Coup Plot: A Note of Caution for The Media, By Richard Akinnola

Since the army authorities came out last week to confirm the detention of some army officers over alleged coup plot, there have been a number of media stories regarding the alleged roles played by some of the officers.

While many of us are unreservedly opposed to any coup plot or military intervention in our governance, l think some of these stories against some of the officers are prejudicial and amount to media trial. We saw a bit of similar show in 1995 when the Abacha government falsely accused Generals Obasanjo, Shehu Yar’Adua and others of what turned out to be a phantom coup plot. A number of fallacious claims against them were dished to media, which turned out to be false.

Few days after the Orkar coup of April 22, 1990, a journalist with Concord, Onoise Osunbor was arrested as a suspect because he lived with one of the suspects at Ikeja Cantonment and being a journalist, he was naturally suspected to have been the person who must have written the coup speech for them. It didn’t occur to the investigators that such a badly written speech couldn’t have been written by a senior journalist.
On June 6, 1990, l wrote a letter to Col. Haliru Akilu, who was the Director of DMI, seeking an audience with him. Two days after, June 8, he replied through his military assistant, Major ID Akinyemi, inviting me for a meeting on Monday, June 11 at the Bonny Camp. This was followed up with other meetings.

It took a couple of meetings by some of us – myself, late Ladi Lawal, Kayode Komolafe, Owei Lakemfa, with Col. Akilu, at both the DMI office, Bonny Camp and SSS office, Ikoyi to get Onoise out of detention.

While l concede the media have the right to get the people informed by virtue of section 39 of the 1999 constitution, despite this provision, there is a need to balance this with the right of the accused to fair trial, particularly regarding pre-trial publicity, otherwise known as PTP.
As M. Hermida posits, with PTP, “there is a possibility jurors have been exposed to prejudicial information which would be taken into account in determining a defendant’s guilt. This would render a trial unfair. When the media disrupt a criminal trial in this way, they pervert the judicial process and threaten the administration of justice”. See -Hermida, M. (1995), Trial by Tabloid. St. Thomas Law Review, 7, 197-216.

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Katie Sambrooks of Cardiff University, in emphasizing on this, made reference to the popular Taylor and Taylor case where she said:”In this case, two sisters were convicted of stabbing to death, the wife of Michelle Taylor’s lover. The Court of Appeal described the publicity surrounding the case as ‘unremitting, extensive, sensational, inaccurate and misleading’. For example, The Sun had published the headline:The “killer” mistress who was at lover’s wedding. The court concluded that it was ‘impossible to say that the jury were not influenced in their decision by what they read in the press’, and was therefore satisfied that the conviction was unsafe. Their lawyer believed that a jury would have been unable to ignore the ‘unrelenting, collective pressure from the media “. See (Davies, N. (1994). The newspapers which hounded the Taylor sisters. www.nickdavies.net/1994/11/01.

Meanwhile, we shall continue our advocacy against military rule. It has no place in our political development. Military governments are evil and retrogressive.