Reporting Nigeria
Their testimony has been less than flattering as their reports have been published in the papers. Most devastating was the Sunday Telegraph's 'Nigeria's Reign Of Terror' - Andrew Phillips reports from Lagos on the ruthless, repressive and brutal regime that Dikko narrowly escaped...
In the report which was very critical of Gen. Buhari's SMC, an unnamed western diplomat in Lagos was quoted as saying: "If they had got Dikko back, they would have grilled him for a week to get his confession and then tied him to a post on Bar Beach and shot him."
The new decrees which have mandatory death sentences for a whole range of offences came in for scathing comment as well as Decree No. 4. Some excerpts from the report:
"The educated Nigerians, who may have been glad to see the back of the corrupt Shagari Government in the New Year's Eve coup, are already fearful of the increasingly authoritarian drift of the 'young general' now in power. You can see from their faces, you can read it in their newspapers, which are Government controlled and do not dare to criticise.
"Two journalists have just gone to jail for a year apiece for writing a story that did not please their leaders.
"But that is child's play compared with other things the Buhari junta has done: secret military tribunals have been packing former officials in the deposed government off to jail for a minimum of 21 years for alleged corruption. There is no appeal and, so far, sentences totalling 200 years have been handed out.
"The death sentence, by firing squad, is now mandatory for a whole range of offences, from armed robbery (an 18-year-old has just been condemned) to counterfeitings and 'tampering' with electricity or telephone cables. Altogether, about 18 different offences mean death by shooting in Nigeria, and many others jail for 21 years including, of all things, cheating at examinations if you are over 18..."
While many would read the Telegraph report with some sympathy for Nigeria coming as it did from the right wing paper, The Guardian's report: 'Reporting The Truth Can Be An Offence', might prove to be more damning in the eyes of the liberals who have generally been accommodating towards the Buhari regime.
Writing on Decree No. 4, Ad'Obe Obe wrote that the Nigerian press which had the reputation of being the most free in Africa, was trying to live with a new law which made it an offence to publish the truth. The report recalled the words of Gen. Buhari in the early days of the coup that the active Nigerian press was a 'weakness' of the society and his claim that Nigerians had a way of abusing liberties. It also recalled Gen. Buhari's proclaimed anger at the way the press had reported the alleged misappropriation of $2.8bn of oil money in 1979 when he was Federal Commissioner of Petroleum.
History was made, the report concluded, when two journalists of the Nigerian Guardian, were jailed for professional activities in independent Nigeria.
Other reports referred to Nigeria being turned into "one gigantic parade ground and the soldiers being more concerned with military drills than any knowledge about where they are taking the country to".
The consolation for the Nigerian press surely is that at least the indepen- dent side of it has been equally scathing in its condemnation of Decree No. 4 and the new wholesale death penalty decrees.
