THE minister for Information and National Orientation has confirmed that his national media tour extravaganza will cost a whopping 1.07 billion Naira of tax payer money. According to him, in a BBC Hausa service interview which was reported by some national newspapers, journalists among his 75 man crew, belches N20,000.00 per person in every two days. The minister further stated that the cost of his tour is very considerate and cost effective, in the sense that the local population can now feel the meaning of democracy and hold their leaders accountable. Jerry Gana and the designers of his road-show infamy, knows that their story and rationale for the monumental waste is simply a white wash and does not convince anybody including the beneficiaries of that tour of shame. Professor Jerry Gana’s public career, which spanned through the Babangida’s MAMSER days to the infamous contraption of the Interim National Government and Abacha’s primitive Junta have been characterized by sterile rhetoric and uninspiring slogans. Has Nigerian public life not been dominated by rudimentary theatrics and clairvoyant showmanship, Professor Jerry Gana wouldn’t have been too annoyingly durable in public life. 

For an academic which the minister is, to believe that an average of two days stay in state capital to inspect road and related projects would bring the long suffering population to the main stream of popular participation and development agenda is a cruel remark to hoe deep we have sunk in deception and debauchery. Jerry Gana should tell Nigerians any other country in the world where a guided media tour is undertaken, to show the largely meaningless rhetoric of democracy dividends. The poor though of the administration which is now, most vainly manifested in Jerry Gana’s fours is to believe that physical structure are the meaning of development and democracy. The proper functioning of public institution and the due process arising there of, with the concomitant public confidence in public institutions is the primary definition of democracy while the development of physical structures is the derivative of a social order, characterized by political stability and democratic consensus.

The sustenance of public physical structures is maintained through ethical decorum of civic responsibility arising from the inter-play of transparent institutional effectiveness and social consensus. The challenge of responsible governance in a thoroughly corrupt public life like ours, with its attendant loss of popular confidence is to search for a modality of renewal, through the designing of a value frame work which will hold as a standard etiquette of national conduct at least in public affairs. Jerry Gana four has reinforced profligacy and waste as a standard and tolerable way of public life and further underscored the lucrativeness of public service. Could Jerry Gana in all honesty permit his head of public affairs to undertake such money guzzling tour, if he has a private company, when there are better ways if reaching his target audience. One thing that is amazing is that there is no single voice of reason in that national executive council to bring home to the Minister of Information and his acolytes the waste and assault on public sensibility, which his ill thought jamboree will bring among discerning Nigerians. Perhaps, other members of the council are executing similar wasteful jamboree, without public knowledge but come to think of it, should even the President object to Gana’s lazy media tour, when the President himself has burnt out sizeable foreign exchange on similar foreign tours, which brought nothing to Nigerians. The administration is gradually making democracy look like a fraud and one in which the perpetrators do not even need to disguise it.

The pathological irony of Jerry Gana’s media tour and its irrationality rests on the fact that the same media which he purportedly lumbers around with, is awash with editorials, commentaries and news on the worsening state of power supplies, rising trend of armed robberies and general insecurity, increasing incidence of corrupt practice among public holders and the deepening malaise of State ineptitude. Their editorial recommendations are very sweeping and thorough; fundamental reappraisal of the Nigerian project and not isolated reform gestures. Professor Jerry Gana himself is acutely aware of the damming media judgement on the government. He exploded in fury, just few weeks before the commencement of his four extravaganza that the media is "a bad examiner". There is no serious media organization in the country that does not have correspondents in every part of the country. 

Therefore, the media does not need Gana’s guided tour to appraise the situation on the ground. The mass of the people of Nigeria, whom Gana claims that his media tour will improve their judgement of the administration, is equally a non-starter. A wise saying runs, that you could tell a blind man whether there is oil in a soup but he does not need your help to know whether there is salt or not in it. Whether Professor Gana thought that he could convince Nigerians that the government performs, when they live with the daily experiences of constant power failure, dry taps and empty boreholes where they exist, tales of bizarre corrupt practice among office holders, illustrated in their obscene life styles, insecurity of lives and properly etc. is a matter of private deception and the fancies of his acolytes. The minister’s media tour has revealed that the current administration is in whole ideological thrall with the corrupt military autocrats that negotiated it to power. What it means to Nigerian is that the country is yet to be wrestled out of the grip of these notorious gangsters, whose only meaning of patriotism is primitively accumulated wealth, irresponsible exercise of power and crude peddling of influence. 

In the seemingly hopeless situation that we are, it is possible to fancy a return of the military as the only way to ebb out a bankrupt administration whose insidious ploy is to perpetrate itself in power. But that is an option that is fraught with even greater danger as our experience have shown. Cursed as our situation seemed to be, the civic power bound in a collectivity is more potent than bayonets. The peoples of Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Vietnam and even neighboring Ivory Coast have demonstrated that a people bound by common suffering and the affliction of bad government can through a common effort bring a change that will improve their lives.

Professor Jerry Gana’s 1.07 billion media tour is surely repugnant to common sense and elementary logic, but even that might be a tip of the ice-bag of the monumental waste orchestrated by a government which bandies itself about as "democratically elected" Had the legislature not been another conclave of waste of public funds, Jerry Gana wouldn’t have had opportunity to yanks his tales of "democracy dividends", while riding roughshod on our collective integrity.

October 2001