“Were you in love with her?” “What advice do you have for the youths?” Listening to the questions being asked of the good looking, well dressed young man surrounded by cameras and microphones, one might have thought he was a newly evicted housemate on Big Brother Naija or a contestant on Love Island. In fact, he was the primary suspect in a brutal rape-murder that shocked the nation 2 months ago.
Not a few outraged reactions followed the circus that was the public parading of Ezekiel Frank Uduak Akpan by the Akwa Ibom State police command in May. Justifiably, most of the anger was reserved for the press coterie who – save for the notable exception of Amaka Okoye of Arise TV – insisted on asking the most asinine, unconscionable questions such as those above. The real issue in my opinion however, was missed.
This issue was revisited with the recent murder of SuperTV CEO Michael Usifo Ataga. This time, there was no seated suspect surrounded by gormless reporters asking the grinning occupant of the chair if they were in love with the person they allegedly murdered. The similarities however, were unmistakable, with Chidinma Ojukwu channeling her inner Frank Akpan to become a media attraction, delivering many hours worth of recorded video content to feed the monster that I sometimes refer to as “Newstertainment.”
Why on earth does this weird spectacle exist?
The real issue linking Frank Akpan’s media circus and that of Chidinma Ojukwu is this – why does the Nigeria Police Force give the media access to suspects? Why do people who have not actually been formally charged with anything in court find themselves “paraded” in front of cameras, microphones and journalists asking every kind of question under the sun, from the sensible to the absurd?
In the case of Frank Akpan, this macabre spectacle actually served to assist the compromised Akwa Ibom State police command in its mission to bungle the case and set up the 20 year-old Akpan as the sole suspect. Were it not for the efforts of yours truly and Isine Ibanga – which led to the DSS taking over the case from the police – it might very well have turned out that the fact of his being “paraded” would have prejudiced the outcome of the investigation.
Correct me if I am wrong here – is this not the exact opposite of what a police investigation exists to do? Are the police not supposed to be invested in finding out the facts of a case and prosecuting it accordingly, and not merely following narratives and providing content for the “Newstertainment” mill? I was under that impression, so if wrong someone should be kind enough to correct me. Perhaps my expensive education was subpar and incomplete. I am always open to learning.
The constitutional question
Then of course, there is the issue of whether “parading suspects” has any basis in Nigerian law. The thing about Nigerian law in its glorious ambiguity is that if you ask 5 lawyers a question about a point of awareness, you can often get 5 different (and sometimes conflicting) answers. As my lawyer friend Solomon Igberaese always tells me, legality is generally established by testing laws in court and using the resulting case law precedent.
For this reason, I have been hesitant to state outright that this practise is illegal and unconstitutional. In between shooting 99 unarmed protesters dead at Lekki Toll Plaza and banning Twitter access in Nigeria via a press release from Lai Mohammed, Nigeria has taught me over the past year that “legality” is often pretty much whatever those with power decide it is. And anyway, as many were keen to point out in the good old pre-Lekki-Massacre days of 2020, “David Hundeyin is not a lawyer.”
Far be it from me to read the publicly available 1999 constitution and interpret the clearly written “Innocent until proven guilty” clause as prima facie basis to suggest that turning uncharged suspects into media content mills is in fact plainly illegal and unconstitutional. No doubt the Nigeria Police Force is acting in good faith, as it is famed for doing.
Who cares about Usifo Ataga’s family in all of this anyway? The content must come first. And if a BusinessDay columnist points out that this entire treatise is a sordid symbol of Nigeria’s total disconnect from civility and rule of law, you can just point out that he is not a lawyer. What does he know anyway?
