By Tunde Akanni
Three decades on, what else can a two-star, if you like, a two-scar champion of Nigeria’s renowned June 12 presidential election do as a patriot who has elected to stay put in Nigeria other than uphold the cause infinitely?
Yours sincerely lost a thriving journalism career to June 12 following the proscription of Concord Press and therefore on Abacha hangs my unpaid gratuity till date. Short of flying from frying pan to fire, subsequently I joined the nation’s premier civil rights group, Civil Liberties Organisation, CLO, keeping me almost permanently on the precipice of jail. But for the courage of the judicial officer who presided over my sedition (?) case to stand for justice, what would my story have been?
As I therefore engage virtually together with fellow Nigerian scholars in the discourse focusing on the all-pervading nature of corruption in Nigeria today in commemoration of the June 12 anniversary, I suddenly get a sense of resuming an unfinished business. In any case, every research work, my current turf, is often open ended such that the concluded work may even signal suggested future direction.
Back in 2018, the Kano based, Dr YZ Yau-led Centre for Information Technology and Development, CITAD, supported by Mac Arthur Foundation needed a scholar-activist as a consulting Technical Advisor for a two-year an anti-corruption consortium project. The lot fell on me. Prior to this, together with Dr Yau, I was a consultant to a similar anti-corruption initiative of DFID called Coalitions for Change, C4C.
After the initial two years on the CITAD-MacArthur project, I was encouraged to conceptualise a project within that same thematic frame of anti-corruption and I came up with the Campaign Against Corruption on Campus, CACOCA, the very first of its type focusing only on campus corruption matters.
As a form of service to my primary professional community, I ran the project with utmost passion assisted by my three folks namely, Mutair Wahab Akinbayo, Dr Monsurat Ayegusi and Badirat Hassan. The project, through research, uncovered a dense rot of corruption which , tragically,you could encounter on any of our campuses even as we established that it was only reflective of the larger Nigerian society.
Nigerian politicians in and out of government have thrown caution to the winds and have therefore infected the campuses. Undaunted, CACOCA bought up air time on LASU Radio for its dedicated programme called “Towards Transparency”. That programme featured anti-corruption news bulletin routinely and got diverse campus opinion leaders to dissect prevailing issues of corruption with solutionist approach.
To guarantee seminality for the campaign we uploaded editions of our broadcasts on to Spotify. CACOCA broadcasts became so inspiring it attracted invitations to me for speaking engagements on anti-corruption as far as far as Jamaica! It is however so sad that corruption has turned out to be terribly intractable for us.
It’s however fulfilling that the “never give up” bug is catching up with at least, as many scholars possible, leading to Democracy Day Discourse organized by the Committee on National Issues, Development and Advocacy, C-NIDA, of the Muslim Lecturers Association, MLA.
Like the hawks that they really are, same set of politicians who had shared beds with the soldiers in plundering our commonwealth while the military era lasted till 1999, have since mustered enough energy to regroup. Not only have they been having a field day across all the three major tiers of power in Nigeria, they have equally, masterfully, seized all domineering vents for information.
They’re also the ones with ample resources to roll out fat volumes with perspectives sympathetic to their biases. The worst of such, most recently, was the one conjured by Babangida, who annulled June 12.
Surviving foot soldiers in the vanguard of the struggle obviously weary, receded to the back scene thankful that they managed to witness the seemingly emerging light beyond the tunnel afterall. Without any facilitator still badly needed for due memorialization of the struggle, each has kept to their tent, left to re-strategise individually.
But old soldier no dey die. Like me, more young, foot soldiers of past decades of the struggle era have not only grown but matured and ready to raise questions again on the conduct of the polity with a view to scientifically charting further way forward. Former editor of CLO’s Liberty Magazine and coordinator of the Journalists Outreach for Human Rights, JOHR, Ismail Ibraheem, has found his own voice again, and now interestingly as a towering scholar, a professor.
In his recent inaugural lecture titled Casino Journalism and End of History, Ibraheem, now an established journalism scholar and a professor of at the University of Lagos spoke before a distinguished audience at the J. F. Ade-Ajayi Auditorium, including academics from varied disciplines.
He chose the provocative title to frame a critique of the contemporary Nigerian media landscape resultant from the information vents practically seized by the conscienceless politicians.
He coined the term “casino journalism” to describe a system where sensationalism, entertainment, and profit drive reporting—prioritizing clicks and ratings over accuracy and depth. The defining traits include, randomness and spectacle over robust investigation; “brownenvelope” influence—accepting gratuities—from elites and ad vertisers. According to Professor Ibraheem, all these amount to gambling-like attitude: short-term wins replacing long-term credibility.
Prof. Ibraheem argues this model treats journalism as a dice roll—one never knows what sensational bait might yield the next burst of clicks. Rationalising the “End of History” consequence
Professor Ibraheem pairs casino journalism with the concept of “the End of History.”
Journalistic narratives lose historical continuity, context, and reflection. Instead of shaping civic memory, the media perpetuates “media amnesia,” hastily moving from one sensational headline to the next. He went further to highlight several Nigerian scandals where historical or contextual depth was stripped:
He recalled how the Civil Liberties Organisation, ironically, deployed sensational tactics in its coverage of the Abacha 2 Million Man March. These examples underscore how critical media watchdog functions are undermined by infotainment practices to which corrupt governance has diverted the media in Nigeria.
On the whole, Prof. Ibraheem’s emphasizes the need to curb sensationalism and preserve context, otherwise Nigerian journalism may gamble away its role, and along with it, our collective understanding of history and democracy.
Being based in the United States for some two decades has not been enough to distract Omolade Adunbi as well. Lade as we used to call him was the project officer in charge of human rights education project at CLO. Unlike Professor Ibraheem who was British trained, Lade trained at the prestigious Yale University as an anthropologist and now a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.
A relentless researcher, Professor Adunbi, among others, has published two major, award winning books in which he attempts a critical reappraisal of governance in relation to resource management in Nigeria.
The first, published by Indiana University in 2015, is titled Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria. Obviously deriving from Omolade’s trajectory as an activist, this book illustrates how NGOs, militant groups, and local social movements deploy ancestral land and resource rights to challenge both state authority and multinational oil corporations.
These actors marshall powerful symbols to justify disruptive actions — from protests to armed rebellion. Adunbi emphasizes that oil wealth reshapes people–environment relations. Communities reorient their livelihoods to pursue oil rents, triggering new forms of governance, solidarity, and exclusion.
In Enclaves of Exception, Adunbi builds on his earlier work by investigating newly expanding domains of extraction: free trade zones and artisanal oil refineries.
By comparing SEZs and artisanal refineries, he identifies both overlap and divergence. Though development narratives cast SEZs as harbingers of growth and modernization, Adunbi shows they mirror the environmental degradation wrought by illegal refineries. Both systems lead to pollution, damage to water systems, threats to public health, and displacement of traditional livelihoods.
The book thus interrogates the relationship between global capital and local resource claims. It reveals how communities — whether operating inside formal SEZs or informal outfits — participate in and are shaped by extractive regimes. The “enclaves of exception” he identifies are sites where legal, environmental, and social norms are deliberately suspended for economic gain.
Most significantly, these works point to the paradox of oil: wealth that empowers but also dispossesses, that brings jobs but also conflict, reconfirming the long held thesis of resource curse.
CLO was a most fertile nursery bed for many of the leading lights of the the June 12 struggle who were mere project officers then. It is pretty gratifying to acknowledge that a few intellectual oaks have since sprouted and have voluntarily sustained the campaign for progressivism whether or not the acclaimed renewal agenda government believes in the need for proper memorialization of June 12.
Tunde Akanni, Professor of Journalism and Development Communications at LASU, Nigeria, was Head of Campaigns of CLO between 1994 and 1998. You can reach him on X @AkintundeAkanni
