|
BNW |
|
B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Security onslaught on news media
SIR: The recent ancien-regime style raid of newsrooms by security elements too fixated on the old system was by no means unexpected; indeed it was the long-awaited kite to test the waters for the familiar straws that a sinking and degenerate hang-on-by-all-means dictatorship must permit itself to deploy.
The current rash of assaults on autonomous and independent institutions from the backwoods of Owu Kingdom to the open veranda of collective bargaining has, most depressingly, given the lie to the enthusiasm of those who would swear by this jaundiced and mis-shapen democracy, albeit the product of our collective blood and sweat and hope.
I believe Marx it was who identified this stage in the career of a degenerative state as the unmistakable symptom of an irreversible morbidity.
The rest of the script can be completed by any near novice: from now the PDP mutant of Nigeria's Relay of Reaction will predictably occupy itself with tactics and legislations tailored only to meet its own desperation for survival and self-justification!
We will see more of Abuja shadows in local government closets. Opponent states are very likely going to be captured or seized through the instrumentality of phony emergencies and non-existent or at best outdated colonial wayo-wayo regulations justified only by state orchestrated violence.
Professional praise singers will make song to glamorise this impending doom. As always with rulers and vacuous-minded regimes shorn of ideas, the poor will continue to take the blame for his poverty while the blameless government approaches its endgame with trademark bovine oblivion.
As for the warriors and advocates of the masses they would have found out that it was much too early to relax their guard and step down the state of the alert. But the big lesson in all of this is that the old regime is never to be trusted again. No Never Again.
It is important that the media retains the momentum in the impending battles ahead as aptly demonstrated by your editorial opinion of Wednesday, September 15, 2004.
Uruan Inyang,
Lagos.
|
|
||||||||||||
