THE SELECTIVE SANCTITY OF SHAME —A Scathing Polemic on Media Hypocrisy and the Tinubu Exception Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
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President Bola Ahmed Tinubu |
"The Nigerian press, an institution that was once reputed as the last bastion of moral conscience, but now reduced to a mercenary machine of selective scrutiny, operating with calibrated silence and sophisticated cowardice."
.... "Let it be clear and unequivocal: the Nigerian press has now turned itself into an appendage of political manipulation, abandoning its once-honourable duty to inform, investigate, and expose."
In the grand amphitheatre of Nigerian politics, where truth is often strangled and falsehood enthroned, where sincerity is banished and hypocrisy paraded with pomp, nothing stings more painfully and dishearteningly than the biased theatre orchestrated by the Nigerian press, an institution that was once reputed as the last bastion of moral conscience, but now reduced to a mercenary machine of selective scrutiny, operating with calibrated silence and sophisticated cowardice.
The audacity of silence, the complicity of compromise, and the editorial prostitution that now define Nigeria’s mainstream media are best illustrated by their deafening hush whenever the name Bola Ahmed Tinubu is whispered or even shouted.
Let it be clear and unequivocal: the Nigerian press has now turned itself into an appendage of political manipulation, abandoning its once-honourable duty to inform, investigate, and expose. Today, it performs a shameful choreography of deception, dancing around truth with the elegance of a snake in search of warmth, slithering away from accountability while entwining itself in the comfort of complicity.
When Tinubu's name surfaces, the press becomes a sanctified altar where all transgressions are sacrificed for loyalty, not justice, and where the ethics of journalism are substituted with the economics of patronage.
If the roles were reversed and it was Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi whose secondary school of claim came into existence years after their alleged graduation, the media would have gleefully gone on a literary carnage. The headlines would be bloodthirsty; the columnists would dust off their vocabularies of contempt, and public discourse would be drenched in righteous indignation. There would be protests orchestrated by media-driven frenzy. Yet, in the case of Tinubu, this scandalous detail is quietly buried beneath the editorial carpets of complicity.
Why? Because it's Tinubu , the man for whom the press sacrifices its integrity upon the altar of favours, contracts, and brown envelopes, and who enjoys a mystifying exemption from the moral codes imposed on others.
Were it Atiku or Obi that tampered with their age records, shifting from 1946 to 1952 in a rather amateur performance of chronological acrobatics, the press would have had a field day. There would be syndicated editorials calling for public outcry, documentaries would flood primetime television, and online platforms would gleam with analytical eulogies of disgrace.
But because it is Tinubu, the Nigerian press sheathes its sword and hands him a laurel. The double standards are as grotesque as they are glaring , a brazen betrayal of the public trust.
If Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi had presented academic records with names bearing feminine titles, with contradictions as pungent as those from the so-called Chicago State University, with no classmates, no proper transcripts, and even carryovers with no resits or retakes, the media would have crucified them at dawn and incinerated them by dusk. “Forgery!” “Disqualification!” “Disgrace!” would have been the media mantra.
But since it is Tinubu, the press offers their silence as incense, their objectivity as sacrifice, and their ethics as burnt offering.
Now, ponder deeply: had Atiku or Obi forfeited millions of dollars due to alleged narcotics-related offences, as Bola Ahmed Tinubu did in the United States, they would have been convicted in the courtroom of Nigerian public opinion by a press that once prided itself on probity and fearlessness.
Yet, Tinubu walks on water; the press gazes in awe, drenched not in truth but in the murky waters of favours and fear, bathing in silence and drinking from the fountain of selective blindness. The same Nigerian media that should speak truth to power now whispers flattery to corruption.
If under the rule of Atiku or Peter Obi, Nigerians were met with the current economic catastrophe , the soaring inflation, the naira’s freefall, the petrol subsidy debacle, the brutal tax regime, and the apocalyptic cost of living , there would have been daily front-page assaults. The press would cry: “Impeach!” “Unfit to Lead!” But under Tinubu, the media becomes a circus of praise-singers. He is christened “Star Boy,” not for his performance but for his immunity from scrutiny and sanctification by omission.
This is the media of today: heavily biased, compromised, and prostituted by political lust. Anchormen now read scripts laced with lies; columnists are now conscripts in Tinubu's propaganda war. They masquerade as journalists but are nothing more than pen-pushers for the highest bidder, heralds of hypocrisy and scribes of sycophancy.
Let the dead speak. And so, the late Yinka Odumakin, a conscience too noble to be bought, spoke from beyond the grave in his fiery open letter to Bola Ahmed Tinubu , a letter now immortalised by truth and courage, and preserved as a historical indictment. The letter was written and published on October 20, 2020.
Odumakin challenged Tinubu's history as a man of multiple faces and fraudulent timelines. “I am Yinka Odumakin, and nobody can say he had known me under any other identity,” he thundered, drawing a clean line between his life of truth and Tinubu’s kaleidoscope of aliases and forgeries.
He scoffed at Tinubu’s laughable age claims: “The current governor of Osun is the son of your immediate elder sister and he is 63, while you claim to be 66. Your first wife died recently at 74.” By inference, Odumakin was strongly suggesting that Tinubu was at least born around 1946, which would make him approximately 79 years old today. In a country where mathematics is optional and memory is forbidden, these inconsistencies do not bother the press.
Odumakin continued with surgical precision: “There is no school I have attended that my classmates would not come out in droves to say we were together.” Tinubu, on the other hand, is a ghost graduate of ghost institutions. When Government College Ibadan old boys sought to honour him, no one could place his graduating set. The event was cancelled in embarrassment, swallowed by the shame of anonymity.
“My parents are not rich, but I am proud of them because from their black pot, my white palp emerged,” said Odumakin, throwing shade at Tinubu’s dubious family claims. Tinubu called one woman “Maami” for political optics, while those who truly knew her children laughed in disbelief and whispered tales of borrowed motherhood.
He mocked Tinubu’s rags-to-stolen-riches journey: “When you returned from exile in 1998, you had only the Sunday Adigun house. All four cars you used were borrowed from Ganiyu Solomon. I offered to print your campaign posters at 40% of what others charged. I delivered, and saved you 60%.” That is the anatomy of opportunism, the beginnings of an empire built on borrowed glory.
But perhaps most damning was his comment on Tinubu’s legendary greed: “There is hardly any boundary between Lagos State treasury and your private pockets.” The public vault is but a private purse in the reign of Tinubu, and the press watches, blindfolded by indulgence.
Odumakin exposed Tinubu’s double life, his alleged betrayal of the June 12 movement, his duplicity in the anti-third term campaign while secretly conspiring with Abacha's remnants. He reminded us how Tinubu described Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi as “Adiye ni Tokunbo, yin agbado fun a pada”, a chicken who turns at the sight of corn. Is that not the metaphor for the Nigerian media today? A gaggle of chickens chasing grains of gold, forgetting their calling and devouring their conscience.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “He who is cruel to truth becomes a slave to delusion.” Nigerian media today has become the wretched slave of delusion, trading truth for contracts and objectivity for brown envelopes, kneeling at the altar of access and dancing to the music of manipulation.
Friedrich Nietzsche thundered, “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” That is the tragedy of Nigerian journalism today: its credibility is in ruins, its voice for justice is now for sale, and its integrity auctioned off to the highest bidder.
If journalism is the fourth estate of the realm, then today it is a demolished estate, sold for a pot of porridge and fenced with complicity. This generation may forget, but history won’t. The grandchildren of these biased broadcasters and sycophantic scribes will one day ask: “Where were you when truth was bleeding?” And the silence of today shall be the shame of tomorrow.
Let it be known and eternally remembered: if Tinubu were Atiku or Obi, he would have been crucified long before INEC ever declared results. But in this democracy of double standards, Tinubu is not only spared, he is sanctified by the sins the press once condemned.
As George Orwell said in “Animal Farm”, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In the press parlance of Nigeria, all politicians are guilty, but some, like Tinubu, are simply too profitable to be held accountable.
And that, dear citizens, is the anatomy of a corrupted conscience, and the post-mortem of a prostituted press.
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