Agba Jalingo
The Senate President, David Mark, on July 26, 2012 while declaring open a two-day retreat for Senate Press Corps in Umuahia, the Abia State capital, called for a check on the use of social media in the country, saying that people now use the medium to demean their leaders. The senator said the need to check the social media became necessary, as they do not have avenue for retraction of whatever they have done.
The previous day, the Special Assistant to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on Special Duties and Social Development, Ms. Sarah Pane, while delivering a goodwill message at the Discovery Empowerment Programme for youth corps members at Jabi, Abuja, reportedly said that the use of social media by Nigerian youths is impacting negatively on the country’s image, adding that denigrating leaders through the medium has become a past time.
It will be recalled that just before the 2011 general election, Nigeria’s first graduate President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, opened a facebook page, which was highly celebrated. It was quite an innovation at the time in the history of our Presidency. Very novel! It served a great purpose for the President because he was interacting with young people across the country with daily updates. The media also kept track of and feasted on his interaction with the public. On his page, the President enjoyed love, affection and interacted everyday with most young Nigerians who wished him good luck but could not reach him otherwise.
Immediately after then, it became the vogue for most high ranking government officials, mostly those who were seeking elective positions, to open their own facebook pages and connect to other social networking sites. At a point, the social networks were the most fashionable platforms for these leaders to reach the rest of us. The President after oath taking, in his inaugural address, famously quoted a post from his facebook page by an ‘ordinary’ Nigerian who narrated to him how his father died after celebrating the President’s fortunes at the polls. The President personally responded to his wall posts and even Dr. Reuben Abati did use the platform to do a lot of his spinning.
The story however began to change with the ill fated decision of the President to increase the pump price of petrol on January 1, 2012. The same young Nigerians, who had become Mr. President’s pals, conceiving him as the Messiah with plenty of good luck, suddenly became his worst haters. They don’t have to go elsewhere; they are using the same medium where they used to meet with him – social media – to vent their opprobrium on the administration.
Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Abati and a few other administration top shots tried fruitlessly on their own facebook walls to simmer the situation but they could not do the magic any more and some had to hurriedly close their pages and twitter handles when they could no longer swallow the insults that were being heaped on them.
Like a love affair gone sour, public officials who hitherto had found in social media a new modern tool to interact with the youths could not bear the sudden change of fortune with their teeming young followers. One after the other, they abandoned their pages for good.
It was about that same time that David Mark too opened his pages. He had so many facebook friends within a short time that he had to open multiple pages. However, Mark, like all others, thought they were always going to hear sweet sycophantic platitudes from those who eat their crumbs or maybe they had erroneously believed that they have finally won the heart of the Nigerian people.
I have personally continued to wonder why Mark and company have not been updating their facebook walls as regularly as they used to. I actually thought he was busy with state functions until his out burst last Thursday. People have been saying that David Mark has been the best Senate President so far, so I thought it was because of his work load that he may not have been getting enough time to interact with us on facebook.
The sudden out burst of two top governmental officials over social media insult on them and their ilk within the same week should not be misconstrued as a coincidence. It is rather reflective of the mood in government. Their call for restriction on the use of the medium is also indicative of a desire to suffocate free speech, which is characteristic of leaders who brook no criticism.
Apart from the jamborees like the one Mrs. Sarah Pane went for at Jabi in Abuja, no one can really explain what her job specification in government is. As Special Assistant to the President on Special Duties and Social Development, her duties are suspect. What value has she added or is she adding that is commensurate with her pay?
Whether for the wrong or right reasons, David Mark has a skewed impression about the rest of us. It was he who was quoted as saying that the telephone was not meant for every Tom, Dick and Harry. He was also reported to have said he will personally shoot Chief MKO Abiola dead if power was handed over to him. He said Nigeria was not ripe for democracy. While Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, Colonel Umar Dangiwa and company were resigning, Mark stayed behind as a member of Babangida’s Armed Forces Ruling Council, which deployed soldiers to shoot and kill protesters who were asking soldiers to go on Ikorodu Road in Lagos, though today he is the biggest beneficiary of a system he fought tooth and nail: DEMOCRACY.
I also cannot stop to wonder why some people continue to say that David Mark is the best Senate president so far because he has stabilized the polity. I cannot understand what they mean. I mean, I need more information please. Lawmakers have three broad functions namely:
a. Legislation – under Mark’s first four years as Senate president, the 109-member Senate passed 51 bills out of the over 300 that were pending before them, making an average of one bill per month compared to the over N18 million monthly pay that they earn. Is that a pass mark? Can any employer pay so much for so little and not kill the company?
b. Oversight: Under Mark’s presidency, there is hardly any Senate committee that has not held or is not planning a probe of the various MDAs they are supposed to oversee. If the senators were doing their oversight functions, will we wait until there is a need for these incessant probes that have become avenues for monumental fleece? Are the probes not a proof of failure of oversight?
c. Appropriation: under Mark’s presidency, senators have continued to appropriate budgetary allocations from N1 trillion to over N4 trillion. Have they bothered to ask why these allocations are not alleviating the squalor of their constituents? Or is it their failure to ask that amounts to the stability people are referring to?
I don’t know of any true democracy in the world that is turbulence free unless the ones where anti-masses people like David Mark are entrenched. What concrete parameters do people use to measure his presidency that gives him a pass mark?
Yes, I agree that the world is worried about how technology is putting the tools of information dissemination in the hands of unlicensed people who may not really care about the social consequences of the information they share. But that exactly is where the future is going. A future where there will be no such thing as abuse of social media. A future without censorship. A future that realises that people have a right to express themselves in any form. To say just anything, including the palatable and the non-palatable.
The courts are there to drag anyone to when they say what you think is libelous or offensive. It is for people like David Mark and Sarah Pane to realise the futility of trying to restrict citizens’ freedom of expression and move on to do things that will make us celebrate them on the social media.
A United Kingdom citizen was discharged last week by a Crown Court after being charged for threatening on twitter to blow up Robin Hood Airport if his flight was delayed. He told the court he was joking and the court affirmed that people have a right to joke, both pleasant and unpleasant jokes.
The years ahead will even be more traumatic for those who are scared of the social media. Technology will turn everyone, including the illiterates, to citizen journalists and there will be no need for censored mediums like radio and television. They will become like post office in the days of e-mails. So
for those who think that our freedom of expression should be curbed, they can as well bury that aspiration. And for those who say our talk is not yielding results, you may soon be proven wrong because those in high places are feeling the heat and they are complaining.
We must continue talking. That is the only indication that we don’t want to carry arms as is the fashion in the country today. We cannot stop talking. We can’t even stop now. Even if you thought that your wall post was not making any difference, now you know that, individually, we are like sun flakes, very frail. But if we stick together, we can cause huge traffic.
God bless Nigeria.
Agba Jalingo is the Coordinator, www.kickthemout2015.org, 12 Adegbola Street, Ikeja, Lagos. 08130197233.