There is a lot of anguish in The Guardian family concerning a statement by publisher Maiden Ibru at the ThisDay 30th Anniversary Awards. I write as a pioneer staff member of The Guardian.
I have said that it is unethical for a media organisation to establish and administer titles and awards.
This is even more dangerous if the awards involve people or organisations about whom it reports, with no clear standards about how “winners” are determined.
That is the precinct of show business—or politics—not journalism. The dangers are limitless in the same sense that a man, once he pays the prostitute, forever averts his eyes from hers in public.
In a normal world, it is the friends and admirers of ThisDay who should have been giving it applause and awards, not the reverse.
That would have included “Lifetime” award recipient Mrs Ibru.
“It is definitely the number one paper in the country,” she said of ThisDay. “It is a fact. I’m the publisher and chairman of the Guardian newspaper. ThisDay newspaper is the #1 newspaper in Nigeria.”
Mrs Ibru is no Katherine Graham, and her newspaper’s dwindling presence at the newsstand and among critics is evidence of her limitations.
On the contrary, ‘The Flagship of the Nigerian Press,” which she inherited, epitomised success.
For first place in the industry, it had no peer. As its Ombudsman, I testify to the paper’s relentless drive for excellence. Every edition sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and none of our staff members had a complex.
Mrs Ibru’s confession is a reminder of how The Guardian lost its way and how badly it cries for leadership: the flagship variety.
Speaking of leadership, one often hears in Nigeria that when you fight corruption, it fights back.
Is it possible that corruption fights “forward”? Think about this: For nearly decades, Nigeria has fought insecurity, an ailment that, in the hands of the ruling APC, now has several mutations.
Despite huge annual investments in the military, particularly in air power, we are losing each of them.
Currently at the heart of this effort is Nuhu Ribadu, the National Security Adviser.
In November 2023, he lambasted the government of Muhammadu Buhari, declaring that it had left Nigeria bankrupt.
It was a strange claim, given that Ribadu’s boss, Bola Tinubu, has never said one word against that government. Even before the election which brought him to power, he affirmed that if he won, he would continue with Buhari’s legacies.
Neither at Tinubu’s inauguration nor in the months that followed did he criticise the Buhari years. He described his predecessor as having served Nigeria with “dedication and uncommon zeal.”
Contrary to the whining of his NSA, Tinubu has not acknowledged any of the maladministration and malfeasance that brought Nigeria to its knees.
Only one or two of Buhari’s most compromised officials are in court, let alone in jail.
And so, in November 2024, Ribadu turned to the old art of praising the present instead, publicly listing and applauding something he called “Tinubu Gains.”
“There are so many things happening in our country today,” he declared. “There are things we want to call Tinubu’s gains, and reforms.”
He then added this rather curious line: “No one dares Tinubu and wins. No one fights Tinubu and wins.”
If you knew Ribadu, that was a strange thing for him to say, as it was almost without context.
Last week, it appeared to make sense when he claimed never to have called Tinubu corrupt.
It was stunning, but I decided that he was right if the reference was to the man who appointed him to his current life.
Maybe that is where Ribadu’s mind is. Maybe his calendar dates only from May 2023, when Tinubu took office, and does not scroll further back.
The problem is that Tinubu became prominent as Governor of Lagos State in 1999, the period in which the word “wealthy” began to appear before his name.
The relationship between both men broke into the open in September 2006 when Ribadu, as chairman of the EFCC, arrived in the Senate to fulfil his commission’s legal obligation of an annual report.
If ‘Ribadu Time’ goes back that far, he certainly did publicly identify Tinubu as corrupt, and to list him among the first set of corrupt governors in the Fourth Republic.
That singular performance is exactly when Ribadu morphed from political appointee to celebrity.
Reporting, he listed 15 governors and three former governors for corruption issues, identifying Tinubu’s as having an “international dimension.”
When he ran for president on the platform of Tinubu’s ACN party, he denied having labelled him corrupt.
Ribadu confirmed his Senate presentation a few months later at the Lagos Airport when he specifically identified three governors: Tinubu, Orji Kalu (Abia) and Ibrahim Shekarau (Kano) as awaiting prosecution for corruption once they lost their constitutional immunity in May 2007.
Unknown to Nigeria at the time, Ribadu had also in 2006 chaired an anti-corruption Joint Task Force (JTF), instituted by President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The JTF report indicted 15 governors, including Bayelsa State Governor Goodluck Jonathan and Tinubu, for false declaration of assets and breaching the Code of Conduct for public officials.
They were to be prosecuted under the Code of Conduct Bureau Act.
Whether Ribadu ever called, indicted or denounced Tinubu as corrupt is therefore clearly untrue. Two issues should however be of public concern. The first is the quality or fidelity of Ribadu’s memory, an issue I previously addressed in August 2014 in “Nuhu Ribadu, Then And Now.”
In that 2006 Senate appearance, Ribadu listed one woman who had attracted the serious attention of the EFCC.
In October 2007, I would describe her as “Nigeria’s Most Powerful Woman.”
Her name: is Patience Jonathan, who was at the time of Ribadu’s EFCC report the wife of the Governor of Bayelsa State. In just one month, the commission had seized from her first, N140m, and then $13.5m.
But in a NigeriaVillageSquare interview in 2010, Ribadu swore that he “never invited Mrs Jonathan for questioning or took her statement!”
That was strange: in August 2006, he filed lawsuit Number FHC/ABJ/M/340/06 against Mrs. Jonathan at the Federal High Court down the road.
And then in 2013, after he called Nigeria under President Jonathan a ‘sinking ship,’ that government denounced him as “shameless,” saying that he accepted “to become the political lackey of a man he once openly accused of corruption at various times between 2004 and 2007.”
The second and more important concern for Nigerians is the insecurity nationwide. Given NSA Ribadu’s memory—or character—lapses, is that office in good hands?
Better still, is the NSA in a good heart if Ribadu is forever juggling his relationship with Tinubu with Nigeria’s security needs? Remember: civilians are routinely bombed in Nigeria, while the insurgents and kidnappers appear to enjoy the same cosy life as the Nigerian political elite in Abuja.
Ribadu appears to be the best investment that Tinubu ever made, defanging the hostile tiger and nurturing it into an affectionate, Siamese cat which meows, “No one dares Tinubu and wins.”
Does corruption fight back, or is it people who fall forward?
Punch
