Gratuitous military, SSS assault on the press

June 7, 2014

Director of Defence Information, Maj.-Gen. Chris Olukolade

IN an unprecedented assault on the press, not seen since the dark days of military dictatorship, soldiers and State Security Service personnel fanned out across the country on Friday morning to intercept, seize and, in some cases, destroy newspapers as they were being distributed. The brazen assault on press freedom signposts the rapid descent of a discredited government and its security agencies into undisguised tyranny.

They will not succeed. Nigerians and the press have endured and triumphed over tyrannical forces – colonial and home-grown, military and civilian – and this latest violence to our cherished freedoms will certainly not be different.

The outrage began on Friday morning when SSS operatives and soldiers intercepted and seized consignments of national newspapers being conveyed to various parts of the country in distribution vans. At the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, copies of the The PUNCH, The Nation, Daily Trust and Leadership were confiscated, while wrappers and cover pages of The PUNCH were damaged. Leadership reported that soldiers intercepted and destroyed copies at the Kaduna toll gate. The Nation too saw its vans ambushed in Abuja, Benin-Warri Road, Port Harcourt, Kaduna-Kano Road and Nasarawa-Jos Road. In Benin, Edo State, soldiers stormed the Nigerian Union of Journalists Press Centre to disrupt activities as they stopped vehicles, hunting for some national dailies.

And what was the excuse for this travesty? Chris Olukolade, a major-general and Director of Defence Information, was totally unconvincing. According to him, the military was acting on an “intelligence report” that “materials with grave security implications” were being moved across the country “using the channel of newsprint-related consignments.” If indeed there was such a tip, decorum suggests that, having waylaid a distribution van and searched it, the storm troopers should have informed Nigerians if they found any incriminating material among the newspapers. If they found none, should they not have released the vans? Instead, they impounded newspapers and even damaged many copies.

This wanton behaviour flies in the face of Olukolade’s assertion that the operation had nothing to do with the content, operations and personnel of the media organisations. Since the action was not in response to newspaper content, as he claimed, logic dictates that the newspapers be released for distribution. In the event, the affected news organisations lost hundreds of millions of naira, as did distributors, transporters and advertisers who are stakeholders in the business, not forgetting the mass of newspaper readers across the country denied Friday’s edition.

The military/SSS assault is inexcusable and unacceptable. Democracy and fundamental freedoms are under threat when security personnel can cite suspect intelligence report to seize newspapers and prevent their circulation. In one fell swoop, the military and SSS trampled, not only on the right to freedom of expression and the press guaranteed in Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution, but the right of the producers and marketers of the newspaper to conduct their lawful business unfettered.  

We do not accept the Defence Headquarters’ pretext for this assault. We suspect that the military and the SSS are simply venting their frustrations on the press following the global spotlight beamed on their failures and bungling in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency in the North after the kidnap of 276 teenage girls in Chibok, Borno State, on April 14.

While we fully back all lawful measures to check the country’s dire insecurity, we are wary of the intelligence-gathering capabilities of our security agencies. The SSS, for instance, has not impressed after five years of Boko Haram terrorism, nor has the military inspired confidence in recent times as the insurgents strike every day in territories where a state of emergency is in place.

It is, however, not surprising that the media have been made the scapegoat for the failure of the security agencies. They have always suffered unjustly in the hands of the military dictatorships. The cold-blooded regime of Ibrahim Babangida witnessed the gruesome murder of the founding editor of Newswatch magazine, Dele Giwa, through a letter bomb. The bombing occurred two days after he had been interrogated by security officials.

In 1984, the Muhammadu Buhari regime introduced Decree No. 4 of 1984, which was used to unjustly imprison two Guardian journalists – Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor. The trend of clampdown on newspapers/magazines continued unabated when Babangida, in April 1990, forcibly closed down The PUNCH for its story on the Gideon Orkar coup. The paper was not re-opened until May. Top editorial staff members of another newspaper, Lagos News, were incarcerated without trial over the same coup.

In the dark days of the Sani Abacha regime, many newspapers suffered physical intimidation, harassment of journalists and destruction of their printed copies. Editors like Chris Mamman, Emma Agu, Toye Akiode, Egbose Aimifua and Bala Dan Abu were locked up without trial. Chris Anyanwu and Ben Obi, the editors of Weekend Classique, were jailed for life by a secret military tribunal. So also were Kunle Ajibade and Femi Ojudu of TheNews. The PUNCH also bore the brunt of this brutality when it was summarily shut down in June 1994, along with National Concord, The Sketch and The Guardian, at a time the June 12 election annulment by Babangida nearly destroyed the country. One cannot forget the bombing of Bagauda Kaltho of TheNews in 1996.

The families of journalists were not spared the brutal ordeals. A case in point was the family of Dapo Olorunyomi, whose wife, Ladi, and three-month-old daughter, Aramide, were detained at Alagbon, Lagos, in lieu of Dapo. Though they were released 24 hours later, they were re-arrested in March 1997, and spent 48 days in military torture chambers before regaining their freedom.

Under our current democracy, the media, a few times, have faced these depraved actions, exemplified in the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s litigation against Abuja-based Leadership newspaper and his goon squad’s invasion of the office of Channels Television in Lagos.

Dating back to 1787 in England, the press had been recognised as the Fourth Estate of the Realm. So critical are the functions of the media in a free society that Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States of America, once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the later.”

Even in modern times, serious-minded leaders do not toy with the media. The Friday onslaught on the press evokes memories of the so-called intelligence report, Joseph Mbu, the Federal Capital Territory police boss, purportedly received to attempt banning #Bring Bank Our Girls campaign on Monday.

If the action of the military and SSS was not Gestapo-driven, we challenge them to make public the offensive materials their raids on affected newspapers yielded or tender public apologies. Besides, the affected newspapers should not hesitate to challenge the military’s display of the rule of the jungle in court and demand financial compensation.