The past half a
decade has been perhaps the most challenging years since Nigeria’s return to
civil rule in 1999.
Literally, the
fate of some 160 million citizens have been caught between nationalist
insurgents in the south, and Islamist terrorists in the north, with no relief
from a distressing canopy of spectacularly poor evidence at governance, and
thieving politicians left, right, and centre.
Narrating these
evidently polarizing experiences on a daily basis, falls on the media, that has
had a mixed bag of brilliant moments and, just putting it straight, sometimes
appalling results of what looks like a Kafkaesque sequence of events.
What is clear,
however, from the perspective of the media, is that these five years also
represent perhaps the most dismal period in the over 150-year institutional
biography of one of our most heroic national citadels.
Constrained by
inter-communal, inter-faith, minority, and other diversity issues, political
reporting in Nigeria can be a test for any journalist, and heightened with the
added challenges posed by a swelling climate of intolerance, fueled by the
reign of criminal gangs who are sustained through official corruption, oil
theft, the now lucrative kidnapping business, politically-financed terror
squads, ethno-national mobs, or private security gangs.
These are the
notations of impunity, the hydra-headed monster that now threatens freedom,
rights, and ultimately, the democratic aspirations of citizens. In all climes,
reporting events like these comes at dreadful costs; and the Committee to Protect
Journalists [CPJ], an independent, , nonprofit organization that works to
safeguard press freedom worldwide, has diligently followed the trails of
such reporters, keenly documenting the heroism of such brave messengers, under
capricious regimes, through whom daily history is brought to us.
Now, the same
CPJ is alerting us in Nigeria that this wave of impunity has finally come home
to roost. In its 2013 Impunity Index release in New York today, CPJ
states chillingly: “Nigeria has become one of the worst nations in the
world for deadly, unpunished violence against the press.”
The CPJ global
index calculates unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s
population, and found this year that soaring impunity rates were also recorded
in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil.
In the five-year
matrix taken for this computation, the CPJ cites the unresolved murder of
Channels TV reporter, Enenche Akogwu; the killing of Nathan Dabak and Sunday
Gyang of the Christian Times in Jos; Zakariya Isa of NTA Maiduguri; and Bayo
Ohu of the Guardian Newspapers in Lagos.
Blaming
“militants in the north and politically inspired aggression nationwide” for the
growing impunity in the land, the CPJ Impunity Index puts Nigeria in the
category of a dozen countries where journalist murders occurred from January 1,
2003, through December 31, 2012, and remain unsolved. The index, published
annually, considers cases unsolved when no convictions have been won.
There are strong
lessons for Nigeria here. Slamming what he recently characterized as “a
choreographed attempt to deliberately cast the administration in bad light,”
the spokesman for the Nigerian presidency, Mr. Reuben Abati, a newspaperman and
lawyer, pretentiously claimed, “This government is proud of its record on press
freedom, its relationship with and promotion of access for the media and civil
society.”
The
administration, as Mr. Abati argues it, actually expects gratitude from
Nigerians on account of “its commitment to press freedom times over [because
the] Freedom of Information Bill (FOI) was signed by this President into law
and under this government the Nigerian print and electronic media has grown in
number, reach and in terms of freedom to practice.”
True, but it was
also under the watch of this president that the most elaborate and illegal
assault on the privacy and constitutional rights of citizens had been initiated
in the post-independence history of this nation.
The online
newspaper, PREMIUM TIMES, [premiumtimesng.com], reported recently
that “secretly, and in open violation of lawful contracting procedures, the
Jonathan administration has awarded an Israeli firm, Elbit Systems…a
$40million contract to help it spy on citizens’ computers and Internet
communications.”
In case Mr.
Abati missed the news, this came only weeks after the administration banned the
airing and distribution of a documentary, ‘Fuelling Poverty’, a 30-minute
videography that documents the massive poverty in the land and the slide
towards a full blown regime of corruption and greed in the country. To
borrow the voice of Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, the film depicts “a seven
billion scam perpetrated at the federal government level.”
As Nigeria
approaches the 2015 corridor, the CPJ Impunity Index offers a valuable compass
for advocacy groups working on human rights and media platforms, but it can
also help law enforcement and security institutions map their responses to the
impunity against journalists. It is always important to stress the
point that, however poorly the media do its work; a free media is pivotal
to the success of any democracy.
It has never
happened that democracy flourishes where citizens are not free to publish their
ideas and receive the ideas of others; and the gospel remains valid
that freedom of expression inspires all other human rights, and that
famous demands like the constitutional right to life, to property, to freedom
of movement, to religion, to spousal relationship, equality before the law, to
non-discrimination, against arbitrary arrest, detention, etc. acquire substance
only to the extent that they can be communicated freely.
Already the
Nigerian political atmosphere is tense, but in these past five years,
political reporting remains the most dangerous beat for journalists all over
the world, according to the CPJ.
In a total of
265 murder cases documented, 30 percent of the victims were reporters covering
political beats. Corruption, not an abstract reality in Nigeria, represented
the second most dangerous topic to cover, and that accounted for 20 percent of
the reported murder cases.
In all the
cases, the killers intended to send an intimidating message to the entire press
corps and in no fewer than 48 percent of cases the victims were abducted or
tortured before being killed.
There is a
strong reason for Nigerians to worry about the growing climate of intolerance
and the advance of impunity here, 10 of the 12 worst cases of impunity globally
have been listed each year since CPJ began the annual analysis in 2008.
The muted lesson here, according to CPJ researchers is that the “static nature
of the list highlights the challenges in reversing entrenched impunity and high
rates of anti-press violence,” which is not like saying it is all bleak news,
because, indeed, impunity can be challenged and reversed.
This, however,
as in all cases of repression, will require commitment and courage by citizens
to push back on the reign of impunity. In Nepal, for instance, CPJ noted
“declining levels of violence” in part to prosecution efforts. For
those who might think there is a direct correlation between civil war and violence
to reporters, in Syria, despite the high number of recent journalist
fatalities, ”large majority,” of the fatalities were caused by
combat-related crossfire.
The Guild of
editors, the union of journalists, the publishers association, and broadcast proprietors
have a document in the CPJ impunity Index to guide their path towards a new
offensive in strengthening democracy by designing local strategies to resist
impunity.
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