It is very rare to see Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) berate anyone in public. The Trojan of works stylises his temper, even when you can hear a roar beneath his repose. He often chisels his diction and avoids public vitriol. Last week, he fumed and his ribcage rattled.
He asked the inspector general of police to investigate what some phony investigators in the name of journalism put in the public domain. They include Jacksom Ude, Yoruba Sheikh and Reportera.ng. Ude says Fashola “allegedly” has written the draft verdict of the Presidential Election Petition Court, and that he even wrote the 2019 Judgment.
The other online predator Reportera.ng wrote that the army had laid siege to Fashola’s Abuja residence.
The former works minister has also taken them to court. This is the first time that we are witnessing a high-profile person browbeat what Wole Soyinka has called the rodents of the internet. They live by impunity clothed in lies. They disdain fact or decency, and they wallow in their cocoons to whip up wild and unsubstantiated fantasies.
It is not about Fashola, nor is it about Ude, Reportera.ng or the comedy of the name known as Yoruba Sheikh. This is a supine stagecraft by a cunning coterie of opportunists to exploit the fragility of democracy, the integrity of our judiciary and the value of the press. It also shows how they relish to pluck any target out of their ease by a swarm of predators who want to make a living from sensationalism, and sensationalism on the misery of others. It is Fashola today. It has been many in the past – CEOs, celebrity artistes, politicians, clerics, and many a citizen with neither a lawyer nor a platform to plead innocence.
In this case, this breed of vermin is part of the subversives who dreaded the swearing-in of President Bola Tinubu. They concocted all kinds of obstacles and generated false hopes and histrionics among a crowd of illusionists that May 29 would not come. They made common cause with street lowlifes, high-strung lawyers, tendentious intellectuals, religious mercantilists of the “yes daddy” variety and ethnic oafs who manufacture Aesop fables. These websites and their rabid purveyors stand by as their rottweilers of fiction. They distinguish themselves with their pigsty conscience.
They were the same breed who had exclusive vision to see the chief justice in Europe with then President-elect when he was here in Nigeria. They made him twins in one. A miracle. Their pious lords in altars seasoned them with their own apocrypha. They also had the big, dog ears to hear the phone calls between Tinubu and the Chief justice. They were the only ones who sighted Wike with one of the PEPC judges. They also knew that a PEPC judge resigned before we knew that he didn’t. They have invented an alternative universe, like the character in the Japanese novel, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami in which a person cruises into an alternative city just by taking an underpass.
They are taking advantage of free speech. Free press is seductive, and American founding father Thomas Jefferson once swore that if he were to choose between a free press without a government and vice versa, he would choose the former. That was before the media skewered him as president over the Sally Hemmings affair. Fact is sacred but not as scare tactic. That is the creed of journalism. Fact without responsibility is murder. That is what these men are doing, and that is what has jolted Fashola from the irate pillow of his bed.
In journalism, you check your facts. No media house is perfect. Even the New York Times had to issue a mea culpa when it erred over reporting of the Gulf war and weapons of mass destruction. When we err, we acknowledge.
But these guys are not even professional. If they are not getting the preposition wrong, like Ude’s Keep “tabs with,” they foreswear correct idioms, like Reportera.ng’s “take siege of.” They are undermining the glories of the trade, including the textual propriety, language, tone and integrity. They don’t understand context and caveat. They just take liberties.
One of the dangers is their ability to flip in and out of lunacy. They seduce the audience by reporting facts today as licence to peddle rumour as fact tomorrow. They steal from traditional media, and that sucks in the unwary. It gives them the liberty to slaughter. It is licensed tyranny.
They know there is a gullible crowd waiting to consume. It’s like the warning in scripture about people who asks their leaders to tell them sweet things so they may be glad. Their victims are like a beast that is quiet when it is hungry but when the master serves up the meat, it begins to bay and brawl. Atiku Abubakar fed that hysteria of lies when he said Tinubu was arm-twisting the judges. Such irresponsible drivel. He advanced no evidence, but he brought himself to the sewer of the habitual evangelists of fables. They are willing to be deceived. It is like the line of the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso’s epic, Jerusalem Delivered, “They drink deceived, and so deceived, they live.”
They know they cannot make good business by saying the truth. They do not have resources to fund good journalism. So, when they are not copycatting fact, which profits little, they fly to fiction. Just as Lord Byron wrote in his famous poem, Don Juan, “You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your labour, there’s a sure market for imposture.”
This is a time for the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigerian to stamp out this infection. They have been tardy and ineffective. The Guild of Editors and the Eze Anaba-led initiative have a big task ahead. While many are wary of the contagion of coups in the sub-continent, the clear and present dangers are these rodents on X (twitter), Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, et al. They can turn democracy into a compost heap in a jiffy. Let it be known that media lies have set country against country before. It’s what Jesus foretold as rumours of war. It stoked Nigeria into the civil war. The Spanish-American war blew up because a certain media mogul wanted to sell his newspaper.
We see routine violations on a daily basis. Some websites thrive on theft. They wait for organisations like The Nation to deploy reporters, and have their reports written, go through the rigour of editing and different other layers of publication. They wait like agberos and ambush others’ sweat as their own genius. Some add snap and sweeteners for an air of originality. This essay will be on sites without authorization. Just last week, someone drew my attention to this column on a platform without even attribution. It is free-for-all capitalism. They also want traffic, if through traduce. I have reported before how a picture of a man with goat at a campaign rally I never attended was identified as me. Even though the person does not have my height, skin colour, nose, etc. There were even posters announcing a funeral while I am still alive.
Fashola knows some of these miscreants are out of the country. Wherever they are, law has no borders. The western world will slam consequences on those who want to traffic on such filth. An American Ude or Yoruba Sheikh will be in jail. They do so here because no one has come for them. The cyber law is not a lipstick on the statute books. It has teeth. Let it bite.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with the Nation Newspaper
