BY BABAJIDE KOLADE-OTITOJU
Dear Mr. Ajasa,
The Osun gubernatorial election, resoundingly won by Governor Ademola Adeleke, produced understandable joy among those who supported him. It produced something a good deal more troubling among a smaller and noisier tribe of his supporters. Political fever does this to some people. It turns arguments into conspiracies and turns people who simply disagree with you into enemies who must be discredited.
The election ended, Adeleke won, exactly as the people of Osun wished it. That should have closed the matter. Instead, a fair number of adults descended into a kind of political agitation in which disagreement became betrayal, analysis became conspiracy and facts became optional extras, something to be produced only if convenient.
I became one of the preferred targets of this campaign.
There were lies, distortions and quotations invented wholesale and hung around my neck. There were things I actually did say, lifted clean out of their context and repackaged for an audience whose appetite for outrage has clearly outgrown its interest in truth.
During that period of cyber mob action against me, a certain Jayeola Ajasa appeared on the scene.
You, Mr Ajasa, did not stop at calling me biased or partisan or simply wrong, any of which I could have lived with. In a Facebook post, you called me “the most corrupt journalist in Nigeria”.
I do not receive that as criticism. I receive it as a grave allegation of professional and moral misconduct, presented as a punchline for your digital audience. As I have been told, you were once a journalist at the defunct The Week magazine, a fact that makes your conduct considerably more disappointing. A man with that background knows the difference between criticism and accusation and the difference between political disagreement and a claim that another journalist sold his profession for cash. You knew all of this. You wrote the post anyway.
Let us dispense, then, with the Facebook theatre. Let us get to the single thing that matters whenever an accusation of this size is made. Where is the evidence, Mr Ajasa? Who paid me and how much? What exactly was I paid to do? Which story did I write or broadcast because a payment landed in some account of mine? Which story did I kill for the same reason? Where is the bank alert, the recording, the witness, anything at all that lifts your accusation above the level of an unsupported Facebook allegation?
You made the accusation as though a mountain of evidence sat behind it. Produce the evidence, even a shred. You owe that to your readers, and you owe it to the profession you once practised, however briefly and however long ago you abandoned its standards. A claim does not become evidence by being typed in bold letters. Neither does an allegation become a finding simply because its author deploys a superlative. Calling a man corrupt is already a serious matter. Calling him the most corrupt in an entire country moves the conversation into a different zone altogether.
The most corrupt journalist in Nigeria? How, precisely, did you arrive at that conclusion? Who commissioned this research? What was your methodology, your sample size, your period under review? Did you audit our bank accounts, comb through our tax records, build some national corruption league table and discover, with the precision of a laboratory result, that Babajide Kolade-Otitoju had won gold?
If that research exists, publish it, methodology and all. If it does not, tell your readers plainly what actually happened. Did you reach into the most inflammatory corner of your vocabulary, find the strongest accusation available to you and throw it at me? If so, what you produced was a political outburst presented as moral judgement, and it tells the public considerably more about the weakness of your argument than it does about me.
Your history in this trade makes the whole business worse, not more forgivable. You know what verification means. You know that “someone told me” has never counted as evidence in any newsroom worth the name. You know an analysis being unpopular is not proof of a bribe. You know a quotation attributed to a journalist must trace back to an actual recording or an actual page. Ignorance might occasionally earn a man a pass. What you have done is not ignorance. It is a decision to dispense with every step your training once required of you.
Here is what I am asking of you, specifically. Produce the evidence for every quotation attributed to me in that Facebook post. Show Nigerians where and when I said those words. Give us the recording, the transcript, the programme, the date. Give us the full context in which the words were spoken, rather than the fragment that suited your post. Do not hand us a screenshot of your own claim as proof of your own claim. If I said those things, I will answer for every syllable. If I did not, the answering falls to you.
That distinction matters here more than usual since a pile of statements attributed to me online were never uttered by me at all. Some were distorted beyond recognition. Some were invented from nothing. This particularly troubling example had me commenting on President Tinubu and a drug forfeiture matter I never discussed. A journalist handed material like that is supposed to pause and ask where it came from before he republishes it as truth. You appear to have found it more useful than that. The years have not served your standards of verification particularly well.
Produce the recording if you insist I said so. That is the honest route, the one anybody serious about this trade would take. The route you chose instead, sliding from “I disagree with Kolade-Otitoju” straight to “Kolade-Otitoju is the most corrupt journalist in Nigeria,” skips over an enormous distance without bothering to build a bridge across it. You have offered nothing to fill that gap.
Reality keeps refusing to cooperate with your version of events, which is unfortunate for the argument you have constructed but no concern of mine. Journalism is a good deal more complicated than the arithmetic you are running, in which a man says something you dislike and must therefore have been paid to say it.
I have spent 34 years in this profession, long enough to leave a trail nobody could scrub clean even if they wanted to. Newspapers, magazines, television, political reporting, investigations, interviews, governments, politicians, businessmen, controversies, victories, errors, corrections, arguments, enemies, friends, the lot of it sits in the open for anyone to examine.
Examine it, then. Forensically, if you can manage the word. Do not tell me how you feel about me. Tell me what I did. Name who paid me. Show me the transaction. Do not tell me my analysis irritated you. Show me the story it supposedly bought. Do not tell me people are angry online. Anger has never once qualified as evidence in any court, newsroom or reasonable conversation.
I am ready to answer serious questions about my journalism. I have never pretended every story I have filed was beyond criticism or every analysis I have offered turned out right. I have been wrong more than once. I have been right rather more often than that. That is a career, not a canonisation.
My willingness to be examined, though, does not require me to swallow an accusation whole simply because you typed it. You accused me of being the most corrupt journalist in Nigeria. The burden of proving it sits with you now, and it is not going anywhere. You also put words in my mouth, which is its own separate debt. Produce the evidence behind every quotation in that post. Give us the recordings, the transcripts, the videos, the original publications. Tell Nigerians when and where I supposedly said these things, in full, unedited. Let them judge the actual words rather than your account of them.
The original material exists to settle exactly this kind of dispute. Use it. Your certainty is not proof. Your anger is not proof. Your dislike of me is not proof, nor is the noise from whatever social-media supporters rally behind your posts. My disagreements with you are not proof that I took a bribe. My television appearances are not proof that I took a bribe. Your Facebook post, most certainly, is not proof that I took a bribe. Evidence remains evidence. Nothing you have offered so far has come close to being a substitute for it.
I am not asking for an apology, and I have long stopped expecting you to distinguish between what is properly established and what simply makes for a satisfying Facebook post. You called me the most corrupt journalist in Nigeria. Prove the quotations you hung on my name. Prove the corruption you alleged. Name the payer. Show the transaction. Identify the story or stories the alleged payment purchased.
I am waiting, and I intend to keep waiting in public, for as long as it takes you to produce the tiniest trace of evidence.
Kolade-Otitoju is a veteran journalist and the director of news at TVC News
