing short of a blessing to be invited to deliver the
inaugural edition of this memorial lecture series. I’d like to thank the
Oreh family and the University of Nigeria for their confidence in me. I
am hardly an easy person to pin down, and I am notorious for accepting
far more assignments and tasks than I can handle. Even so, from the
first moment I spoke with Obinna, the youngest of the three Oreh Boys, I
was sold on this assignment. Obinna spoke with infectious reverence
about his late father and his mother, Dr. Catherine I. Oreh, who still
serves this university in the Adult Education Department. Then there was
palpable admiration as he told me about his two older brothers, Onwuka
and Ndudim. Since I also hold my parents and siblings in the highest
regard, I knew – even before meeting any of the Orehs – that theirs is a
special family.
In the intervening months, there were several hiccups arising from my
failure to make deadlines for the completion and submission of my
lecture. Through it all, Obinna – the family’s direct contact with me –
remained gracious and unflappable, displaying a quality of patience and
composure that made a deep impression on me. Since we are inevitably
formed out of our parents’ clay, I came to see his warm, optimistic
disposition as a revelation – in all likelihood – of his father’s mettle
and fiber. Having made this broad claim about the debt we owe to our
parents’ example, I find myself obligated to enter a disclaimer. That
disclaimer is that my own trouble with deadlines was not inherited from
my parents. My mother, a retired schoolmistress, as well as my late
father, exemplified fastidiousness and scrupulous adherence to time.
The decision to institute this lecture series speaks eloquently about
Dr. Oreh’s life, ideas and work, and is an important clue to the kind of
values he shared with his beloved wife, and bequeathed to his children.
Even though I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Oreh in flesh and
blood, I feel a vibrant fondness for the life that he led, the legacy he
left, and the imprints he made.
On one level, that life was marked, it seems clear to me, by abiding
commitment to professional excellence in mass communication practice and
scholarship. In looking over his CV, I was struck by the magnificent
convergence of praxis and theory in his work, the way in which he was at
once a doer and a thinker, a communicator as well as a teacher of the
art of communication. Just as remarkable was the man’s brief foray into
partisan politics, an arena where we need more and more enlightened and
morally astute citizens.
Going by the testimony of those who knew him best, Dr. Oreh brought a
certain sense of elegance and purpose as well as a habit of rigor to
every task he undertook. These attributes earned him remarkable success
in the two spheres of the communicative profession that engaged his
energies and interests. Those of us gathered here today testify, to one
degree or another – and in one form or another – the extent to which we
are in the debt of Dr. Oreh, a man of impressive humanistic depth and
extraordinary professional accomplishments.
The symbiotic balance of practice and theory that he exemplified is
today sadly rare, if not altogether absent in the field of mass
communication in Nigeria. There is no question that Nigeria boasts some
outstanding scholars in the area of mass communication, several of them
on the faculty of this esteemed university. Our nation is also greatly
endowed with women and men who excel as practicing mass media
professionals. What’s so sorely lacking, or in short supply, is the kind
of cross-disciplinary flair and organic dexterousness so effortlessly
demonstrated by the man whose work and life inspired this lecture and
whose memory animates our celebration. The kind of synergistic gifts
that the late Dr. Oreh possessed are indispensable ingredients for the
growth and maturation of any community, be it academic, political,
religious or whatever.
When I was invited to inaugurate this lecture series, the organizers had
also proposed several prospective titles. I told Obinna that I would
leave the choice up to the family. When he rang back to say that their
favorite was “The Fourth Estate and the Other Estates,” I was greatly
delighted. From the outset, the title had struck me as particularly
cogent and intriguing. The title’s power and seduction lies in the
fruitful tension between its seeming concreteness and its mysterious,
even mystifying air. For somebody with my temperament – marked by
fascination with narratives that go off on surprising tangents and
distaste for any story that travels on a straight line – the title was
tremendously attractive.
In its contemporary usage, the fourth estate refers in the main to the
mass media as a collectivity. Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish
thinker and parliamentarian, is credited with categorizing the field of
journalism as constituting a fourth estate in 18th century British
society. In his book, On Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle
suggests that Burke coined the term in 1787 at a time when the British
press was rising to the challenge of providing more intense coverage of
the deliberations of the House of Commons. For the staid, conservative
British, that moment of transition was rife with possibility and peril.
On the one hand, press coverage was going to demystify the legislative
process. By beaming a light on the arcane rituals and ceremonial
encrustations of lawmaking, the British press was going to bridge the
gulf between the people and their legislators, with the added collateral
advantage of vitalizing democracy, enhancing transparency and increasing
the quotient of public expectations and political accountability.
We have it on Carlyle’s authority that Burke was deeply charmed by the
prospective advantages of press scrutiny. Carlyle wrote, “Burke said
that there were three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’
Gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they
all.” In this Burkean social architecture, the press, despite the
relative recentness of its mandate, occupies a monumental seat, no
inferior to the first three Estates: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords
Temporal, and the Commons. In Britain’s tradition at the time, the two
“lorded” groups constituted the upper chamber of parliament whilst the
Commons was the lower chamber.
Of course, the term “the fourth estate” has a longer, richer, more
slippery and variegated pre-Burkean usage, history and context. However,
it does not serve our purposes to trace or excavate all of the meanings,
histories and guises worn by the term. It suffices to remark that our
contemporary sense of the term is infused with Burke’s spirit.
Once that is understood, then we are challenged to ponder the extent to
which an idea articulated by a British philosopher speaks to the
Nigerian experience. Would we be able to claim, as Burke did, that the
Nigerian press – or the mass media, broadly – is a vibrant player in the
nation’s fledging democratic industry, a champion of transparency, and
sustainer of the principle of accountability? What are the odds that
Burke, were he to stir from his grave and land in Nigeria, would gush
about the Nigerian media, recognizing them as a fertilizing agent of our
ongoing experimentation with a nasty phenomenon that our politicians
often call nascent democracy? Looking at the Nigerian media, would a
Burke proclaim them as surpassing the other sectors of the polity? Have
the media in Nigeria risen to assume a consequential role in the twists
and turns of the country’s political development? Have we ever witnessed
– or are we witnessing – a golden age of mass media practice in Nigeria,
one that rivals the vibrancy that moved Burke to make his effusive
assessment of the British press?
Before venturing to propose answers to these difficult questions, I
should emphasize, as a matter of prudence, that I speak, not as an
outsider objectively dissecting an institution, but as a veritable
insider. In disclosing this fact – which, at any rate, is public
knowledge – I hope to confess both the subjective nature of my responses
as well as a recognition of the way in which, as a part-time member of
the profession, I am implicated in these matters.
In 1999, shortly after Olusegun Obasanjo moved into Aso Rock, the
Guardian of Nigeria asked me to start writing a weekly column. The
original conception was to create a forum to enable me to comment on the
goings-on in the United States. But after writing about the U.S. in my
first two or three columns, I served notice of my wish to begin
meditating on Nigeria, especially its politics. It seemed to me somewhat
odd to be discussing the curiosities of American life as seen from the
perspective of an African immigrant when the country of my birth was
undergoing transition from many years of military rule to a system that
aspired to and usurped the name of democracy – even though, in practice,
it often resembled the blighted dictatorship it succeeded.
The vicissitudes of Nigeria’s political adventure soon became my
dependable subject. In my novel, Arrows of Rain, an elderly woman tells
her journalist-grandson, “A story that must be told never forgives
silence.” That stricture from my fiction has informed my weekly
commentary both in the Guardian as well as the Sun, which since 2007 has
been the new home for my column. Nigeria’s story can be wearyingly sad,
a narrative of a nation conceived in hope but nurtured into
hopelessness. Or, as the inimitable Chinua Achebe might say, Nigeria is
a nation that manages the feat of snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory.
Week after week, I seek to examine one facet or another of our country’s
malaise or promise. I have done this in the spirit that our national
story, a narrative of missed opportunities and disasters as well as
resilience and undying hope, cannot forgive silence. My column is an act
of memory, a way of reminding us – as well as future generations – of
the road that we have traveled, as individual actors and as citizens of
a country in search of itself. As our bard Wole Soyinka has stated in
his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness – paraphrasing
the Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel – “A people who do not preserve their
memory are a people who have forfeited their history.” I make much the
same point, if less eloquently, in Arrows of Rain: “the fabric of memory
is reinforced by stories, rent by silences.” In the prefatory section of
his complex, polyvalent novel titled The Cattle Killing, the African
American writer John Edgar Wideman writes about the “terror
of…forgetfulness.” We fall victim to the plague of forgetfulness when
our storytellers, among them journalists, shirk their responsibility,
when they fall asleep on duty. And our memories are impoverished just as
often when, as citizens, we choose to be nonchalant, apathetic and
unheeding of the stories we are told.
Why have I found it necessary to take this circuitous route to a
confrontation with the questions I posed earlier? The chief reason is to
underscore the complexity of the problem. Another reason is to
foreground my fascination with the twin phenomena of memory and
forgetfulness, which constitute two sides of a coin. Above all, I
envision the mass media as engaged in the memory industry. It is that
sector of society that ought to, on the one hand, offer us an inventory
of events and, on the other, mine that harvest of events for the
meanings they yield, the way they illuminate our fate as a community.
To what extent, then, have the mass media exhibited mastery in the
reportage and explanation of Nigeria’s drama? I don’t believe I make a
controversial claim at all when I contend that Nigeria is, everything
considered, a disappointing middle-aged nation. Even the most incurable
of optimists would be hard put to it to deny that the country has hardly
met the euphoric expectations that attended Independence in 1960. In his
brilliant book, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis, journalist
Karl Maier describes Nigeria as “by far the most confounding,
frustrating, and at the same engaging place I have ever visited.”
Despite prodigious endowments in human and natural resources, Nigeria
regularly inhabits the top positions in indexes of social misery –
poverty, disease, child and maternal mortality rates, investment in
health and education. Just as reliably, our country is ranked among the
most corrupt, least transparent nations on the globe. Our public
officials have looted hundreds of billions of dollars from the public
treasury and deposited these funds in their private accounts. Nigeria is
a veritable paradox: a nation of conspicuous consumers that produces
little; a community where a few primitively accumulate ill-gotten
wealth, indifferent to the severe social dislocations wrought by their
greed.
Given the gargantuan scale of the nation’s dysfunction, it is easy to
argue that the media have been manifestly inept. But this judgment would
seem to me to demand some qualification. One is the danger of viewing
the Nigerian media as a monolith. Instead, one should clarify that the
mass media in Nigeria display stupendous heterogeneity. They embody
great variety in terms of forms, foci, professional and ethical
standards, ownership, and territorial reach or penetration. In fact,
Nigerians – like most people elsewhere – live in a time and place
saturated with newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, websites and
blogs. These media vary widely in their focus, the spectrum ranging from
“general interest” through politics, finance, arts and culture, and
entertainment to outlets that highlight and venerate the obscene and
execrable obsessions of Nigeria’s parvenu.
It ought to be noted, too, that the patterns of mass media ownership in
Nigeria also constitute varying levels of constraint on sound
professional practices. State and federal governments own some
newspapers as well as radio and TV stations, and that fact shapes how
the media envision and serve their mission. Sometimes, it is retired or
serving government officials who found and finance these organs. Yet
again, the owner’s whims, caprices and interests color the media’s
posture.
Implicit in the acknowledgement of this multiplicity is a recognition of
the undeniable presence of bright spots in the history of the media’s
engagement with its historic duty of informing the Nigerian populace.
Sections of the Nigerian press worked tirelessly to confront the regime
of General Ibrahim Babangida after it became clear that its vaunted
transition program was little more than a ruse, a gimmick aimed at
self-perpetuation. In the bleak days of the Sani Abacha dictatorship,
the media – certain newspapers, magazines and radio stations – emerged
to lead a strong resistance. In more recent history, some principled
news organizations and journalists were as much as factor in frustrating
former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s illicit scheme to effect an
amendment to the Nigerian constitution in order to award himself a third
(and possibly fourth and fifth) term.
Besides, in the last ten years or so, we have witnessed the birth of
something akin to a revolution in the way information is generated,
disseminated and used. The Internet has radically remapped the landscape
of Nigeria’s – and the globe’s – mass media practice. By its nature,
online news has a limitless potential in terms of readership and impact.
The Internet affords instantaneity of product and access. Increasingly,
it also empowers the reader to respond immediately to the material she
has just consumed. Websites that carry news and commentary have emerged
as the wave of the present, the most democratic of news sources. They
breach borders and nullify the constraints of time to reach any reader
with a computer and Internet connection. Let me be clear: these Internet
outlets have not always served noble ends. However, some of them – and
here, I must single out the outstanding www.saharareporters.com – have
become nothing short of powerful and transformative tools, adept at
ferreting out some of the hitherto concealed scandals of money
laundering and abuses of power committed or authorized by some of
Nigeria’s most highly placed elected and appointed officials.
Yet, after allowing for these exceptions, I am persuaded that much of
the Nigerian media is far from discharging its burden to a degree that
would impress Burke. In a lot of ways, too many reporters, columnists,
editors and website administrators have felt comfortable suborning their
witness for a mess of porridge from the master’s dining table.
Unfortunately, too many members of the fraternity of the mass media have
permitted themselves to be infected by the same grasping impulse that
has polluted the political space. There can be no sweeter music to the
ears of corrupt politicians than to realize that some journalists – too
many of them, if you ask me – are for hire, willing to look the other
way, to falsify accounts, even to invent tall tales of politicians’
accomplishments for the right price.
One of the most disturbing trends that have emerged since 1999 is the
practice of newspapers or groups of journalists handing out questionable
performance awards to politicians. It is not uncommon for individual
newspapers or groups of journalists to award “Governor of the Year” or
“Best Minister of the Federation.” Others confer equally meretricious
awards for “Transparent Governance” or prizes in the categories of
education, health, agriculture etc. It is common knowledge that
incompetent governors are all-too willing to spend small sums of cash to
finagle these awards. Were Burke to witness the practice, chances are
that he would reach for some fitting expression. Filled with disgust, he
might speak about “a descent from the fourth estate to the first slum.”
It behooves journalists to scrutinize the activities of occupants of
public office. When, instead of doing so, journalists take to peddling
prizes to governors, ministers and other politicians, then their
ethically stinky practice deserves to be called by its proper name: a
scam.
To be clear, I suggest that Nigeria’s fourth estate of the realm is
bedeviled by the same pathologies that have afflicted Nigerian politics
and other sectors of the nation’s life – including its law enforcement
and academia. If the situation of mass media practitioners were
exceptional, then one would be sounding greater bells of alarm. Many
factors account for the huge gap between our legitimate expectations of
what our journalists ought to be doing and the reality of what they do.
Unfortunately, however, we hardly have the time to explore that
territory in any depth. But of this I am convinced: The media’s travails
both mirror and reinforce the malaise in the broader society. The
toxicity of the political space poisons the atmosphere of journalism
practice; but journalism’s susceptibility to political meddlesomeness
and corruption also exacerbates swindles by politicians. When the media
abandon their role as watchdogs, or worse, when they exhibit an
inclination for corruption, then the entire mechanism of checks and
balances is dealt a terrible blow.
Some might blame the decline in professional standards and paucity of
ethical outlook among many journalists on the fact that media jobs, on
the whole, pay relatively poorly. This factor cannot be discounted, but
I doubt that it explains away the professional and ethical lapses. Far
more important, I suggest, are two interlinked nemeses. One is the
catastrophic devaluation of moral currency in our society, the other an
equally deleterious fall in intellectual discourse. Taken together,
these two failures debilitate what I would describe as the moral and
intellectual estates. I insist that a vibrant tradition of journalism
can only thrive through sustained concern with and investment in the
moral and intellectual realms. There are always exceptions, even
remarkable ones, but it seems to me that too many of our practicing
journalists are, in moral and intellectual terms, wretchedly equipped.
A soundly educated class of journalists – and I use educated in the
broadest possible sense – would realize, for example, that a person’s
worth is not reducible to the size of her or his paycheck. Any
journalist who justifies the acceptance of bribes from politicians on
the ground that her salary is small has missed the point. Nobody ever
mistook a career in journalism as a path to riches. A measure of
discernment of values and motives ought to precede one’s entry into a
career in journalism. If material enrichment is of the essence, then one
had better look for a different trade or line of work.
Journalists ought to develop a deep sense of history. Such consciousness
would mean recognizing that such stalwart political and intellectual
figures in our nation’s history as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi
Awolowo, Chief Anthony Enahoro, Mr. Mokwugo Okoye, Professor Chinua
Achebe, Chief M.C.K Ajuluchukwu worked at one point or another as
journalists. Newspapers and journalists were in the forefront of the
struggle to achieve Nigeria’s flag Independence from British rule. A
profession with that pedigree and impact deserves to maintain something
of its intellectual and moral standing, and to be jealous of its
reputation.
One way of reclaiming that endangered professional prestige is to
re-imagine both the nature and indispensability of the role of a
journalist in a country like Nigeria. Nigerian literature, whether it is
Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, Helon
Habila’s Waiting for an Angel or my own Arrows of Rain explore
characters who are journalists, and who face or transcend various
ethical or professional dilemmas. As I have already proposed, one of the
journalist’s most important duties is to tell stories. Permit me to
vivify the subject by focusing on the Igbo conception of stories.
For the Igbo, stories serve as a tool for constructing and enshrining
individual and communal identities, for charting tracks to the past and
projecting to the future, and for reinforcing memories. A rich harvest
of pithy sayings within Igbo expressive arts foregrounds the perils of
storylessness – or, just as often and with equal eloquence, heedlessness
to stories. One such expression is, “He who doesn’t know where the rain
began to beat him won’t know where he dried up,” a favorite of Achebe’s.
Another related aphorism, used to chastise inflexible people, states:
“The obstinate who won’t heed any warnings will certainly heed the
summons of the death-mat.”
Igbo folktales are equally replete with tales that detail the harsh,
often tragic, cost of disregarding, mangling or manipulating stories for
selfish interests, or blundering into combat without their chastening
benefit. In one cautionary tale, Chicken unwisely chooses to stay away
from an important meeting of all the animals. We learn that the
convention’s agendum is to discuss the unhealthy rate at which humans
were slaughtering animals for food. Exploiting Chicken’s absence, the
gathered animals decide to propose it to humans as the primary
sacrificial animal. Through this deft stroke, the socially responsible
and engaged animals receive some respite from their human antagonists,
exacerbate Chicken’s grief, and hand us a chastening tale about the dire
consequences of apathy, nonchalance, disengagement and abdication.
In Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, an elderly character dwells at
length on the crucial place stories occupy in the matrix of society:
To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell
their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He
gives the eagerness to rise when they hear the call; to rise with racing
blood and put on their garbs of war and go to the boundary of their town
to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle. And then there are those
whose part is to wait and when the struggle is ended, to take over and
recount its story.
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the
war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards—each is
important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could
do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I
will say boldly: the story…Now, when I was younger, if you had asked me
the same question I would have replied without a pause: the battle…
So why do I
say that the story is chief among his fellows? The same reason I think
that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their
daughters—Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story can
continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives
the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the
story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind
beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort;
without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither
do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It
is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the
face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
This long passage from Achebe’s novel, I believe, constitutes a
statement of the kind of exalted moral estate that every conscientious
journalist should aspire to inhabit. Whether they report news, edit copy
or compose columns, Nigerian journalists ought to embrace – or
rediscover – the task of pointing the nation away from the spikes of the
cactus fence. Rather than engaging in falsification or obfuscation in
order to claim the cheap lucre held out by corrupt politicians,
journalists ought to commit to the service of society, exposing the
impunity of those who misshape our nation and malnourish our collective
lives.
Speaking truth to power has become a cliché, even a facile phrase. Yet,
our journalists ought to be able to say, like Teiresias, the blind seer
in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, “It is the truth sustains me.” Or, like
Socrates, affirm that the unexamined life is not worth living. They
ought to cultivate the habit of asking hard questions. Why is it that
Nigeria cannot seem to get a handle on its electric power woes despite
the billions of dollars squandered in recent years in pursuit of
regular, dependable electricity? Why are most Nigerians deprived of
healthcare, while the well-to-do – who are often corrupt politicians and
their coterie – make jaunts to such places as India, South Africa, Asia,
Europe and North America to seek medical treatment? Why are Nigerian
universities starved of research funds even as parasitic politicians
gorge mindlessly on the nation’s ever-dwindling resources?
Many years ago, a colonial novelist named John Buchan wrote a novel,
Prester John, in which a character is invited to trot out the following
epiphany:
That is the difference between white and black, the gift of
responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long
as we know this and practice it, we will rule not in Africa alone but
wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own
bellies.
Achebe and many other African intellectuals have spent considerable
energy combating this and similar racist depictions that state or imply
that the African is beholden to the worst forms of hedonistic excess.
Even so, in light of the scope of corruption exhibited by many Nigerian
politicians, do they not leave the impression of being governed by their
insatiable guts, their moral compass answering to the grammar of greed?
And in choosing to ignore these monumental acts of treachery, are our
journalists not guilty – at the very least – of cooperating with those
who abbreviate our dreams and abort our aspirations?
In order to be worthy inheritors of Burke’s fourth estate, rather than
usurpers, Nigerian journalists ought to reclaim the moral and
intellectual estates. This process would entail, above all, attention to
the place of language in journalism. The language of Nigerian journalism
is often, one is sad to say, shockingly dated, pallid, disheveled. Part
of this linguistic enervation is a product of the journalist’s
often-lazy adoption of the politician’s language. George Orwell was
certainly right in arguing that “Political language…is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind.”
The search for and reclamation of a language that clarifies rather than
confounds is a necessary moral and professional undertaking. It is said
that Confucius was once asked what would be his first step if it fell to
him to govern a nation. He reportedly answered:
To correct language…
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains
undone;
If this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;
If morals and art deteriorate, justice will go astray;
If justice does go astray, the people will stand about in helpless
confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything.
In a few brilliant lines, those sentiments sum up the ideas I have been
worrying in this talk. I thank you for your attentiveness.
