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From: maggie anaeto <maganaeto@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:37:13 +0000 (GMT)
To: ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
ReplyTo: maggie anaeto <maganaeto@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: DAME: JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
DAME: JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
by
Ayo Olukotun
Last week's 22nd edition of the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME) at which the Punch established its preeminent status in the print media, by netting in a haul of 7 out of 12 prizes provides a vantage point to reflect on the state of the craft.
Journalism, it goes without saying is the meeting point between town and gown; its most appealing varieties take something from the laid back thoughtfulness and theorising of the academic and marries them to the drama and bustle of the city to produce a stimulating intellectual genre.
Unsurprisingly, in several countries around the world, journalism served and continues to be the incubator and touchstone of seminal and original contribution to letters. Refresh your mind with names in the United States like Hannah Arendt, a political thinker who reported for the New Yorker for several years; Nobel prize novelist, Ernest Hemmingway, also a journalist; James Baldwin, essayist, novelist and journalist as well as the magnificent political journalism of Theodore White, author of the series entitled, 'The Making of the President' to see the connection. Needless to add that in continental Europe especially in France, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and the intellectually active Bernard-Henri Levy rose to prominence from a culture in which star philosophers and star journalists are often one and the same person.
Nigeria is no exception to this global norm, even if in reduced measure. Reread the essays of Peter Enahoro, Alade Odunewu, Babatunde Jose, Olusegun Osoba and Abiodun Aloba most of who as Peter Enahoro put it earned their degrees from the university of life and you will appreciate the point. The privilege of fresh exposure to the quality of mind of this generation of journalists and men of letters was granted to me in the mid 1990's when the Daily Times requested the late Professor Femi Sonaike and myself to edit a book of commemorative essays to mark media mogul, Babatunde Jose's 70th birthday. In my judgement, the most insightful and arresting contributions to that book were made, not by those of us with several university degrees, but by this vanishing generation of journalists, who despite minimal formal education in several cases, could hold their own anywhere in the English speaking world.
For reasons I cannot explore in detail here, not many of our op-ed writers and columnists today can match the vibrancy of Jose's prose who personally wrote many of the memorable editorials of the Daily Times of his days, including the evocative 'Darkness Visible' which presaged the overthrow, in a military coup of the government of General Yakubu Gowon. Narrating both the constraints and daring of his days, Jose had written in his monumental autobiography 'Walking a tightrope' that "one has to balance between the ivory and iron towers, occasionally risking a little spin round one foot and yet remaining firmly balanced on the rope." The memorable
'little spins around one foot' as Jose called it signposted the journalism of social conscience and reform for which that tribe of journalists were known with momentous consequences for the politics of Nigeria.
It is the reinvention of this tradition at The Punch I believe evidenced for instance by the paper's willingness to interrogate official cant and to reject a notion of journalists as no more than stenographers of the political establishment, that accounts for its harvest of professional laurels as well as its revered status in our journalism.
Before amplifying that theme, let me go back a little bit to say that I do not minimize the benefits of better education for our journalists. What can be called an intellectual revolution in Nigerian journalism occurred at The Guardian when the late Dr. Stanley Macebuh, pioneer managing director brought around him academics and writers such as Professor Femi Osofisan, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, Professor Fred Onyeoziri, Dr Olatunji Dare and several others, intensifying the linkage alluded to earlier between the ivory tower and the market place.
However, what is of more enduring importance is the legacy of journalism of social conscience, which I have traced to the founding fathers; journalism that speaks truth to power and that is not fettered by the might of the state or the capacity of advertisers to penalise critical positions. This kind of journalism can obviously not thrive in shoe-string enterprises that eke out a hand-to-mouth existence on the fringes of decency, for that will make them vulnerable, to put it mildly, to seductive overtures of the high and mighty. It will also not thrive in contexts where proprietors are breathing down the necks of the professionals to ensure that they toe the line. Neither can it be found in sharply partisan terrains where advocacy of particular political viewpoints usurps professional independence.
The Punch is not without its blemishes, nonetheless it can be fairly argued and at the risk of some immodesty that it is the stellar platform in Nigeria today for a journalism of social conscience; and one that blends conscientiousness by being fair to all sides with conscience to the extent that it is morally engaged on the side of the victims of misrule and mediocrity.
There is a culture of free expression that fertilizes a journalism of commitment just as there is a culture in which the journalist is handcuffed by institutional constraints which formally or informally impose on him/her no-go-areas. I know that this is true because I served once as a senior editorial board member in a newspaper owned by the federal government and know from firsthand experience what it means to explore the boundaries of approved topics and editorial postures. At such pressure points, the journalist survives by strategies of literary concealment and subterfuge which maintain the critical enterprise by a measure of metaphoric camouflage.
The Punch is a different ball game all together. Neither its opinion columns or editorials are censored in any real sense of the word. And this has served as nourishment for those of us who have had the good fortune to contribute to its pages. You cannot read for example The Punch editorial of November 25, 2013 entitled "Okonjo-Iweala's gaffe on Abuse of Waivers" without coming away with a sense of the paper's fierce and outspoken independence deployed to the ideals of good governance and the dethronement of vested interests. But forthrightness is a luxury if a newspaper is waiting for a life-line contract from government or political chieftains and this is one reason why The Punch model of self-sustaining buoyancy unlocks the secret to the practice of a journalism of social conscience.
Obviously this writer has benefitted from this atmosphere of uninhibited expression subject of course to the laws of the land. Interestingly, the day before this writer was announced winner of the Alade Odunewu prize for informed commentary, my good friend, Professor Michael Vickers from his observatory at Sussex, England had said graciously in an email that this writer "remains the prime public articulator of the conscience of the Nigerian people".
Such compliments are made possible in a paper which stimulates a crusading zeal on behalf of good governance.
Prof Olukotun is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Entrepreneurial Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan. ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com 07055841236