What price the Westminster model?

Phillip Isakpa

Readers must pardon me for, exceptionally, taking the privilege of this page to engage in some autobiography. This is because, probing in my archives, I have discover that my first column in Business Day appeared seven years ago this week. It was originally monthly, and then became for a period more irregular, but for the last two years exactly it has been weekly every Thursday. Even then it was in diary format, although sometimes I featured one subject, but for the last few months it has been purely a column.
These milestones have caused me to reflect on the nature of journalism, bearing in mind that I am already starting to brace myself to commemorate next year my fifty years in the profession. I began, as a history graduate extremely wet behind the ears, as Assistant editor on a magazine called Building Materials Components and Equipment, which was principally to obtain some kind of experience. This involved frequent tedium, writing features on wood and metal-framed window or the physical and aesthetic diversity to be found in sanitary fittings, but it gave me a permanent sensitivity to the nature of architecture and buildings.
From there I moved to a weekly generalist magazine called The Sphere, which prominently featured photographs: I wrote the words that went round them. This not only gave me a greater sense of the visual importance of photos in journalism, and their value in making up pages, but stimulated an interest in contemporary world history as opposed to the arcane Anglo-Norman medievalism which had preoccupied me at Oxford. I supervised a page called Voice of the Commonwealth that took me to a series of African constitutional conferences for countries such as Uganda and Kenya, and the break-up of the Central African Federation, which gave me my first insights into African politics. The desire to know more of this world led me to a job at West Africa magazine in January 1963, in the week of the arrest of Tony Enahoro in Chiswick and the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio. From where I never looked back, even while acutely aware from the beginning that it’s a funny old profession.

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These musings have also been provoked by the extraordinary collective nervous breakdown of the whole British political class over the abuse of expenses of parliamentarians. A friend of mine in Nigeria, talking over the phone, dismissed the affair as much ado about nothing compared with the approach to allowances of the parliamentarians in Abuja. A British businessman, however, bemoaned to be that it made it hard for any of us in Britain to lecture African countries on corruption (as we are wont to do). What price the Westminster model? he said. But the affair highlights the fact that it is possible for one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph , to set the political agenda for several weeks, and effectively trigger what may become a complete shake-up in British political life.

This is a strange state of affairs, and in the present feeding frenzy, the fact that the whistle-blower’s middleman received £100,000 for his vast dossier has been buried (or forgiven), even while it is acknowledged to be a case of the erstwhile deplored chequebook journalism. It is also an indication that on occasion the media can derive new power from Freedom of Information legislation, which is increasingly being adopted globally as an exercise in extending democracy. Combined with the revolution deriving from the Internet with all its baggage of blogs, social websites, and other new phenomena, which some see as further evidence of a new form of democratisation, we are now in uncharted territory.
There have been warnings for some time that this may not necessarily be good for the health of the media, or indeed for democracy. A little over a year ago in this column I reviewed a book called Flat Earth News which flashed alarm signals over the way in which new technology, combined with rampant commercialism and new techniques of spin were debasing the traditional newspapers as we know them. I am reminded of this by a new book called Beyond the Banking Hall, by Kabir Dangogo, who has had a distinguished career in public relations in the Nigerian banking sector. This is an instructive account of his fifteen years in the business and has been commended by Dr Shamsuddeen Usman as a manual for practitioners from the fountain of someone who has seen it all. It is more than this, however, as Kabir has great familiarity with the Nigerian media and it often reads like a personal memoir, as well as providing fascinating detail from inside the banking world. Having had interludes in my own career practising public relations for international organisations, I sympathise with his preaching of ethical public relations even if it may sound to some as being as much of an oxymoron as military intelligence. Even in the age of spin you can still defend an institution without telling untruths.