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Unfair reports on Governor Aregbesola 

 

I write to register my misgiving on the bias of your newspaper against Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State. This week alone, I have seen at least three adversarial reporting against him. On Wednesday, there was a full page feature article on page 21 titled ‘Aregbesola’s church project and its controversy’. There is no controversy about the worship centre, except that Senator Iyiola Omisore, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, criticised it. There is no opposition or controversy in the community where the project is cited and among Christians in the state. Even the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) is yet to officially criticise the project. There is also no opposition from Moslems in the state. This ‘controversy’ is the figment of the imagination of the reporter and by extension the newspaper, except perhaps, it is the newspaper editorial policy that whatever PDP opposes in Osun State has become controversial.
Interestingly, Governor Aregbesola who is being crucified by the PDP has been portrayed by The Punch to be a bearded anti-Christian Taliban, yet, he is being criticised for building a huge worship centre for Christians. The following day, the newspaper had a news report on page 8 titled ‘CAC members protest Aregbesola’s take over of land’. The protest by the Christ Apostolic Church looks like a subtle and residual resistance to the recent school reclassification programme. It also could have arisen out of genuine misunderstanding between the church and the government. Protest is legitimate in a democracy and the church should be commended for adopting this peaceful mode of seeking redress. However, the newspaper personalised the issue by making it look like Ogbeni Aregbesola had personally seized the church’s land, when it was in fact the church versus state government saga. It was the same case of personalisation in the Wednesday features when the governor’s name came up in the title.
While the church and protesters were robustly engaged in the Thursday news report, no effort was made to get the government’s or Governor Aregbesola’s side. So much for fairness and getting the other side! But the reporter is not done. On Friday, he now did a full page feature on the news report of the previous day titled ‘Osun govt, church at war over land for school’. A cursory look at the title will make it look innocuous, passing it off as correction of the personification error of the previous day since it comes out as ‘Osun govt’ this time, instead of ‘Aregbesola’. The sting, however, is that it reports a peaceful and legitimate protest between a church and government as ‘warfare’. This is not figurative. It is meant to hype that small protest and give the impression that a serious crisis had broken out between the government and the church, in the magnitude of warfare. It is meant to discount the peace in Osun and create a fictive impression of violent demonstration in which the government had deployed armoured personnel carriers to put down the protest and the bodies are counted probably in scores.   The subeditor also sexed it up by using an unusually large font size that rivals the front page and also gave it a double deck, instead of the single deck that most stories in the paper get.
I can go on and on, day after day, week after week on the bias against Governor Aregbesola in this paper in its leaders, news, features and dedicated columns. It appears The Punch sees nothing good in the government of Ogbeni Aregbesola and will easily lend itself to amplify the position of the opposition in Osun to the detriment of the governor. I am pleading with this newspaper to adopt a balanced and fair approach in order to sustain the confidence of fair-minded readers and especially the supporters of Governor Aregbesola in Osun State and beyond.

•Michael Oladele, Osogbo, Osun State