Tonnie Iredia
The Chairman of Nigeria’s Code of Conduct Tribunal CCT, Danladi Umar was for wrong reasons in the news for much of last week. Interestingly, the issue at stake had nothing to do with his assignment of determining the level of adherence of public officers to the official code of conduct required of them.
Instead, the story was about his interaction in a market-place, with one Clement Sargwak, a security guard at the Banex Plaza in Abuja. Umar had gone there in his private capacity as a citizen to transact some business which ended up in a case of assault. Several analysts who have dwelt extensively on the story have placed sufficient focus on blame game, making it superfluous to further engage in a rehash of that line of thought. What is yet to be done, is to enumerate the effects of the story on our nation’s growth and development. This is precisely what this piece seeks to do today in the hope that some useful lessons can be learnt by us all.
The first and perhaps the most important issue which the story throws up is the inability of powerful Nigerians especially policy makers to comprehend and appreciate not just the power of the social media but the role it can play in reforming society. With increasing population and corresponding increases in societal activities, the under-equipped, under-staffed and under-remunerated conventional media can hardly cover a substantial portion of daily events. Much of what happens in the country is thus under-reported. In which case, were it not for the social media, not many would have had the privilege of knowing what transpired at Banex Plaza last week. What this suggests is that contrary to the belief of many highly placed individuals, especially some legislators who have been anxious to make laws against what they see as the evils of the social media, the platform has its own advantages.
For its interactivity, portability, speed of information dissemination and international context, Nigeria certainly needs the social media. Of what use is any medium of communication which covers only segments of a few events that the people may, as a result of many challenges, never get to know about? Yet, ours is a developing society that is in dire need of public enlightenment. Indeed, but for the social media which enabled the instantaneous dissemination of how the entire Banex Plaza incident happened, denials, claims and counter claims would have completely rendered the event incomprehensible. We can only hope therefore, that our leaders will begin to see the need to depart from the desire to kill the social media which in every other nation is employed as a veritable tool for development communication. This underscores this column’s earlier submission that replicating harsh regulations as well as increasing the powers of regulatory bodies can only impede information management, they can neither resolve nor alter the propensity for fake news.
The viewpoint that Nigeria’s current information management framework is probably not far above the stone age level is visibly represented by the press statement issued by the CCT to ‘inform’ Nigerians on the incident through a narration of the version of its boss. The statement left people to wonder about the briefing or induction course designed by the Ministry of Information for press officers assigned to government organizations. At what point are they to speak and what format is devised for the statements they issue about their organizations and their activities? There are two speculations provided by the statement issued by Ibraheem Al-Hassan, the Head of the Press and Public Relations Unit of the CCT. The first is that the press officer is probably not a professional. The second is that in line with what happens in many parts of our country, where everyone thinks that the job of information management is an all-comers’ game, the press officer was told what to write and in fact how to write it, without regards for the absurdity that such statements may convey.
