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The Nigerian media
has no sense of humour. It does not recognise a joke when it sees one.
It is too straitjacketed in its story selection and analysis. It needs
a makeover if it is not to bore the nation to death.

At a time the
country requires a healthy dose of laughter, the media riles us with
inanities. Once upon a time a former head of state (as he then was) put
up a sign on his farm that dogs and journalists were not welcome there.
The media took it to heart, whining that the general was equating them
with dogs. Who does not know journalists are dogs, after all they call
themselves watchdogs of society? What does a dog do other than watch
its owner’s interests? Why should the farmer open his barns to dogs
that would not welcome his interests?

The other day when
some northern elders decided to field a former vice president as their
northern consensus candidate for the presidency of Nigeria without the
consensus of other Nigerians, this former HOS and former president of
Nigeria, indeed, the ex VP’s principal, owner of the naughty farm
signpost, reacted humorously to the choice, uttering his famous lines:
“I dey laugh o.”

What did the media
do? They went to town, claiming the former president was mocking his
former deputy. What did they expect him to do? Cry? If he had done so,
they would have complained he didn’t wish his former deputy well.

Even the former
VP’s minders didn’t catch the joke. They derided the old man that if he
had died in jail where the dark goggled one sent him, there would have
been nothing for him to laugh about. That sent the news hounds on a
wild trail, celebrating the insipid utterance.

If they were
steeped in the traditional mores of our people, they would have known
that when a matter beggars belief laughter is the best antidote.

The latest fixation
is with our man lucky enough to be running for the highest office in
the land. They say he called the opposition rascals. They say his
utterance was un-presidential. They say his prolonged struggle with the
former vice president, the zoning evangelist anointed by the northern
elders, had taken its toll on him and affected his speech, and he had
started abusing people he could hardly look in the eye a few months
ago.

One party even
tried to drag the former president, the chicken farmer, into it. You
see, he was on the campaign podium with the campaigning president and
he was adjudged guilty of corrupting the campaigning president’s
speech. Are they saying the campaigning president cannot pick his own
words? A man who has just won his party’s nomination against grave
opposition is an excited person, who can seek recourse in malapropism
as he mistakes rascal for radical?

The man had simply
said: “We (read PDP) must take over all the states in the South West.
The zone is too important to be left in the hands of rascals”. Is the
South West not important? Yes, it is. Does the PDP currently control
the entire South West? No. Of the six states that make up the
geopolitical zone, the Action Congress of Nigeria controls Lagos,
Ekiti, and Osun, that is fifty percent. The Labour party controls one,
Ondo State, leaving the president’s Peoples Democratic Party in charge
of two, Oyo and Ogun; that is thirty three percent. Is the South West
in the hands of rascals? What manner of rascals?

Two of my
dictionaries describe a rascal as “a person who does things of which
you disapprove, but whom you still like”. A rascal could also be “a
dishonest or mischievous person”. So which one was the man who wants to
be elected president talking about: the likeable one, who irritates now
and then and is recognisable in every family and organisation or the
dishonest/mischievous one?

You see, the man
from the creeks, the one who became governor without being elected, and
also became president without being elected, the one who is struggling
to be elected into the highest political office for the first time, did
not mention any name. So why is the opposition so eager to appropriate
a name that may not be theirs?

The man, obviously,
did not go there to unfold a grand vision of governance; his mission
was to ruffle feathers, and serve notice the recent reverses in the law
courts did not mean all was lost. It was to rouse the sleeping warriors
to action and assure them that the federal might would be behind them
in the battle to defend their turf in Oyo and Ogun and contain the
expansion in Ondo, Ekiti and Osun States.

It was also to warn
the darling of the media in Lagos not to sit pretty. The Peoples
Deception Party wants Lagos badly. It is seen as Nigeria’s honey pot
that finances those acts of radicalism, sorry, rascality, of upturning
their hitherto carefully orchestrated plans to dominate the South West.
That’s why the Assemblage of Confused Nigerians and their friends in
the media are so angry with the president.