JUST when the Nigerian media thought that it had won a huge respite for press freedom, it is again facing the battle of its life as the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, acting in stealth and through third parties, unsheathes its restless sword against the fourth estate of the realm through an amendment intended to reshape the media landscape from vibrancy to docility. The media defeated all the military governments that sought to castrate it since the end of the civil war, nay since colonial rule, and has lived to write the stories and obituaries of those infamous governments; there is no question that it will write an even more intense and fearsome epitaph to the current administration’s poor leadership, with a copious mention of all the dramatis personae involved, from the disingenuous and increasingly disagreeable Information minister Lai Mohammed to the boneless executive stooge Olusegun Odebunmi (Rep- Oyo Surulere/Ogo Oluwa constituency) in whose name the latest assault is being promoted.

 

Fortunately, the media never shirks a fight nor its duty, and having the advantage of time on its side, will fight this latest treachery against the constitution with all the gusto and experience it had mustered in its many decades of battling visionless military governments. The current administration has, in all its execrable essentials, acted and spoken as a military government veering towards fascism, but it has less than two years to go in office. It will of course fight with all the bitterness and fierceness it is capable of and accustomed to, especially knowing it has a little time left; but if history is any guide, it is inconceivable that it can win, regardless of how much regulatory venom and constitutional amendments it musters. But that will not deter it from doing maximum damage. Right from inception, when non-democrats seized the commanding heights of the administration in 2015, it always seemed that party members and leaders alike, not to say the trusting but sometimes amnesiac media in Nigeria, had backed the wrong horse. They are now ruing their hastiness.

 

The All Progressives Congress (APC) is now clearly regarded as Janus-faced. It presented a different, beguiling and perceptive face to the electorate in 2015, but has ruled since then with another face – brutish, threatening, unconcerned with the future, and self-centred. There were a few Nigerians who warned that the party under its candidate was hoodwinking its way into office, but a majority of Nigerians frustrated by the shenanigans of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency believed that should the devil himself offer to lead the assault on the last administration, the country would rally to his side. See what they wished for. Well, immediately the new administration assumed office in 2015, it proceeded post haste to effect the most radical and dispiriting change in perspective and substance any new government was capable of.

 

First to be shorn of its ethical trimmings was naturally the executive branch itself. The cabal, under the phlegmatic leadership of its septuagenarian quartet, brusquely took over, purged the ruling party of any extraneous influence, emplaced those who would take dictations or are cut from the same cloth, and silenced the consciences of the idealists among their ranks who erroneously thought the progressives had finally arrived and would envision for Africa what the philosopher-kings who freed the continent from colonialism could only dream of. Then the administration proceeded to castrate the judiciary, and hiding under the anti-corruption mantra which it knew would seduce most Nigerians, set the cats among the pigeons while the country slumbered. But the Nigerian judiciary is notoriously slow and conservative, and was not as amenable to the caper the executive branch wished to pull off. So, the executive simply cut the Gordian knot, overthrew the dissembling leadership of the third tier, and has since then inoculated the judiciary against reason, law and commonsense. The executive arm needed less effort, and met with few complications, in disemboweling the legislature.

 

Now, it is the turn of the media, which has for long hidden under the grandiloquent label of fourth estate of the realm and drawn its moral strength from Chapter Four of the 1999 constitution. But as the Information minister told the House of Representatives Joint Committees on Information, ICT and Justice during a consideration – it looked less like the probe they claimed it was – of the Twitter ban, whatever rights anyone thought the flawed constitution vouchsafed to the Nigerian through Section37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 are qualified by Section 45. As far as the APC is concerned, they could always, if pushed sufficiently, find a constructive corollary in the constitution, any constitution, to abridge rights, promote tyranny, and regiment the country back to its Neanderthal past. The administration had since 2015 laboured to deal with a media that menaced the government’s intrinsic authoritarian disposition and detestation for rights and freedoms; but it had met a brick wall every time it mustered the courage and strength. Desperate to redeem lost time, and flustered by the constant needling of the press, the administration has finally found its Man Friday in Oyo, the puppet Hon Odebunmi, to lead the charge against free speech. Don’t believe presidential spokesman Femi Adesina and Information minister in their attempt to distance the government from the execrable bills against the press.

 

The desperation has seemed repugnant to many Nigerians. In fact they suspect that the obsessive desire to control everything, regardless of democracy, implies that the administration has a nefarious agenda to execute before 2023, whether in regards to Fulani hegemonic interests or in engineering some other political forces to birth new political realities, to prompt the realignment of political interests whose locus would be permanently shifted to predetermined destinations, or to create a dominant class or group.

 

These objectives do not take into consideration the possibility, no matter how small, of a hypothetical tomorrow in which another party would win office. Should that happen, the same draconian laws that are now been inspired to dominate everywhere and everybody might be deployed to stifle the APC in opposition, just as the late military strongman Sani Abacha deployed the anti-coup decree promulgated by the Olusegun Obasanjo military government after the 1976 coup to entrap him in the 1995 phantom coup.

 

Mr Lai Mohammed has public relations and legal background. But he has offered himself in the past few years as a consummate propagandist entranced by authoritarianism, if not fascism. He must not expect history to be kind to him. There is no way he and the administration he serves unreservedly and heedlessly can win this needless battle with the media. They do not have the same staying power the Nigerian media possesses. They may whisper their admiration for the Chinese model of democracy and even prosecute both their domestic and foreign policies with the gung-ho adventurism of North Korea, but their hedonistic lordships have neither the discipline and depth to match the Chinese nor the self-flagellation and imperturbability the dynasty in Pyongyang projects.

 

APC thinks they will always be in power, or retain power by engineering defections from other parties; but they have done enough to lose power in a free and fair election.

However, there may be some method to their madness: by trying to promote individuals like presidential aide Lauretta Onochie into the Independent National Electoral Commission as a national commissioner in flagrant opposition to the law and common sense, they signal their readiness to redefine the rules and principles of democracy along the Oriental perversity which past African leaders had admired and clumsily operated to the shame of the continent.