COMMENTARY IS CHEAP

 Has it ever occurred to you that “columnist” rhymes with “communist” and, if you care to think about it, “calumnies” too? I realized this very recently while surveying the multitude of scribblers who make a habit (and a sneaky living, I suspect) of foisting their views on all and sundry. The galling fact also is that they do it without the least excuse!

I mean, you plunk your hard earned naira for a newspaper expecting, of course, to be informed about the latest goings on in the global square, and what do you get? Too little of the main fare, and a load of drivel masquerading as articulate reasoning by people who imagine that license is the same as fine sense.

Okay, I have to draw the line at this point. My beef is not with genuine writers handing out special insight on particular subjects, say, health and life style, sports, literature and the like.   I am angry instead with the large crowd of opinion peddlers, ever ready as they are, to pollute the public space and peace with jaundiced, half-boiled analyses. They must have something to say, it seems, on the latest fiasco or fantasy in the polity. The entire nation too must know about their views. Nonetheless, the huge majority of them add nothing worthwhile to the debates, but empty posturing couched in stylish prose. These are the certified opinion-ists who proudly lay claim to the dubious title of public affairs analysts or commentators.  Only in Nigeria has that become a career description!

Yet, their peculiar job title explains the trade by what it does not say; that “public affairs” is No Man’s Land, mercenary territory of a kind, where the weapons of choice are a weighty dictionary and a prolific pen.

Going through the vast array of daily commentaries that are sold to the public on the touted erudition of some established editorial board types and their news and features desk imitators, I have come to appreciate the inelegant conclusion of the American writer, John Cheever. He it was, who famously observed that opinions are like that part of your body that is noteworthy for its very odorous functions. Everyone has them, of course, but to what avail, when they all smell?

Stand Cheever on his cheeky head, and you might reach some startling conclusions of your own. Society needs opinion peddlers of every description, in quite the same way the human body needs that malodorous organ: to relieve it of noxious wastes for the good health and well-being of the entire system. So, their “jaundiced analyses” are the societal equivalents of excretal matter resulting from the natural exertions of the body politic.

Society would be the worse for it, if we did not have the professional commentators amongst us to vent their petty passions, fears and frustrations with random assaults on logic and common sense. Theirs too is part of the general jaw-jaw that is acclaimed to be better than war-war.

One does observe however, that there is an aspect of the Bolshevik in every writer who has a private pulpit- a column- for regular sermons to the masses. I am not alluding to the radical import or otherwise of the discourses. The communist factor exists obliquely in the hunger to share, albeit not food and shelter but that sense of what is wrong that needs to be put right for the good of all. This is the spirit, I suspect, in which born-again Christians regale each other with their understanding and interpretation of Scripture.

But, too often, something else is lurking behind the stage curtains; a demon from the dark soul of humanity. It manifests in the lust to dominate, to rule or colonize and the territory has not been staked out anywhere that is pricier than the public mind. This is the battle ground for the analysts, commentators, editorial writers and spin doctors on every side of the social and political divides. Remember the six men of Hindustani, who went to see an elephant though all of them were blind? Their descendants abound everywhere.

What they have done in the free arena of the Nigerian media is reduce public discourse to a rowdy contest of shouting orators. You can hardly hear the oration for the commotion, be it the albatross of the PDP zoning principle, the lingering marginalization of various groups in the country, or whatever. Besides, their conclusions reek constantly of entrenched social and political myopia.

Still, the challenge of regularly producing a viewpoint on the current kite in the socio-political sky or whatever hits your fancy can be soul-tasking. It’s no easier for the committed columnist or hack writer. Writers’ block comes in handy as a veritable obstacle to peak performance. For this reason, a number of famous bylines deserve commendation for maintaining appreciable standards of engaging communication through the years. It would not do to mention names, so that pretenders can continue, á la Cheever, to provide the needed conduit for the release of accumulated social and political gases.

And the question may rightly be asked, why are you doing this then, Mr. Pita Okute? Because, commentary is cheap and I caught the itch again to ventilate, yes, in the accepted fashion of my professional tribe. I may just be one of those, you know, the Cheever chums, but I shall do my best, I promise, to steer clear of elephants. Rather, you and I will try hard to follow our good un-hankered nostrils and tell the flowers from the sewers.