Abubakar and Chukwuma are both Nigerian citizens. This is an incontestable fact. Abubakar was born in Gusau, Zamfara State and Chukwuma was born in Ekwulobia, Anambra State. Due to their respective socio economic pull and push factors, both of them have ended up migrating hundreds of kilometres away from home, and are now in Oyo State.
Living in Ibarapa, Abubakar is into the only economic activity he has ever known, which is itinerant cattle herding in the manner of his ancestors. Chukwuma runs a shop retailing household furniture in Ibadan. While both Chukwuma and Abubakar are viewed as settlers and are not necessarily liked by the indigenes, only Abubakar’s presence sparks sporadic bursts of intense xenophobic violence.
Chukwuma gets the occasional “omo Ibo” and “go back to Onitsha” jibe, but it typically ends there. With Abubakar however, the situation regularly escalates into open street warfare between irate indigenes and his class of settlers. To everyone who has even a cursory understanding of the situation, it is clear what is happening here. There is clearly an aggressor and there is clearly a victim. There is black and there is white. Any greys are few and far between. Reading and watching the news and public conversation about it though, one would think the situation is completely different.
Please stop saying “Bandits”
The conversation around Nigeria’s unprecedented current state of insecurity is deeply dishonest, as I have alluded to several times. More than simply being dishonest and misleading however, it is now dangerous because it openly plays semantic games with factual events to the effect of erasing them or diminishing their importance in public consciousness. How the news cycle uses the term “bandits” as a euphemism in place of the correct and factual term “terrorists” is just one case in point.
If the news headlines were to say “Terrorists Kidnap 15 Travellers in Edo State,” the reaction that would evoke would be very different to that evoked by “15 Missing After Kidnappers Attack Travellers Along Benin-Ore Expressway.” Both headlines are not technically wrong, but only one of them conveys the full urgency and nuance of the situation by including the correct descriptor “terrorists.” The effect that words have on modifying psychological environments has been well established, for example in the case of words like “regime” and “junta” in place of “government” or “administration.”
Substituting “terrorists” or “insurgent militia” with “bandits,” “armed men” or “kidnappers” as has been repeatedly done over the past 3 years is a blatant attempt to rewrite reality by reducing the severity of what is happening. Regardless of the politics taking place in Abuja, the fact on ground is that Nigeria is increasingly being overrun by several terrorist and militia groups including Boko Haram, Al Qaida and several Fulani clan militia groups. The fact is that Chukwuma has a symbiotic economic and social relationship with his adopted home in Ibadan, while Abubakar has an adversarial and parasitic relationship with Ibarapa. The unrest is not down to simple ethnic bigotry, but is nothing short of a clash of fundamentally incompatible civilisations – which leads to warfare.
The Lai Mohammed problem
A few weeks ago in an appearance on Arise TV where I discussed my decision to go into exile, I mentioned that Nigerian journalism is existentially threatened by 2 things – overt state aggression that seeks to muzzle journalists and turn their work into ineffective milquetoast rubbish using legislation and regulatory codes; and covert financial bullying using the status of the federal government as Nigeria’s largest media spender. The recent NBC Code amendment which has already been invoked repeatedly to censor factual reporting is the most obvious example.
More recently, the National Press Council Amendment Act has come into consideration for a third reading at the House of Representatives. This amendment bill seeks to prevent people without an academic background in journalism from practising journalism, which makes as much sense as preventing anyone without a business management degree from becoming an entrepreneur. It would mean that journalists like Fisayo Soyombo – who studied Agriculture at university – would be required to stop their groundbreaking, award-winning work.
The Nigerian state is clearly no longer interested in pretending to do its job and find solutions to the insecurity problems bedevilling the country. Right now, every single geographical and political region of Nigeria has active military operations ongoing. The Nigerian military has never been more numerically engaged in kinetic operations at any other time in its history than during the Biafran War and the peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The Nigerian government’s solution to this is to nudge news reporting into substituting “terrorist” and “insurgent” for “bandit” and “kidnapper.” Failing that, its solution is to muzzle the media altogether using yet another poorly thought-out legislative action.
Here we go again.
