LESSONS FROM AGAINST THE RUN OF PLAY (1)

Little changes overtime can have big effect, writes Emmanuel Ojeifo

With the exception of politicians and frontline political parties, no group has done more soul searching since the 2015 presidential election than journalists. And the reason is simple. The media played perhaps the most significant role in the high and low moments of that democratic transition. Some people say the election was first won in the media before it was won at the polling booth. With his recently published book, Against the Run of Play (2017), Olusegun Adeniyi has continued to focus the attention of the public on that watershed in our political evolution as a nation. The book retells familiar stories with new eyes and unusual insight. It aggregates in gripping prosaic narrative style the constellation of factors behind the defeat of an incumbent democratic president, for the first time in Nigeria’s political history.

As expected, Adeniyi proves, once again, to be Nigeria’s king of suspense reportorial journalism, as he has done with his weekly column in THISDAY newspaper for the past two decades. He elevates the reportorial component of journalism – that part that sends out people to gather and verify facts (what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel once called the Journalism of Verification) – to a level of prominence, and adopts it as the standard for disciplined and transparent journalism. When I first met Adeniyi in 2012 in his office at Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre, as our conversation unfolded, he described himself not as a journalist but as a “field reporter.” He loves field journalism where he simply gathers information and reports what he has observed. Although it is nearly impossible for the journalist to avoid imposing unconscious bias and subjectivity into the storyline, Adeniyi often succeeds in refraining from interfering with the plot. He simply sketches the story and leaves his readers to tease out the hidden message.

Since its official launch, Adeniyi’s book has been a hotbed of controversy and critical reviews in the public space. The political thriller has woken up sleeping dogs, with many of the political dramatis personae itching to tell their own sides of the story. For Nigeria’s democracy, this is a plus. Democracy grows through constant exchange of ideas in the public square, and Adeniyi’s book can seriously help to generate the needed temperature for the kind of political engineering that could redeem our nation. I have read the 204-paged book from cover to cover, and I can bet on it. It is a book you cannot afford to put down until you flip over the very last page. Adeniyi writes with a seductive effect. He holds you in palpable suspense as you hurriedly flip over to the next page, eager to know what will happen. As you do this, you’re bound to hold your breath as he takes you on a journey through familiar paths with new eyes.

The book comes across to me as a dispassionate bystander’s account of one of Africa’s historic democratic transitions, and how both triumph and defeat coincide in the denouement. On the question of democratic transitions in Africa, Adeniyi happens to be a rising expert. After his three-year stint as presidential spokesman (2007–2010), he took up a Fellowship at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, where his research culminated in a monograph on factors that shape incumbent democratic transitions in Africa. One imagines that the idea of writing Against the Run of Play is the result of a fertilisation of ideas from his Harvard period. Interestingly, it is in this new book that Adeniyi fully showcases his mastery of the art of political story telling. He is an umpire, a reporter, a juggler of both sensitive and sensational information, and a wordsmith, who tries to remove himself from the picture so that his characters are clearly amplified. I am pretty sure that the book will add a great wealth of knowledge to the growing library of books that critically analyse Nigeria and Nigerian politics.

In exposing how a series of contested factors, political intrigues, fatal errors, careless miscalculations and unresolved blunders led to the ouster of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party from power, only 16 years after the party’s nauseating boast of holding power hostage for 60 years, Adeniyi shows that little things really matter, and that often, little causes have bigger, unforeseen effects. This sociological realism has been explored in great detail by one of America’s most gifted reporters, Malcolm Gladwell in his 2002 book, Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a Big Difference. According to Gladwell, the best way to understand the emergence of phenomenal social changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Epidemics, according to Gladwell, exhibit three distinguishing characteristics. One: they are highly contagious. Two: little changes can have big effects. Three: that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment.

Whether they are fashion trends, diseases, behavioural patterns or political revolutions, to appreciate the power of epidemics we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that, sometimes, big changes often follow from small and insignificant events; and that sometimes these changes can happen quickly. Gladwell’s theorisation helps us to understand that political disasters, like plane crashes, are more likely to be the result of a steady accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions. One mistake is made and it is not corrected, and it leads to another blunder that by itself is not really much of a problem. Then another mistake is made on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all these blunders that leads to disaster. That is how to understand the constellation of issues that threw Dr. Jonathan out of the Villa and the triumph of President Buhari. But herein lies the crucial lesson for Buhari and the verdict that ominously hangs over his wobbling government. He is repeating the same mistakes of the past.

DEMOCRACY GROWS THROUGH CONSTANT EXCHANGE OF IDEAS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE, AND ADENIYI’S BOOK CAN SERIOUSLY HELP TO GENERATE THE NEEDED TEMPERATURE FOR THE KIND OF POLITICAL ENGINEERING THAT COULD REDEEM OUR NATION