NNPC At The Press Dinner

One of the predicaments in democratic dispensations is the inherent inadequacies of institutions created as pillars of public accountability, rule of law, transparency and such other binding principles and policies. As a human creation, democracy comes along with the spots of imperfection in its conception and practice even as humanity tends to assume that “civilisation” is a certificate of expertise and excellence in thought and practice. Today we are witnesses to the many pitfalls, booby traps and even banana peels that expose the veiled vices of democracy in virtually all sectors.

While enough has been said and written about the concerns and crises associated with flawed outputs of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary especially in the media, not much highlight and critical analysis has been applied to the defective excesses of the press as an adopted “honorary” arm of government tasked with oversight and evaluation functions to keep others on their toes.

One does not have to look far for evidence of professional “mischief” especially with the advent of so-called social media, the latest aberration with despicable anti-social excesses. When “news” reports are published with heavy dose of propaganda choking the professional and ethical specifications with licentious impunity, journalism’s “yellow” hue pollutes the perception of the random reader who cannot “read between the lines”. Masked with the deceptive façade of news, yellow reports fail the test of credibility by leaving more questions unanswered in crude concoctions of sweeping statements, unsubstantiated allegations, unwarranted insinuations and contrived deductions.

A typical example of such pranks is playing out in the publication of purported “scandal” in the simple cancellation of an NNPC dinner arranged to host members of the National Assembly. The cancellation of a dinner is the remotest activity of public interest in the exclusively high end crude oil based, foreign exchange income generating and petroleum powered strategic national economic resource sufficiency agenda of NNPC. Even the cancellation of a dinner for federal legislators cannot be sensibly accorded serious consideration in NNPC affairs to warrant the scale of imaginative misrepresentation and manipulation of issues deployed by some “news” outlets to propagate hideous motives and corrupt implications against the NNPC management with unavoidable collateral damage to the legislators.

The unblemished account of events given by the NNPC is that a long outstanding proposal to host members of the National Assembly to a dinner that had been twice postponed due to unforeseen circumstances, suffered another force majeure (to use oil company lingo) necessitating postponement yet again. No more, no less! But the press hackers churned out press-dinner of disinformation and defamation against the NNPC and its management by mischievously fabricating “ethical questions”, “moral implications” and “unsavoury controversies” around the administrative routine issue.

Deliberately shutting out the factual incidental history of two unrelated postponements of the NNPC dinner earlier in April and August this year, the plagued outlets dished out paragraphs of propaganda projecting a failed bid by NNPC to bribe the National Assembly honourable members to obtain a favourable outcome to “an impending probe” of NNPC GMD Maikanti Baru by the Senate, over allegations against him by the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, ‘some weeks back’! Hamid Hendrix, Ilorin