Opinion
By Felix Oguejiofor Abugu
FOR the average reader in the South East, perhaps the most important story in the media now isn’t about President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s (PBAT’s) Niger military gambit – that one is a no-brainer for all of us. It isn’t even about Simon Ekpa’s imponderably frequent sit-at-home orders that keep people off the streets, their businesses and farms, thereby leaving many impoverished and hungry.
For many a reader in the South East, the most important story is about the scapegoating of a popular broadcast journalist in Imo, the one and only Chinonso Uba aka Nonsonkwa, over the lingering security crisis in the State: Nononkwa is obviously being hounded for constantly speaking, on radio, against the seeming mishandling of the lingering security crisis in Imo State, by the Hope Uzodinma Administration.
Uba was on Thursday, the 27th of last month (that is 18 days today) abducted, according to reports, by heavily armed masked men shortly after he finished anchoring his morning programme on Ozisa FM, Owerri on the premises of Assumpta Cathedral of the Owerri Catholic Archdiocese. An unarmed journalist abducted in broad daylight by heavily-armed security operatives in a commando-style operation and held incommunicado since then!
What’s Mr. Uba’s offence? According to Imo State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Declan Emelumba, Uba was arrested by the Police in Abuja on “allegation of criminal libel bordering on threat to State Security.”
Emelumba denied that the journalist’s arrest had anything to with his “criticisms of the Governor Hope Uzodinma administration,” insisting that neither the style of his arrest nor the contents of his radio programmes was the issue but “the defamatory statement by Mr. Uba that Governor Hope Uzodimma and Alhaji Asari Dokubo are responsible for the killings in Imo State.”
‘As a law-abiding institution,’ Emelumba further stated, the government only sought the help of the police to investigate and substantiate or disprove the allegation.
“His Excellency swore an oath through the constitution to protect lives and property of the people and here you have someone accusing him of breaching that oath which is an impeachable offence. It is only natural for the institution charged with investigation to look into the matter,” Emulumba stressed, adding that “since it is trite in law that he who alleges should provide proof, it was necessary for the police to invite Uba to prove his allegations.”
“The real victim here is Governor Hope Uzodimma,” Emelumba contended. “If it were in some society, people would have taken arms against him based on that seditious publication by Uba. Free speech does not give him the license or immunity to set the State on fire. Being the so-called activist is not a license to destroy the State. Let him hand the proof of his allegations to the police.”
Now, the question for Chief Emelumba or, for that matter, the government of Imo State is whether it is for the police to prove the government’s allegation against Nonsonkwa by detaining him indefinitely or for the courts to so do? Under what law in Nigeria is the government allowed to act as both the complainant and judge at the same time in its own case?
This high-handedness, not to say lawlessness, displayed by the Uzodinma Administration in the arrest of Nonsonkwa takes us back to the executive rascality evident in the promulgation and execution of the infamous Decree 4 of 1984 by the Buhari military regime. Under that draconian piece of legislation, two The Guardian journalists – Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor – were tried and jailed for a report in the newspaper which turned out to be the truth about ambassadorial postings complied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And you ask, when did publication of “truth”, which was by no means a classified matter, become an offence punishable by imprisonment?
Long before The Guardian journalists’ case, there was also the defunct The Observer journalist’s case. Minere Amakiri, a journalist with the Observer Group of Newspapers based in Benin City, capital of the defunct Midwest State, had run a story in the newspaper considered by the then Military Governor of Rivers State, Commander Alfred Diete-Spiff as rude to the Governor. Consequently, the Governor ordered his ADC, a police officer, ASP Ralph Michael Iwowari, to shave Amakiri’s head with a broken bottle, as punishment for his ‘insolence’.
AGBA JALINGO, HELD FOR 6MONTHS FOR ‘CRIMINAL DEFAMATION’
What made the story on teachers’ strike in Rivers State ‘rude’ was that it had been published on the Military Governor’s birthday! And for that reason, the Governor ordered the immediate arrest of of Amakiri, his head to be shaved clean with a broken bottle and the journalist detained thereafter.
Swiftly, the the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), then under the leadership of Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande, the late former Governor of Lagos State, detailed the late Dr. Olu Onagoruwa, SAN, a prominent Lagos lawyer, to advise the Association on the most appropriate action to take in the circumstance, whereupon Onagoruwa called for a large-scale condemnation of the Governor’s action. He was later to write a book, Press Freedom In Chains, on the Amakiri affair and related matters.
While the constant suppression of free speech under military regimes in Nigeria was inexcusable, it was largely understandable. For, in reality, we did not then, and certainly do now, expect that the frontiers of human rights and freedom would be as expansive under the military as they SHOULD be under civilians.
And we use SHOULD advisedly here. Because the truth of the matter is that there has not been any remarkable difference in their tolerance levels between the military regimes we have had and the political leadership in the current democratic dispensation in Nigeria.
The Nonsonkwa case is already a sore example of the intolerant, knee-jerk reactions that often characterise the responses of agents of the State to even hints of opposing views by those outside of government, especially journalists. But before Nonsonkwa, there was also the infamous Agba Jalingo saga.
Jalingo, a frontline critic of former Gov. Ben Ayade of Cross River State, who was arrested on August 22, 2019,was specifically accused of engaging in false publication that was intended to cause annoyance, ill will and insult to the person of Mrs. Elizabeth Ayade. The report, which included Ayade’s denial of the allegation, alleged that Mrs. Ayade had hired a lecturer to impersonate her to take an exam at the Nigerian Law School in Abuja.
Jalingo, publisher of Cross River Watch, had also, in a report published on July 12, 2019 in his newspaper, questioned the whereabouts of N500m said to have been approved by the Ayade Administration for the establishment of Cross River State Microfinance Bank.
In the report, Jalingo alleged that the microfinance bank could not effectively take off because the money earmarked to start its operation was not released.
Consequently, Jalingo was detained for 33 days before his arraignment in court. He was to spend some six months in prison before his release following public outcry.
Nor do can we so easily forget how the immediate past First Lady, Aisha Buhari blatantly exercised a non-existent presidential power when she invited the DSS to arrest and detain at the State House a 500-level student of Federal University, Dutse, Jigawa State, Aminu Adamu, for tweeting that “Mama is feeding fat on poor people’s money.”
Specifically, Adamu tweeted in Hausa: “Su mama anchi kudin talkawa ankoshi,” roughly meaning “Mama (who holds no public office) has embezzled money meant for the poor to her satisfaction.” This attracted the ire of “Madam President” who, through the DSS, ordered the police was to charge Adamu to court for breaching Section 391 of Northern Nigeria Penal Code, a charge that was later withdrawn, again following public outcry.
The resort to indiscriminate arrest and detention of journalists without trial for weeks and months on end is, to be sure, one of those fascistic tendencies that make people wonder if this democracy is any better than a military regime. Pray, what is the difference between Amakiri’s case and Aminu Adamu’s?
In the case of Nonsonkwa, the Imo government even shot itself in the foot when it claimed that the journalist was arrested for accusing Governor Uzodinma and Asari Dokubo of being responsible for the killings in the State. As they say in these parts, before nko? If as the Chief Security Office of Imo State, Uzodinma cannot stem the killings in the State, who is to take responsibility for such failure? Didn’t the buck stop on the Governor’s table any longer? Nonsonkwa is unlikely to have imputed that Uzodinma goes about shooting people as part of the insecurity ravaging Imo (especially Orlu, the Governor’s hometown), but that by his failure to secure the state, he cannot but be responsible for the killings.
As for Dokubo, the anarchic former militant leader who has claimed to be partly responsible for the mayhem in some troubled parts of Nigeria cannot be the reason for the arrest of a journalist who simply re-echoed Alhaji Dokubo’s own sentiments. Hasn’t Dokubo boasted about the military exploits of his boys in Igboland and other parts of the country mired in security crisis? So, what is criminal defamation in simply amplifying what Alhaji Dokubo himself had said?
In any case, if the government already knows why the police arrested Nonsonkwa, one had expected Douglas House to take him to court or, failing to do so, release him. No extant law in Nigeria permits agents of the State, without an order of a court of competent jurisdiction, to detain a citizen for days or weeks or months on end without trial.
So, enough of these acts of impunity by political leaders in the land! The same way he directed Nonsonkwa’s arrest, Governor Uzodinma should, in the name of all that is sane, order the release of Nonsonkwa. He has no case against that guy. Maka Chukwu! (abeyanews)
– Aug. 15, 2023 @ 05:25 GMT |
Tags: Alhaji Asari Dokubo Dr. Olu Onagoruwa Felix Oguejiofor Abugu Governor Hope Uzodimma Mr. Declan Emelumba
