The newspaper vendors at Ijaiye bus stop, Pen Cinema, Agege and Ojodu Berger bypass frequently map the Nigerian psyche at their stalls.
Every day, the headlines are spread on wooden tables, held down against the breeze by broken concrete or old spark plugs. Around them, men gather in small clusters, their voices rising against the rumble of yellow buses. Many of them define the news strictly by the headlines; only a few dare read between the lines.
The latter may occasionally display a sharp instinct for the unsaid, a realisation that the most significant truths are often buried in the inkwell of the press.
Of the institutions that shape national discourse, a curious habit has taken root with the press. It is an old reflex, an editorial tendency to ignore deep wounds and obsess over superficial scratches.
It may also be explained as the posturing of a knowing press, a penchant for perverting its knowledge to suit what I dare call the toxic triad: political, socioeconomic and prejudicial benefits. This is nothing new, however. I lay no claim to some ingenious labelling, as this trinity stems from the consequences of the political economy – a discourse best suited for another day.
Today, the conversation dwells on the vanity of a press that knows the terrain too well but uses its awareness to exploit structures it ought to protect. It’d rather play the ostrich, blindly burying its head in the sand, as a measure of political correctness; it chooses to blend with the dust rather than face the storm.
Most modern newsrooms have mastered this art of calculated invisibility. This selective vision became remarkably clear in recent days as Nigerian newspapers fixated on President Bola Tinubu’s absence at the 79th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in New York, United States. To the critics, it doesn’t matter that Nigeria is represented by a high-level delegation led by the Vice President Kashim Shettima.
They do not analyse the situation through the clinical lens of administrative efficiency to determine whether VP Shettima’s presence, among high-calibre Nigerian representatives, is enough to fulfil the country’s diplomatic and socioeconomic purposes at the event. Interestingly, loud segments of the mainstream press and social media, chose to treat Tinubu’s absence as an existential failure.
The tenor of punditry in newspapers, on television and social media has been maleficent, as commentators mischievously attach malicious import to Tinubu’s absence. So doing, they labelled a standard bureaucratic decision as a sign of global rejection.
There has been a frantic eagerness in the commentary, a desire to find proof of a country drifting into insignificance. It was an easy outrage, requiring no investigative labour or constructive scrutiny of administrative decision. It was news tailored to satisfy a specific appetite for national embarrassment.
Yet, curiously, the same editors and pundits that painstakingly tracked the itinerary of the delegation in New York, and conveniently ignored the president’s attendance at the same event three years ago – 78th UNGA in 2023 – at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City, at the onset of his administration.
The same pundits and editors conveniently turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the verdict by the International Chamber of Commerce Arbitration Tribunal in Paris. The tribunal had issued its final award regarding the Mambilla Hydroelectric Power Project, a decades-old dream of energy sovereignty that has been choked by litigation and administrative greed. In the pages of that international ruling lay specific, documented details regarding former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, one of the candidates vying for the presidential seat come 2027.
Here was a story that touched the very bone of the Nigerian condition, a revelation of how the lights were kept off in millions of homes, how factories were stifled, leading to loss of jobs, and how international legal frameworks see the transactions of our political elite. It was a narrative filled with names, dates, offshore accounts, and the specific mechanics of state capture.
Yet, the newsrooms that had found endless airtime for Tinubu’s UNGA absence were disconcertingly quiet. Those who dared publish it kept it off the cover pages, restricting it to the inner pages; the digital pundits ignored it, keeping it out of their soapboxes, altogether. This was the ostrich press at work: hyper-reactive to the optics of power, but completely silent when faced with the cold, hard evidence of betrayal by one of its own favourites.
The current style of media commentary has largely abandoned grounded critique and replaced uncompromising analysis with partisanship. Little wonder most journalists parade as factional players jostling for political spoils.
Agreed, absolute objectivity is impossible, and the world yet suffers the lack of a completely free press – for every news medium, the platform is a paid ‘agent’ or ‘pawn’ within the political economy – still, the relentless commitment to negativity and focus on doomsday will eventually be our undoing.
Such media fixation rarely helps the itinerant traders of the sidewalk or the ambitious entrepreneur hoping to start a small business. It merely exhausts them, turning their real, everyday struggles into raw material for a cynical media elite that treats the country’s fate as a game of narrative dominance.
This professional decline is essentially an economic problem. A journalist whose next meal depends on the patronage of a political actor cannot write the truth about that actor’s offshore accounts. The decline of traditional print revenues has left many newsrooms vulnerable to regional oligarchs and corporate chiefs. When a newspaper relies entirely on government advertising or political sponsors to keep its presses running, its editorial independence becomes a luxury it can no longer afford. And every major news medium, world over, is guilty of this.
Even the so-called independent media depend on funding by non-profits and international NGOs, many of which are tied to each funder’s selfish agenda or ‘selfless mission’ to project sodomy in the name of diversity, gender wars buried in ’empowerment,’ and an organised campaign to replace a ‘hostile government’ with more youthful, unsuspecting stooges in the guise of ‘youth empowerment.’ There is no free meal anywhere.
To build a worthy press, we must change how journalism is funded. This means moving toward subscriber-supported newsrooms, community-funded investigative cooperatives, and independent foundations that are insulated from the designs of the political class.
It necessitates a return to a rigorous investigative culture where an opposition leader’s financial deals are scrutinised with the same intensity as the executive orders of the sitting president.
The danger of failing to make this change will result in a loss of media credibility; there is also the risk of losing the country itself. History is replete with warnings about what happens when a nation’s media infrastructure gets conscripted or captured by factional handlers and foreign interests.
We must remember how the Western press and local media proxies were systematically weaponised in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh after he dared to nationalise Iranian oil. And lest we forget, how in Chile in 1973, CIA-funded local newspapers like El Mercurio created economic panic and civil chaos, paving the way for the brutal boots of Augusto Pinochet.
Similarly, during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, outlets like the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) were used by internal political actors to dehumanise fellow citizens and incite violence, leaving nearly a million citizens dead.
The Nigerian press must learn from these historical tragedies.