With delegates to the ongoing National Conference having spent almost a whole month discussing the speech delivered by President Goodluck Jonathan on their inauguration, it is now very clear that they must speed up their deliberations if they are to make a success of their brief within the stipulated three-month time frame. However, rather than focus all their efforts on the job at hand, it would appear certain delegates are more interested in gagging the media and keeping journalists out of whatever is going on there.
About a fortnight ago, former Minister of Justice and a one-time member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Musa Elayo, urged the confab to adopt the Executive Session approach of the legislature, at which issues are discussed in secrecy and away from the prying eyes of the media.
Soon after, there was also a fresh demand to amend Order 14 Rule 7 of the conference to empower the confab to revoke the accreditation given media houses to cover its proceedings. This was targeted at media houses adjudged to have published “unfair and offensive” stories about the confab. Although this aspect of the order was eventually expunged and amended to restrict the confab to accrediting journalists to cover its proceedings, the proponents of the press gag move have yet to give up.
Many of them were particularly piqued by the embarrassing photographs, published by some newspapers, of delegates who were sleeping during the plenary sessions at the National Judicial Institute. Others expressed reservations over the way the press was reporting just about everything happening at the conference – including delegates’ bickering over food, toiletries, sundry allowances and other issues of personal welfare.
The confab leadership finally succumbed. It ruled that some of the issues would henceforth be discussed in secrecy, away from the prying eyes of the media and the public. Last Tuesday, journalists were barred from the sittings of ten committees at the National Judicial Institute.
The resolution on secret sessions raises serious questions of transparency and the real motive of some of the 492 delegates. In a country where there had been widespread complaints about the absence of transparency in the conduct of government business and the need to let the people know what their representatives are doing, it is almost unthinkable that those whom we have chosen to straighten things out and help open up the process are the ones now canvassing secrecy.
The questions to ask are: were those photographs of sleeping delegates manufactured by the media? Was a delegate not playing Scrabble on a laptop while the session was on? Most of all, has any media report been found to be false? Why would delegates come into the public space to do what they do not want the public to know about? As some of the confab delegates have said, the antidote to being reported sleeping is not to sleep. Also, those who feel sleepy have been admonished to leave the chambers so as not to cast the confab in bad light.
Certainly, barring the media from some sessions will not do the confab any good. It smacks of a hidden agenda and will only leave journalists with no other choice than to rely on insider sources for news of what happens in those sessions.
With 492 delegates at the conference, it is unlikely that reporters covering the confab and their editors would not cultivate one or two sources that would always update them with exclusive stories of what goes on behind closed doors at the secret sessions. The danger in this approach is that some delegates could genuinely be misrepresented in the media, as stories might be embellished – a situation that would not have arisen if the sessions were open to the media.
It is also by going into secrecy, like secret cults, that the confab would begin to face the same media/image problem that the legislature is currently facing, with allegations of corruption, jumbo pay, padding up of the national budget for selfish reasons, among others, regularly leveled against lawmakers.
Of course, what some of these anti-media delegates are calling for runs in the face of Section 22 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), which guarantees the right of the press to report the government to the governed.
Apart from the point of law, the press is like the oxygen which the confab needs to fully actualise its mandate and the sooner the delegates begin to see the media as partners, the better for the country. We have already wasted one month trying to get started.
The time for the conference is running out. It will amount to a colossal waste of time, and of the N7 billion taxpayers’ money voted for the confab, if some delegates are only interested in reining in the press.
This confab is one in which Nigerians of all shades of opinion represented at the discourse should open up – warts and all, and tell one another the bitter truth. It is for this reason that the country is paying almost N4 million to each delegate. If possible, everything that they have to say should be said in public, to everybody’s hearing. There is no need for some delegates to try to hide anything. Whoever is not comfortable with that should do the honourable thing and leave the conference.
What Nigerians want is a robust, no-holds-barred discussion of their many problems, with a view to the adoption of new ideas that will be proposed to resolve them. The confab should, therefore, not gag the press.
