On Wednesday, Mr. James Ume, MD, Channel Koos Media, the GM, Christian Chukwu and I went to the home of the late Chris Danladi deep inside Tudun Wada, Nasarrawa state, to pay our respects to the deceased. We drove up to a point and had to complete the journey on ‘okada’. To say the least, the poverty of the area is better imagined!
Danladi, until his death, was a photojournalist with the Leadership Newspapers Group. He was hard working and always with a cheerful mien.
The passing on of Danladi echoes the sentiments I had shared when Comrade Chuks Ehirim, former chairman of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, FCT Council, died in somewhat disturbing circumstances.
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The views are the same Vice President Yemi Osinabjo expressed when he spoke at two separate events; end-of-year seminar of the State House Press Corps at the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa in Abuja, and in Lagos at an event organised to celebrate the 50th birthday of broadcaster and journalist, Kadaria Ahmed.
“Nigerian contemporary press is caught up in a crisis of confidence,” he said. “The faith in the media is at all-time low because faith in all things in the country is at all-time low. The crisis of corruption is systemic and every institution is infected. Justice can be bought so also headlines can be bought.
“The combine sales of the major print newspapers are less than that of Daily Times 40 years ago.”
The vice president went on to express other strong views as to the greed of publishers who reap from adverts, yet do not pay their workers, and even when they do, the wage cannot take the journalist home!
Nothing best illustrates the terrible state of journalism as that of Danladi. Since his death, tributes after tributes are being expressed as to his fine qualities. The irony of it is that the NUJ which he belongs to, did not find it fitting to agitate for his backlog of salaries as well as that of scores of others to be paid by the management of Leadership Newspapers. But it has become a tradition to wait like the vulture to feast on meaningless carcasses of tributes.
The NUJ just ended its NEC meeting in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. In the communique, the union failed abysmally to call out media owners to pay the salaries of journalists in their employ. In a classic case of physicians healing others but can’t heal themselves, the NUJ called on state governors to pay salaries of workers.
Like the vice president said, people are increasingly losing faith not just in the media, but in the NUJ. The present leadership not just at the national but in the FCT is as colourless as it is directionless; it is as blind, as it is without vision. Nothing inspiring, nothing endearing!
This brings me to the matter of the leadership recruitment process in the union. It has become a costly joke that anybody from anywhere simply for the fact that you have circled round the secretariat of the Union for long and bearing the toga of a journalist can be elected. Lekan Otufodunrin dealt with this matter in his piece; Akinreti: The kind of NUJ President, Chairmen we need.
The time has is upon the NUJ to decide if it must come out of the present Intensive Care Unit it has found itself or eventually pass away. It is only in the media that you find a separate guild for editors and journalists. Rather than for the experienced and mature hands to define the pathway for the NUJ, they elected to form a separate body that patronises and grovels before the powers that be.
Why are we yet to ask why have SANs not formed a separate body outside the NBA? Why have consultants in medicine not formed a different association from the NMA? Why does the Nigeria Society of Engineers not have a separate organ for senior or advanced engineers? You know why the media albeit the NUJ is the way it is? We lack faith even in our own abilities, we prefer handouts and we think each must protect his “own turf” of patronage. Nothing more, nothing less!
If the reverse were to be the case, the NUJ will not go to Uyo and be thinking of Beat Associations when it has a bigger inferno of distrust and lack of confidence amongst its members at an all-time high. What should have been its concern is how to reinvent the union to respond to the yearning and yawns of its members; how to leverage on advancement in information and technology to empower its members; how to provide opportunities for its members to leverage on to better their lot.
It seems it is too much to ask these of the leadership of the NUJ.
Time has shown that a god that cannot protect its people, eventually dies. May that not be the fate of the NUJ!