HOW the Nation NEWSpaper defamed JUSTICE UWAIS, ERC, PROF Iwu and INEC

By: Ibrahim Danlami

The Nation of 29 th & 30 th September, 2008 ran two sensational and inflammatory back-to-back stories on its front page on how Professor Maurice Iwu is desperately trying to save his job by resorting to a harried intradepartmental deployment of some key officers of INEC. I read the cloned stories with some piquant interest but that was up to some point when I suddenly began to realize that the story just didn’t fit. Some things just didn’t add up. Besides much conjectures, there were lots of missing pieces and a helluva of hyperbole that made the story more and more unbelievable as you continue to read deep into it. In point of fact, the story revealed itself as a tissue of clumsy untruths, veiled ethnic-baiting; and was much suffused with lots of HMV (His Master’s Voice – meaning that it appeared to be speaking for some political bogeyman, lurking in the shadows and nursing lots of animus against Maurice Iwu/INEC). The following points will suffice to illustrate.

One: How come The Nation believes and wants Nigerians to buy the dummy that it is suddenly the constitutional mandate of the Justice Uwais-led Electoral Reform Committee (ERC) to fire Maurice Iwu, disband INEC and found new bodies to manage Nigeria’s elections? Nigerians know that the ERC was set up by President Yar’Adua to make recommendations for making elections in Nigeria better, if not less rancorous. To be sure, the ERC is not a probe panel or a commission of inquiry formed solely for the purpose of probing Maurice Iwu or INEC. Anybody who knows the true nature and limits of reform panels of this genre will tell you that such things like firing Maurice Iwu or disbanding of INEC or personalizing any ills vaunted around the 2007 elections are naturally beyond the scope of the ERC. Why The Nation chose to travel this path of perfidy and infantile hallucinations for two days in a row beats me. Making it front page is baffling, if not bizarre.

Two: The story blatantly misread the Nigerian statutes on point. For starters, extant Nigerian statutes clearly spelt out in great details the manner of removing INEC Chairman from office. And for good measure, the framers of the laws of federation of Nigeria were wise enough to make it a little too hard. To understand the process of removing the Chairman of INEC, you just have to read the procedures prescribed for removing governor of a state, CJ of the Federation, or even the President. First, the INEC Chairman can only be removed for legal cause, defined in our laws as actionable ‘misconduct’. That means that his removal must also pass judicial muster. Second, the President, even if he wishes, lacks the constitutional authority to remove the INEC Chair. Third, the INEC Chair can only be removed on a resolution of the full Senate. In other words, removing the Chairman of INEC is something akin to impeachment or even more difficult, judging by the procedural safeguards prescribed by the wise compatriots that foresaw the malevolent tendencies The Nation openly exhibited in those stories.

Three: How did The Nation get lucky and become privy to a ‘draft report’ it also stated in the same breath to yet to be written or prepared? Some phantom report indeed – already in place and only awaiting implementation by the President. Please. Does it then mean that Nigerians no longer know the difference between ‘draft’ report, ‘interim’ report and ‘final’ report? In the publication, The Nation repeatedly referenced to ‘draft’ report and yet it strained to make-believe that the so-called report represents the ‘final’ word from the ERC. This is sad, if not worse. Yet again, the publication claimed that the report is ‘to be submitted’ to the President in December and that the President is already poised to implement the ‘report’ wholescale, especially as it concerns firing Iwu. This is September, long ways and three months from December. Three months is enough for a ‘draft’ report to change completely and become ‘the final’ report which is what the President mandated the ERC to produce and present to Nigerians for debate before adoption.

advertisement

Fourth: The ERC is still working on the important task of giving the nation a new electoral regime that will improve on the gains of the very difficult 2007 general elections and strengthen the institutions and laws for conducting future elections in the country. Under settled ethics underpinning media coverage of still ongoing proceedings of reform panels, the media have to be careful to refrain from publishing anything that as much shows that it has a reckless disregard for the truth or that it harbors some malicious intent. The said publication by The Nation fails this acid test. The whole story is awash with malice aforethought, mischief and incitements of sorts.

More could be said to include that the publication is irresponsible and dangerously pre-emptive of a strategic matter that is still receiving attention of the ERC and the whole nation, and most importantly, which is yet to be presented to the President. Such conduct is sanctionable by zealous invocation of the laws of the federation enacted for purposes of containing and penalizing false reports of this nature. The concept of press freedom guaranteed in our Constitution does not provide any protection for purveyors of false and seditious publications, especially this one which is clearly designed to disturb the public order. As a former CJ, an experienced Justice Uwais can be trusted to know what to do to protect the sanctity and integrity of the proceedings of the ERC from anybody who believes he can get away with such unbridled publication of naked falsehoods.

Fifth: It is funny that The Nation will have Nigerians believe that INEC is no longer free to engage in intradepartmental transfers or redeployment of its own personnel. The publication did not say that anybody was fired. It just claimed that some people were transferred from one department to the other, all still within INEC. Assuming, arguendo, that some INEC staff were infact transferred within INEC (not outside of it), how is that supposed to mean that Maurice Iwu and INEC are doing so as a cover up of some sort? Does it mean, as The Nation claimed, that the transferred staff exclusively held the ‘terrible secret’ to how every bit of the 2003 and 2007 elections were ‘rigged’ by Iwu? Are we now supposed to believe that there was some written script warehoused in the departments these transferred staff manned that Iwu is trying to protect by redeploying them? And the list goes on. What a sad and self-destructive story.

Sixth: I want to make it clear that I have nothing against The Nation. Infact, I am a fan of The Nation, which is the main reason why I bought the paper and thus was able to read the back-to-back publications at issue here. I am also a great fan of Sam Omatseye, the Chair of The Nation Editorial Board from back in the day when he wrote for the SUN from his base in North America. Though, I sometimes I disagree with his views, I still respect him as one of the most cerebral columnists the Federation of Nigerian has brought forth. I don’t know what may have hampered him from killing a report that even some rookie editor would have recognized as worthless. Now the full disclosure: I am one of the vast majorities of Nigerians who believe that we should have closure on the hackneyed debate dredged up on the 2007 elections and concentrate on working together to forge a way forward to bettering our elections in the future. I am also one who believes that Nigeria’s strategic institutions like INEC and the ERC should not be defamed so recklessly. I would like to believe that those who continue to do so will be called to account sooner or later.

Danlami wrote in from Abuja

ibrahimdanlami@yahoo.com