Free speech for bandits - In Touch, The Nation newspaper
By Sam Omatseye
In Yoruba, the word Orire means good fortune. But it is not the sentiment a cruel drama is bestowing today from that village in Oyo State. It is the story of gangsters and zealots, gunmen and conmen. It is the underside of tyranny. It is woven into the tale of children, school kids, teachers, an invitation to a beheading, and the fear of the unknown.
What is worrying is that these bandits are salivating. They are in the front of a new frontier. The news,that is. They have a stranglehold on the newsrooms, the keyboards, camera lenses, the lips of anchors and on our ears and eyes in the nervous interstices of our homes. They are reporters, editors, news directors and travesties at that.
Nothing demonstrates this more than two developments. The strike on Al-Minuki and his cohorts of close to 300 goons took place about the same time that Ansaru boys stole into the rustic Oyo village and swept away tens of school pupils and their charges. Understandably the Orire tragedy has overshadowed the exploits of the joint action of American and Nigerian forces. It entailed lopping off the heads of the magicians of terror, the arrowheads of plots and deaths, the engine room of fear.
The government had to announce the killing, show pictures, scramble to convince the world of the earnestness of the fight against the vermin. In fact, some newshounds were quick to tell us that there had been an earlier reporting of the felling of Al-Minuki. They were right, not out of virtue but facts. It was a moment of media gloating by some, of trying to cast a slur on the veracity of that heroic moment. Until, of course, clarity came but, with it, silence. Even Gumi the untouchable tried to play down the nationalistic meaning of the strike. Why the forbidden American bombs on our soil? As if the kingpins are not also sponsored also from outside with Ak-47 not made here in Nigeria.
Some in the media wanted to undermine the government role. Why did the Americans report it before our government? They wondered. As though that diminished the scale of its accomplishment.
But when the Ansaru boys struck. They did not have to say a word, or show pictures or run video footages, or hire a PR firm. They did not have to demonstrate their gun acumen or their knowledge of the terrain. They did not have to let us know they wanted us to fear. They did not notify government that they had struck. Their deed did it.
They made headlines without calling an editor, or a news radio or tv station. They did not even have to be seen, in fact, not to be seen was more potent. They just had to show blood. The gore of the teacher. We had to scrutinise the evidence of the face of Al-Minuki, eyes open, cold dead. The death of the teacher stabbed the eye of the looker with too much evidence. The plea of the other teacher asking the government not to deploy force was at once a call for caution and evidence of desperation. The gangster did not offer a vocal register. They do not master the style of presentation, except the bloodhound images, the pockmarks on school and church walls, the screams, blood trails, the impotence of their captives.
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They act with precision, an economy of action. No fees, no news conference, no camera lights, no halls to pay for, no open vanity of self-celebration. They hide under covers and they make headlines around the world.
They have betrayed a malignancy of humility. They have subverted modesty. They stoop to conquer the news and airwaves. They are the first-line editors. We want them dead. We want them caught and dragged on the streets or hanged on trees. But they tell us what to write, what to say, what to lament and what to lead with. Even when we condemn them, they grin.
So, while we say that their acts are against the government and we say the government has not done enough, we are on their staff. The politicians who keep acting as though not much is being done to fight them, are unwittingly also working for them. They are not paid. They are not formally recruited. They are not placed in any offices or allotted any official tasks.
The anchors who rage do so on their behalf without intending to. The writers do same. The ululations of civic actors are no different. They have us in a bind in a world of mass communication and digital speed.
But they do the work. We might call it slave labour. But it is a special kind of servile surrender. They are not under whips or lashes. They are not like our African brothers and sisters in the 16th and 17th centuries who were chained, legs and hands, who ate rations of undernourished meals, hewed woods and sweated in plantations. These are well-fed servitudes, willing serfdoms of misbegotten masters.
Critics may bear arms of laughter at the failings over security. They are like what Sophocles wrote in his play, Ajax, “The sweetest laughter comes from mocking enemies.” In the final analysis, it is fellow Nigerians who die and sulk and fester in the shadows of these vicious foresters.
Yet, the irony is that these men want things we cannot accept. When they took away the school girls in Kebbi State, we lamented. We were almost grateful to them that they let the girls go. We also know that some men in the armed forces evacuated the school hours before they struck. How do we handle a situation where those who are supposed to stand guard run away? If correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain? We have not yet found out the real facts of that episode. In the end, the same goons made a video of ‘happy girls’ twittering in the count.
The two contrasting news values and our perceptions depict how the goons have won the minds, even though they cannot win over sane minds. They are not appealing to our humanity. They are exploiting it. They harvest fear. This is not taking cognizance of some realities. That they are being killed in large numbers. Reports also abound, and this is also a credit to the news media, that many of the attacks are being reported. The beat-back of their onslaughts, capture of their leaders, the arrests of the suppliers of their food and medicine as well as gums, their comfort women, etc. Yet, none of these reports concentrate the minds like the attack on schools and churches. We know, in the words of the poet, Robert Pollock, that they “stole the livery of heaven to serve the devil in.” Their claim to piety rings hollow. But they are ‘sexy.’ They are commandos, red-blooded, feral. They are the harbingers of hate. Good news in the press has two strands. The capture of the bad guys does not excite us as the exploits of the bad guy. The bad guy who sacks a village and rapes makes better news than the capture of that man.
It is the nature of man. ‘Good’ bleeding moves us more than good breeding. In an essay, Nobel Laureate and the author of Beloved, Toni Morrison argues that the good guys in great novels are less interesting than the bad guys. Somehow, we root for them. Obierika is a boring fellow beside Okonkwo. In Paradise Lost, Satan is more fascinating than Christ the redeemer. Macbeth makes better story than Duncan. Moses did all the miracles but the Israelites undermined him and longed to return to their taskmasters and king.
The only other interesting fellow apart from the villain is the victim. Not the hero. Like Oliver Twist that made the prime minister wonder whether Charles Dickens knew of a certain boy sufferer in any of the England’s sweltering factories. The hero is fine. We love him. He makes our hearts murmur with delight. The villain tugs at our muscles. We do not pay enough attention to the hero. He appeals more to our minds. The villain more to our sentiments. We need the hero, but we remember the villain more. Who remembers the police officers that nabbed Anini? Few do.
The politicians of opposition who love the news of adversity are indirectly helping to distort the reality. The killings of Al-Minuki and his fellow murderers may be infinitely more significant news than the Oriire story. But the Oriire story grabs our empathy. That is the point of the gangsters.
A thousand of them may have been killed by the soldiers and police. But about 30 or fewer of them can hold the nation by the jugular by picking the vulnerable. It is not peculiar to Nigeria. In the United States, attacks are often in schools, and it grabs attention more than other places. President Obama wept in public over the shootings. It has not stopped. They are the areas to attack to get attention. But no one mocks the president for not securing the school. They look for solutions, rather than harrumph.
This makes the goons great propagandists. They are cowards. They hit soft targets, and they succeed in twisting the narrative. They make the soldiers look weak and ineffective, although they can do better. We saw this in the Basques separatists in Spain, Chechnya implosions in Russia and the Irish bombs in Great Britain. They do not have to win. They just have to attract minds. It is their own way of making a speech. To speak, they do not have to use their vocal cords, but the agony of their captives, the critics of government and the sound of their guns. That is the tragedy.
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