Debbie dear,As we say in these shores, ‘long time no see’ my darling. Really, it’s quite an age we last saw, although our mutual admirers imagine that great lovers that we are, we often see, meet and rub hearts together in a love nest in a hidden away exotic Island.
In reality we’ve hardly met beyond once, at most twice, since you bowed out of the judiciary. My thoughts strayed to you today, because of the brouhaha over the closure of the Channels Television Station.
You can trust the NBA, human rights’ groups and other busy-bodies to shout themselves hoarse over the ‘shut-up’ order on Channels. Of course the talk is about the need for government to respect press freedom and follow due process in her reaction.
Honestly I wonder at all these noise-makers. When a tsetse fly feasts on a man’s stone, what to do than to swat the impudent beast off and effectively as possible? Does any one talk of due process when violence lands on the back of the rude twat?
What people don’t know is that rumormongers are very dangerous indeed. In fact the more the truth content of the rumour, the more dangerous they are. Much worse is it, when the victims of their ear-tingling, mouth-widening and eye-popping information are ‘big’ men and women in society big men and women like Chief Judges, Governors, Ministers, Money bags, e.t.c.
What the Channels Television did was horrible, in fact horrendous. Peddling false hoods about the president of the country! What impertinence, for any one to claim that Mr. President, the God’s anointed leader of the Giant of Africa will lose his job voluntarily in a few weeks time. Is that another way of insinuating that the president is too ill to continue with his God ordained and PDP rigged in position?
I know you know how much a pain in the neck, the press could be. In your time in the judiciary as the “FOREMAN” a certain, stupid boy, later to be famously described as a nut (omo were yen) was to give you hell, literally so to say, with an obnoxious publication known to the whole world as SUKUBU. Week in, week out, the SUKUBU was publishing trash, and washing your dirty linen in public. Yet the people continued to buy the trash and so kept the rogue paper and her miscreant editor afloat. Of course you reacted appropriately to the provocation.
You too did what President Yar’Adua had just done-You slammed a ban on the trash paper and initiated the process of destroying the legal career of the paper’s miscreant editor. Such dangerous elements are not fit for the bar.
A lawyer in the first instance has no business being a journalist. He could be a publisher, yes. A publisher of law reports, of seminar and workshop papers, of biographies of living, dying or dead judges, of law text-books and legal novels ala John Grisham. Nothing more, nothing less.
With the benefit of hindsight and learning from the Channels Television experience, what you should have done that time against the SUKUBU idiot was to have invaded the office of his obnoxious paper and occupy it with men of the Security State Service while you arrest the nut and one or two his top geckos. Then you arraign them before one of your numerous courts on several counts of sedition and treasonable felony. After all even if it is true as the SUKUBU was alleging that a sum of 264 million naira of government money disappeared or appeared to have disappeared into the comfort of the confines of your GLOBE purse, did he have a share in it?
Journalists, trained and self-taught alike must comfort themselves in the presence of POWER, otherwise when POWER strikes, it may be sharply unpleasant. Only a fool will annoy people in POWER. And the easiest way to annoy POWER is to force it to hear the TRUTH.
My Debbie, I beg, enough of all this philosophy. One of these days, we actually need to see and meet. And chat. And hold hands. And look into each other’s eyes. And profess undying love to ourselves. And do more besides.
Yours troublesomely,
The First Gecko
No comments:
Post a Comment