Nigeria insecurity situation and media incitement

The insecurity state of Nigeria today has become a thing of great worry to the rest of the world. The menace of the Boko Haram group has become uncontrollable for the federal government. The President of Nigeria is now ‘incapacitated’ to handle the group and to arrest the awful situation since all the strategies he brought to arrest the problem have failed. The state governments have all resigned and submitted to the will and operations of Boko Haram and have ‘entered into their holes, since the ‘cat is out’. All these result  to the incessant killings of the innocent citizens of Nigeria everyday.

The fact exists that the situation is like this and that fear and tension has become the very companion of the average Nigerians who have fled from the very centres of Boko Haram operations to a self-house-arrest in their villas, wounded.

This situation has been on the hold until about two months ago when the operations of Boko Haram group became more intensive in the country. Reading the handwriting on the wall, one can say that the country is at the highest point of crisis and derange, and as such, needs an integral management and control. 

The media as a matter of fact is the ‘only window for the citizens’. They have the duty of relating to the society the happenings in the society. I also wish to acknowledge that they play this role in Nigeria. One of the evidences to this fact is the recent of killing of a Channels TV journalist Eneche Akogwu  who was killed in Kano city in Northern Nigeria last week, 20^th January, 2012, while covering the aftermath of the major terrorist attack. Akogwu, 31, was a reporter and journalist for the privately owned station.

However, reading Vanguard Newspaper publication of 26^th January 2012, “five newspaper vendors in Nsukka, Enugu State were arrested by the police wednesday for selling a newspaper that published pictures of those allegedly killed by Boko Haram in Kano last weekend. The police also impounded several newspapers, which the vendors were selling at the time of arrest, saying the pictures were those of pipeline fire victims that occurred long ago. The police said the publication was intended to incite people to embark on violence”, gives me a serious concern of the role some Nigerians could be playing in this Nigerian situation.  The monitoring of Nigeria media reveals that inflammatory coverage does not necessarily consist of a direct call to violence, but instead takes the form of indirect or coded terminology that still has dangerous potential to foment conflict.

Besides some media, “recent articles in the cyber and print media reveal that some well-meaning Nigerians are involved in inciting, inflammatory and gross misleading” of the people. http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/07/sss-arrests-el-rufai-over-incitement. If it continues this way, It will be difficult to survive this situation in Nigeria.