CHUKS OLUIGBO
Let’s create a scenario. Ojoma Akpoma, a
journalist who reports Real Estate for a newspaper, lives in Badagry area of
Lagos. He would have loved to live in a place like Ikeja, which is close to his
office, or at least somewhere more central, like Surulere, but the rents there
are rather too expensive for his meagre means. He has no car. He has no laptop.
He has no camera. His office did not provide any of these things for him. He
has been struggling to save money to at least buy himself a personal computer and a
camera to facilitate his work, but his monthly salary is too meagre that he can
hardly save up enough. Worse still, he has not been paid in the last five
months.
So, when he hears this morning that a building
has collapsed at Ojota, Ojoma, a conscientious journalist, is desirous of
getting to the site so as to file in a firsthand report for tomorrow’s
publication, but he is constrained. It will cost him at least six hours and about
N1,200 in transport fare to and fro, factoring in the Lagos traffic. Can he
afford that huge cost?
While he contemplates this, his phone beeps. He
checks. It is an SMS from a real estate developer inviting him to an exhibition
at a hotel in Festac Town. He thinks about it. It will take him about one and a
half hours to get to Festac, plus transport cost of about N600 to and fro. He
will have the opportunity of meeting CEOs or top shots of some real estate
firms from whom he can get interviews and possible leads. There will also be
other advantages. More importantly, he won’t go home empty-handed – there will
also be an envelope to say “thank you for honouring our invitation”, which will
somehow make up for the unpaid salaries and take care of transport fare and
other expenditures.
Now if you were Ojoma, which of the above two
matters would you attend to? I guess the choice is not a very hard one. If
we’re honest, we will agree that the answer is quite straightforward.
Ojoma’s tale is all too familiar. Every day the
average Nigerian journalist walks this kind of tight rope. He is employed by a
media organisation that does not care much about his welfare. He is poorly remunerated, and even the meagre salary
agreed upon by his organisation is not promptly paid. He is expected to provide
for himself all the tools he needs to work effectively – laptop, camera, car,
etc. Nobody sponsors his editorial trips, but he is expected to file in news
and reports of things happening in the sector he covers, no matter where it is
happening. He is expected to investigate crime without funding in a tough
terrain like Nigeria where access to information is at its lowest ebb; where
people are less than willing to volunteer information to any broke-arse
journalist poke-nosing into other people’s affairs; where there is no form of
insurance cover in case of any danger to life; and where there is absence of
legal framework to protect the journalist in case of threat to life in the
course of duty. If he dies in the process, all his employer will
probably do is take out a quarter page of obituary and deeply regret the
passage of so-and-so who died in active service. That’s all. And his family
will be left forlorn, having lost their breadwinner, because even the little
monthly deductions from his salary in the form of pension are not remitted to
the appropriate pension fund administrator.
That is why I sense ultra-insensitivity
whenever I hear or read people say, and write, that the Nigerian journalist is
not doing enough, is not properly playing his role as the voice of the masses
and watchdog of society – without recourse to the tight corner that the
Nigerian journalist finds himself, without reference to the harsh environment
he operates in. Here are samplers:
“Unlike the 1960s through the 1980s, news
coverage is getting weaker and weaker. And many a times, critical examination
of people and events are missing. In addition, you don’t see strong
investigative journalism anymore. What passes for news, many a time, looks like
government-dictated public service announcement. And many editorials are
nothing but apologies and infantile opposing viewpoints. Except on few
instances, commentaries and opinion pieces by some columnists are dull and
dumb. It is as if some are afraid to speak their mind; afraid to offend; afraid
to lose favour; and afraid to push the envelope,” wrote Sabella Abidde in The
Punch of July 25, 2012.
“Sadder is the fact that journalists, like the
general population, seem to have a very short attention span. For instance, the
press may report on a very juicy scandal on Monday; but a week or two later, it
moves to the next scandal with no follow-up of previous events. Therefore,
unscrupulous politicians have got used to weathering the storm for a few days
or a few weeks — confidently knowing that ‘all would be forgotten soon’. And
the rate at which the media forget, or become disinterested, is alarming and
discouraging,” Abidde wrote in the article entitled ‘Journalism in contemporary Nigeria’.
Similarly, Lawrence Nwobu, in another article,
observed that Nigerian journalists have since become seasoned hypocrites and
opportunists who send critical anti-government articles from their stables on a
regular basis only to end up jumping into the same government at the slightest
opportunity. “Once in government, they become apologists of the same government
they had spent years criticising. This has had the effect of diminishing any
pressure such critical articles could ordinarily have exerted on the government
as every journalist is now seen as a rabble-rousing opportunist hypocrite who
is only criticising because he has not been offered a position in government,”
Nwobu wrote.
By Jove, do these critics expect anything
different? Doing so would mean pushing their optimism too far. Yes, the
Nigerian media used to have “a number of fearless, very bright, and forthright
journalists” who could put their lives on the line for the good of society, but
all that changed when the Nigerian journalist realised that Nigeria has a
terribly bad character. He realised the futility of his activism; that even
those he is fighting for will turn around and blame him if in the process he
runs into trouble with powerful elements in the society. Now he sees no harm in
joining the same government he has criticised in the past, especially since his
criticisms aren’t even getting anywhere and the citizens he is staking his life
for see him as a rabble-rouser.
Put simply, the present-day Nigerian journalist
is a victim of societal influence, much like other professions. He is a product
of the society he lives in. He is no different from the Nigerian police,
military, customs and other agencies of government, even the judiciary which is
considered as the last hope of the common man. He operates within the same
harsh economic environment. He has responsibilities. He aspires for better
life. He desires to own a home in Lagos or Abuja and ride in a good car. And he
also wants to stay alive – or at least ensure that even if he dies in the line
of duty, his dependants won’t start life from scratch.
Like every other struggling Nigerian citizen,
the Nigerian journalist is like a man trying to extinguish an inferno with his
bare hands. In the process, he is also being cautious not to get his fingers
burnt.
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