Tunde Thompson

He was one of the two
journalists that were jailed under the draconian Decree No 4, promulgated and executed in 1984 by the Federal Military Government of Nigeria headed by General Mohammadu Buhari. Today, Tunde Thompson is on the media team of President Buhari and is a card carrying member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.
Opaka Dokubo spoke with the iconic journalist in Asaba, Delta State where Mr Thompson was the guest speaker at the public lecture organised by the Delta State Council of the NUJ to wrap up their 2015 press week. excerpts:

Being on the media team of President Buhari
Well, all I know is that there is nothing between me and the now president Muhammadu Buhari, it was the state. The state decided that A and B had written what they should not have written and there was a security law that you can be locked up for six months in the first instance, there fore we should be subjected to that punishment.
There are impressions that the diplomatic stories that I wrote which Nduka partly contributed to because I gave my manuscript to him when I was travelling, for my grandmothers’ burial. What I’m saying is that there was some security risk in all that but those are not issues to start talking about now. I was not aware of those security risks.
It was also simple as saying, you said you were going to run a government of national unity, you have named eight ambassadors and six or seven of them are from the north”. When I wrote about those who were named high commissioners and ambassadors, I was not thinking about state of origin. But may be some people queried the government about most of the people coming from one part of the country. May be that’s why they took it  seriously.
But I was surprised because as a senior diplomatic correspondent, I was defending my country. I remember I was in one embassy and they were about Nigeria closing its mission there and I said to them that diplomacy is also business and a government can decide to close its embassy if the returns were not encouraging.
Reconcile Buhari the military dictator and Buhari the democrat
I don’t even think that Buhari was a military dictator, I don’t think he was. I was one of those who supported some of the things he did, especially the War Against Indiscipline.
Nobody can tell me that it was dictatorship to decide that we should adopt the queen culture, we should learn to tend our environment such that there will be sanitation consciousness.
Like now, some people helped themselves to too much of the country’s money and the rest of us that the leaders represented under Buhari were not happy about it.
Circumstance, can smile on you, you don’t know whether you will survive or not, but you have to be a man. The coup leaders told Buhari that he should be the leader because they saw in him the qualities of one who would be a head of state of Nigeria as a military Leader, the same thing that the APC saw in him and decided to make him a presidential candidate. It was not easy, it was a big battle but this is one who has been exposed, he has had experiences in various aspects of our national life.
There is nothing you can hold on to so much to say that he was a dictator.
Do you see him performing as much as he did under the military?
The man has shown you that he can perform because the previous government  did a lot of bad bad things like Fela would say. If you were to find out how much of Nigeria’s wealth are in private hands now, may be 80% minimum…
If you were to find out why even the East / West Road wasn’t done, you’ll know that the reasons were very very uncomplimentary. There was not enough commitment to patriotism and achievement of excellence.
I 2011, I voted for Jonathan but when put side by side Buhari, I said no way, I will never vote for Jonathan where Buhari was a candidate and when I saw that they were trying to malign him, ridicule him, embarrass him, put him into irrelevance, and they were using Decree No 4 (of 1984) to discourage his participation or even standing as a presidential candidate, I said to them, look its 31 years, he may have proved that he is a patriot, he has struggled three times to be president of this country, almost like Abraham Lincolu of the United States of America who ran eleven times. The man has tried and all the allegation you’re making about him, you can’t even prove them. I have forgiven the man, So those talking about Decree 4, that’s 31 years ago, let us see the quality in him that even make him have confidence in himself to want to stand as a candidate. You have to have confidence to be able to stand three, four times to be chosen. And he didn’t succeed before because all the parties under which he participated before didn’t have the national spread. The PDP founders were very clever, very smart in their thinking, they needed a party that had a spread across Nigeria. That’s where  they got their initial advantage. All other parties didn’t think that way. They didn’t think of a national presence in leadership. PDP took that into consideration from the word go.
Those people who decided that APC advantages which PDP had are the best thinkers in Nigerian politics of the modern age and they should be appreciated. Even God almighty inspired them into thinking that way.
As someone who had been on the receiving end of an anti-press, anti-freedom legislation, what do you  make of  the frivolous petitions bill  in the senate.
I support any attempt to check indiscipline, to check lack of ethical consciousness in the practice of any profession including Journalisms. Me that you see here, somebody had written on the internet that I had died about ten, fifteen years ago. I was not interested in pursuing the matter by suing them or something. But I had an experience of what the present legislators are trying to check.
You’re a journalists but you’re not supposed to be reckless; you’re a journalist, you’re not supposed to make false allegations; you’re a journalists, your duty is not to run any person down or to try to put anyone into disrepute at all. So self censorship still remains a preferable way of getting journalists to behave in the right way. You have to censor yourself, you have to know the rules of journalism. You’re not supposed to behave like a warrior who is out to spoil everything for the opponent. No. the journalists is not a politician. It is not a bad idea for some legislators at the federal level, at the state level to say let’s check it because you wont know it until it hits you.
Nevertheless, we can never return to Decree No 4 level. It was people who never wanted government to remain popular and to stop critics from hiting out at the government which Buhari headed that misled the administration at the ministry of Justice level.
Those who act in the name of government are different from government because they sell ideas to government and government is too busy to think about the ideas that are sold to them. And even the president, the ministers, commissioners may not have been informed or be aware of the intricacies of  some of the moves that are being made or contemplated. So, Decree 4 may be one of them,
Even Buhari, I never saw a place where he signed that Thompson should be arrested for writing about this. All I know is that they did not give us a chance to even make self defence. That’s not good. I will like to advise government not to conclude that anybody is guilty without even listening to the person.
I will advise (the senators ) to take it easy, not to think about all these draconian laws that are meant to keep people in check.
Excuse me, no condition is permanent. If you make a law now to protect  yourself as public servants from unjust criticism, are you going to be there forever? So, its better to make a law without even thinking of your own personal benefit. I hear that some of the senators, after the saraki matter started, they were talking about looking immunity law. The president, the Vice President, the governors, I don’t even know about the  deputies, that can enjoy immunity. The President of the senate, the speaker of the House are part of the people.
They must talk to the people and the people will talk to them. So they cant be above any law. As for the citizens that they want to check who are journalist, I would say all this provision of putting people in jail for two years
…they just have to take it easy. They have to be less ambitious in the prosecutorial range of the bill so that they can win some public support. A law maker is only as popular as he makes himself and his laws. Why should we make laws that will put us in a ridicule? Are we the only country that are exposed to the new media?
So, let us make laws against malicious of character, against factless reporting.
Your report must be factual, your opinionation must be based evidence acquired though careful investigation. I am saying that if  you have to stop those things, you don’t have to put somebody in jail for two years or make all sorts of demands that will give the impression that you ‘re a draconinan legislator.  They don’t even know that a legislature that wants to be draconian will not be aided by  a president who wants to be democratic because the president does not have to sign a bill that is outrageous in its aspiration.
We should not allow people who have narrow constructions in their minds to make laws that will put all of us in a ridiculous context within the contemporary world.
Even as a member  of the APC, how do you see the state of opposition politics in Nigeria?
It is not right for opposition parties just to keep criticising everything, running down people in authority just because  they want to be noticed as being in opposition.  There are times you have to be sincere to yourself.  Imagine the election that has been concluded in Kogi State now, eeh they’re going to rig, eeh everybody is trying to rig…
They accused the party in authority at the centre of wanting to do one evil or the other.  That’s too much.  Some of the accusations are untested, they’are unsubstantiated.  We’ve finished Kogi and we have had Bayelsa and you can see that the rivalry in Bayelsa has always been there.  I can say, undemocratically so because some of them decided to put their trust in weapons of mass destruction instead of social intercourse, democratic interrlationship, persuation, convincing people that you’re a better candidate debates and so on.