October 1996
While listening to a Voice of America documentary on Russia
recently, l was struck by the presenter’s observation that
the Russians had a long history of saying what they think
they should say rather than what they truly think or believe.
It made me wish, especially after seeing the massive turn-out
for the much-talked-against zero-party local government
elections in March this year, that the Americans would come to
realize that Nigerians, similarly, were susceptible to the
Russian kind of “flexibility” in the public expression of opinion.
American belligerence to the recent thrust of events in Nigeria
is largely due to the assumption that what they conceive of as
the voice of the Nigerian people is indicative of the true
yearnings of the generality of the Nigerian people. It is an
assumption, however, which we, as a people, have continued
to stultify (to make seem absurd) by our actual response to
event after event.
In fact, l always wonder how Vox Populi Vox Deo (the voice of
the people is the voice of God) came to be gospel truth. I
suspect, and l think, rightly, that this unfortunate piece of
aphorism is just one more example of what Chinua Achebe
aptly describes as the white man recreating the world in his
own image and for his own benefit. So, even God has to be
recreated in the image of proud democratic man, the very same
God who, just a couple of centuries back, gave full divine rights
to His Imperial Majesty.
It brings to mind what the 18th century French Philosopher,
Voltaire, once said: If God did not exist, it would be necessary
to invent Him. Thus, whether man scores football goals with
his hands; whether he annuls elections or dethrones
traditional rulers, everything very conveniently becomes an act
of God.
While God strives, therefore, to create man in His own image,
man also strives to recreate Him in the human image.
Generation after generation, anthropomorphic gods (that is,
gods resembling man) have been created the world over in
consonance with the obsessive temperaments of the creating
people. So not surprisingly, the voice of the people suddenly
becomes the voice of God.
Given this pitiful egocentricity, it becomes perfectly acceptable,
especially in the face of universal democratization, that the
most powerful democratic nation of the world should be God’s
own country, doling out opinions which cannot be
controverted, in the very same way that James I doled out
commands in the days of the divine right of kings. In case we
are in doubt that the creator of the stupendously expansive
universe has a country here on planet Earth, let us be kindly
reminded that the United States of America is God’s own
country.
In the same vein, the journalist in a democracy becomes God’s
prophet, the repository of truth, the custodian of the sacred
flame. Nigerian journalists would recall that their august visitor
in 1989, Associate Editor Charles Gusewelle, from the United
States, told the Nigeria Union of Journalists that information
was the fire of democracy.
In his words: ‘It can light up the darkness of ignorance. It can
cleanse the system… and combine the weaker elements of
hope and shapeless longing into the steel of true national
purpose’. We probably need to remind ourselves that
information used to be one of the prime services of journalism;
that is, before the present ascendancy of strongly-opinionated
reporting, whereby events are recreated in the image of our
beliefs, especially in the Weeklies.
Gusewelle went on to talk, quite surprisingly, of the damage
journalists can do with this fire of democracy. Fire is useful but
fire is also destructive. According to him, if faith in the
institutions that hold society together is destroyed through
information, the nation, invariably, fails. This means that while
information can nurture hope and longing into redemptive
action, it could, on the other hand, sow seeds of
disintegration. For, all apostles of God carry the power both of
life and of death in their lips.
Given this destructive potential of information, it is not too
surprising that the heavily tongue-lashed Buhari-Idiagbon
regime had a Decree 4 to stop embarrassing things from being
published or voiced. All that is, however, now history. The
General Babangida regime stepped in, annulling Decree 4 and
letting out the fire.
The voice of the people, we would recall, applauded him as a
liberator and settled down to use the fire. To the marvel of the
international community, we made a bonfire huge as hell:
Babel voices spitting fire as they traversed the information and
ideological length and breadth of the country; Babel voices
playing God, the God that answereth by fire.
We have seen this fire, as raw acidic truth, put the reins on
leadership. We have seen that, indeed, ‘the pen is mightier
than the sword’ (though not quite as mighty as the machine
gun). We have seen that ‘resistance of tyranny is obedience
to God’; that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely’; that ‘no human being is good enough to be
entrusted with absolute power’. That which we have read with
our eyes, of the word of the newspaper prophet, declare we
unto you.
But since the newspaper prophet is, after all, also merely
human, we have also seen the fire of democracy manifesting
as shocking slander, the publication of opinion as fact and the
propagation of false prophecy about our national destiny. We
have seen the man in the street gradually recreated to become
psychologically unfit for the task of spirited nation building. We
have seen children, young unformed children, passed through
fire and heard their blood wail from campus sands.
The result today is that we have hordes of neophytes in the
holy duty of antagonism out-screaming even the veterans of
this great combustion. It is this inferno, this ceaseless
screaming, predicated on untested basic assumptions, that
usually asserts itself as the voice of our poor democratic god, a
voice laced with prejudice, half-truths and morbid
speculations. So deep, the frustration!
As the negative myths get to assume the full dimensions of a
deity, acolytes, as in all religions, cling pitifully to ‘received
truth’, even when the evidence of their eyes call them to
order. As Albert Einstein rightly says, ‘In this sad world, it is
more difficult to overcome a prejudice than to split an atom.’
So, the silent masses may queue in the rain to lend credence
to a ‘popularly rejected’ transition programme, but the voices
cannot be deterred. God does not fear man, sing my people.
The zero-party elections were not elections but mere selection,
quips my Lord Archbishop. Voices, democratic, international,
endlessly…
But, voices or no voices, since the surprisingly massively-
attended zero-party local government elections, it has become
a little clearer now, even to the international community,
including people in God’s own country, that in Nigeria, as in a
number of other non-western societies, the voice of the people
and the people are NOT one and the same thing.
