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| Godwin Emefiele. CBN Governor. |
On 12 May 2019,
Nigerians were bombarded with a sensational headline and audio recording from
Sahara Reporters purporting that the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria,
Mr. Godwin Emefiele and some Senior Management were discussing how to cover up
purported N500 billion they stole from the Bank.
Yet, since this “news”
broke, the internet has been lit with commentaries from every part of the
world. The Central Bank quickly issued a press release explaining the
conversation as nothing more than an attempt to resolve a misunderstanding with
external auditors on the classification of a particular asset on the CBN’s
Balance Sheet.
My verdict at this
moment is that any unbiased and objective person who listens carefully to the
audio would come away agreeing largely with the CBN’s explanation, rather than
the malicious innuendos and vicious half-truths characterized by Sahara
Reporters.
Besides the fact that the audio recording does
not present any evidence of any illegal act being conducted by senior officials
of the CBN, it raises serious legal and ethical implications on the use of
wiretaps in Nigeria. Do we have rules under which phones of not just senior
government officials, but other Nigerian citizens can be wiretapped? How are
the rules defined? Who determines when a phone line of a Nigerian citizen has
met the threshold under which their phone can be wiretapped? And can wiretaps
be applied at discretion by security agencies without any recourse to the law?
Is there a log to show who utilized the wiretap system at a particular point in
time in order to identify illegal users of the system? Finally if wiretaps are
illegally obtained, shouldn’t journalists or media outlets have an ethical
responsibility to avoid using such tools considering the means by which they
were acquired?
Could such tools be
used to blackmail senior government officials and citizens? Because by their
very own act in publishing illegal materials, a journalist may be aiding and
abetting the conduct of illegal activities.
Wiretaps may be
justified when there is an imminent threat to national security or when
sufficient evidence is presented to show that a wiretap is required in order to
prevent or to investigate particular criminal activities. In the case of the
conversations involving senior officials of the CBN, if the wiretaps were
obtained legally and a case was to be made against officials of the CBN, the
audio should have been presented to the security agencies, rather than to a
media outlet.
The transfer of the
audio conversation to an outside party is clearly a violation of the law and
the perpetrators of this act should be brought to book. If such acts go
unpunished, it will undermine the confidence of Nigerians in relying on the
telecommunication infrastructure in the country, if their conversations can be
shared for no justified reason with media outlets. In the new age of advanced
technology, it will encourage the use of other mediums of communication such as
Skype and Whatsapp, which will ultimately lead to a drop in voice revenue for
telecom firms.
These questions are
critical because every Nigerian deserves the right to privacy of their
conversations. Privacy is even more important for those who hold sensitive
government positions. What other conversations of senior government officials
do they have? How long ago have they been listening to the conversations? What
could they have done with other sensitive conversations the Governor may have
had with Senior Management of the Bank, International Organizations like the
World Bank and the IMF, or with the global managers of Nigeria’s Foreign
Exchange Reserves?
How about
conversations with the National Security of Adviser, the Minister of Finance,
the Vice-President, or even the President himself? Nigerians deserve to know
how Sahara Reporters got this audio tape, how they confirmed it before going
public with it. And in this, the security operatives who must be charged with
investigating this leak should not take “we got it from an anonymous source”
for an answer. They need to dig deep and ensure that they get to the truth of
this matter.
It appears that the
release of the audio was only done to embarrass the Governor in light of his
recent nomination by President Buhari for a second 5-year term. And in this,
the perpetrators of this leak may have succeeded in causing anxiety and
embarrassment to the Governor and his Senior Management. Yet, one of the
dangers of such leaks is that it deflects the attention of the Governor from
focusing on his mandate of price and exchange rate stability and growing the economy
for the benefit of ordinary Nigerians. To the extent that the conversations of
the Governor revealed nothing illegal, though embarrassing as many private
conversations are prone to do, all that the leak has done is to shortchange
Nigerians and their economic problems from getting the full attention of the
Governor and his team for some days.
It therefore seems to
me that Sahara Reporters have once again engaged in irresponsible journalism.
Judging from the
reactions on the internet, the Governor seems to have quite a handful of
powerful enemies. It appears they are all trying to milk this story to the
fullest possible extent. Yet, one wonder what they themselves say in private or
what could be revealed when their own private conversations are leaked.
As deduced from a
well-known story in one of our Holy Books, a much wiser man challenged the
accusers of another with these words: “he who has no sin, let him cast the
first stone”! We all remember how many stones were cast, afterwards.
Adegbulugbe Olayemi writes
from Ondo State.
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