Refflections with Olu Obafemi
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Continued from last week
THE argument has been that the fact of members of the political class owning media establishments worsened after independence when governments, at federal and regional levels, embarked on media ownership. We found this in all the regions—West, East and North. This gave rise to the situation in which the voices of divisiveness tended to drown the voices of national unity and national integration. The media houses at the regions embodied the ideologies, programmes and the differences of the various regions to the detriment of the cultivation of a national culture and national cohesion. Thus, rather than promoting and building ‘unity in diversity’ the numerous regional media promoted diversity rather than unity. Hence, there had been widespread enhancement of primordial ethno-national consciousness where we should concentrate on building national consciousness and national patriotism—indeed a federate We remark here that, though federation was adopted by the founding fathers of Nigeria in recognition of its imperativeness for a society like Nigeria, mutual hostility, distrust and unhealthy competition subtended among these ethno-national constituent groups in Nigeria. Ethno-national rivalry was fuelled by the political leaders through the instrumentality of the press which was owned and deployed by them as well as manned and managed by their cohorts. Hence, Nigeria’s federalism was marked and tainted by political and media duplicity, complicity and sophistry, right from the colonial to the nationalist aegis of the nation’s political evolution. Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1968) advanced the imperativeness of federating in a multi-ethnic entity like Nigeria thus;
In every civilized federations of the world, there must be the federal principle which refers to the method of dividing powers so that general and regional or state governments are within a sphere , co-ordinate and independent of one another.’ This establishes, recognizes and emphasizes the independence and inter-dependence of the central and regional / state governments.
As it were, this principle of regional government not being inferior to the central government was not wholly and adequately internalized by the leading politicians of the First Republic and their media. It is important, however, to note that the regions developed correspondingly with the centre to the extent that the regions generated resources independently to execute infrastructural and developmental projects, as we found in the regional governments of the Western Region under the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello in the North and Dr. Azikiwe and later Michael Okpara in the East. The principle of non-inferiority of the regional governments to the government at the centre was amply internalized by Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of Northern Region when, he as the leader of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), left the running of the central government in Lagos to Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in order to consolidate his policy of regional development in the Northern region.
With regard to our experience of federalism as a nation, Ogunmola (2013), as adapted by Memo (2014) aptly states as follows;
Despite the acknowledged diverse nature of the country and the adoption of federalism by the country since 1954, the past and present leaders of Nigeria continue to run the country as a unitary state with too much power concentrated at the center and no resemblance of autonomy or the component regions/states or any respect for the people that made up the federation in the first place
Ogunmola further finds this state of affairs to have resulted in the country remaining more as a unitary state for all practical purposes than as a federation. The unitarization bent of the country has been, disputably blamed by Ogunmola on the media barons during the aegis of nationalist struggle and the immediate post-independence Nigeria. The argument has been that the fact of members of the political class owning media establishments worsened after independence when governments, at both federal and regional levels, embarked on media ownership. We found this in all the regions—West, East and North. This gave rise to the situation in which the voices of divisiveness tended to drown the voices of national unity and national integration. The media houses at the regions embodied the ideologies, programmes and the differences of the various regions to the detriment of the cultivation of a national culture and national cohesion. Thus, rather than promoting and building ‘unity in diversity’ the numerous regional media promoted diversity rather than unity. Hence, there had been widespread enhancement of primordial ethno-national consciousness where we should concentrate on building national consciousness and national patriotism—indeed a federated nation.
. Concluded