DEAL WITH IT, BBC AFRICA: PRESIDENT JONATHAN IS ON TIME MAGAZINE’S LIST OF 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS

Doing my pre-dawn DX-ing today, I listened as the British Broadcasting Corporation’s African Service,tried her age-old tactics of using her in-country Alsatians to take the fall for her when she tries to foist her typically insidious and biased opinions on the world. It was a stillborn attempt at obfuscating their real designs – another attempt at Nigeria bashing.

So President Jonathan made the list of 100 Most Influential Citizens and of course, since it is Nigeria, a posse of “why not my country” types at Bush House in London are belly-aching and seek to pooh-pooh the idea. That would never have been the case if that honour had gone to the President of any other country whose stature does not emasculate many a fragile African ego. What do I mean?

Well, in 2008 outgone President Kufuor of Ghana got the award and it sat well with BBC Africa. What was not clear was who or what Kufuor had influenced. Yes, alongside Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdulaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Kufuor was in the thick of driving the African Peer Review Mechanism and the New Partnership for African Development. Nothing more. If he was a good administrator, Ghanaians alone would be able to tell. I do not know how impacting the lives of people in a small country of 20 million people, assuming that every life was impacted, qualified him for a spot on the Top 100 List?

Indeed, in West and Central Africa of that 2000-2005 era, it was President Olusegun Obasanjo who ran the show. He forced a power-grabbing Faure Gnassingbe in Togo to stand down and seek power through elections rather than a brazen father-to-son succession which he attmpted following the death of his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema. During the same epoch, the President of Sao Tome and Principe was visiting Nigeria when his government was toppled in a coup. Obasanjo not only ordered the coupists to stand down or have the coup reversed by direct military action, he personally went with the Sao Tome President to take back power, alongside his Chief of Defence Staff and the Guards Brigade Commander.

Elsewhere in Guinea Bissau, a coup also got mounted by the military and Obasanjo flew to that country, banging his hands on the table, and telling the coupists to stand down or face a military invasion. The coupists stood down.

So who and what did Kufuor influence? But it sat well with the conclave of emasculated minnows who orchestrate these things at the BBC African Service because for them, anything edifying can come to any other African country but not to Nigeria where they already have too much going for them presumably.

Coincidentally and to prove how trashy it sometimes gets at the BBC African Service, even while the Foreign and Commonwealth Office continue to wonder why British diplomatic stocks are plummetting everyday in Nigeria, at that time when Obasanjo was playing the enforcer with so much effect, the BBC ran a poll to give threatened minnows an opportunity to vent their frustrations on Nigeria as always. The poll sought to know if “Nigeria was throwing her weight around too much”, a calculated attempt by the same clique at BBC Africa to instigate Africans against a well-meaning Nigerian Federal Government…a rehash of the biblical “who made you a king and a judge over us” which is supposedly the birthright of Britain.

So President Jonathan has the award today and an irrepressible and famously self-denigrating Nigerian stringer on the payroll of the BBC gets drafted as proxy, to attempt to shoot down the kite, so that it is not too obvious that the evil geniuses at BBC Africa are the hands behind the panic button who are up to their malevolent designs yet again.

Well, the obscure University of Abuja academic who was venting his ethnoregional spleen on the BBC tried to compare Jonathan to other names on the list such as Obama and the usual posse of big hitters. What the BBC did not quite remember was that when it was the turn of Kufuor to have his moment in the limelight, others who got recognised were not in the league of Ghana or Kufuor in any way – demographically, economically, politically or otherwise.

Indeed, what did Kufuor have in common with George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Al Gore, Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates, Hilary Clinton and Nelson Mandela, speaking influentially? Yet, the BBC did not raise a whimper because Ghana possibly threaten no fragile egos at BBC Africa.

Here is the plug. The top African voice which spoke in favor of Ouattarra during the Ivorian debacle and against Gaddafi during the Libyan Crisis was President Jonathan. President Zuma took a directly opposing stand. In both cases, President Jonathan won and Zuma lost. What else is influence about?

Last month, Mali’s military ousted the democratic government of that country. President Jonathan galvanised West Africa into instituting political and economic sanctions against the Malian junta. They have since recanted. That was leadership and influence at play there.

BBC staff read this blog by the dozen everyday. I am saying to you guys that until you set that grossly misused platform aright, your diplomats in Nigeria shall continue continue to labour in vain. That is why Britain, former colonial masters in Nigeria, have continued to fall further and further behind America in the perking order of countries which wield influence in Nigeria. Make friends, not enemies. There is no way that the Voice of America would so maliciously put out stupid and evil reports on a continuing basis.

BBC Africa are ACTIVELY destroying whatever is left of British goodwill in Nigeria. Get four of your own to review the pathetic output about Nigeria which has emanated from BBC Africa in 2012 alone and see how far removed it is from the much parroted journalistic balance which the BBC continue claim as organisational ethos.

If you need one good African to run that place, try Paul Bakibinga. Another pair of Africans of comparative seniority – Bola Mosuro and Hassan Arouni. If you need a white face, try one of Liz Blunt, Mark Doyle, Hillary Anderson, Barnaby Phillips or Dan Isaacs, even if some have left.

Pay them well and get qualitative hands working. The BBC appears to be a very stingy corporation and that is why your employers cannot seemingly retain the services of mature and balanced professionals. So you are now stuck with a glut of charlattans and jingoists who are adept at maligning the character of nations and who merely pretend to be world-class journalists just because they work for the BBC.