The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Newspapers

  • State of state-owned newspapers

    State of state-owned newspapers

    The Federal Government has no newspaper of its own since it sold, in a controversial manner, Daily Times, to a private investor during the Olusegun Obasanjo administration.

    Before The Daily Times, New Nigerian had gone comatose. The government at the centre has since then relied on its vast network of television stations – the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and the equally far-reaching radio network – Radio Nigeria – MW and FM stations, scattered across the length and breadth of the country. If any of these television and radio chains goes network, they are unbeatable in reach.

    The successive federal administrations of Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, did not make any attempt to start another newspaper of its own. It is not clear yet if the President Bola Tinubu administration will be interested in floating one.

    At the state level, where some of the oldest newspapers in the country operate, the states own some enduring newspapers, which compete with many private newspapers, especially in the Southsouth region.

    Such private newspapers are more in Akwa Ibom and Rivers states, some focusing on different areas while others on general interest. Local politicians and community leaders can only ignore them at their own peril.

    The Tide, funded by the Rivers State Government, is like a constant star. No governor has failed to keep its flag flying.

    Up North in Kano, no one has tampered with the state-owned The Triumph title, which is also daily like The Tide.

    It has produced iconic journalists like Mallam Garba Shehu – former editor of the newspaper who became President, Guild of Editors (NGE) and later a presidential spokesman.

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    But The Standard in Jos, owned by the Plateau State Government, has shrunk to a weekly. It is no longer able to publish daily.

    In the Southeast, a new lease of life has been breathed into the Imo State-owned The Nigerian Statesman newspaper. This is being propelled by the Commissioner for Information, Declan Emelumba, a former political editor of the defunct Daily Champion.

    The newspaper has continued to publish daily, meeting the information need of Imo people.

    But the same cannot be said of The Chronicle in Calabar, Cross River State. A one-time vibrant title, once edited by eminent journalist Ray Ekpo, who moved from there to become editor of Sunday Time and eventually Editor-in-Chief of the highly successful Newswatch Magazine, is no longer on the bounce, although still publishing.

  • To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    To the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria

    Belated but sincere congratulations on the winning for the second time in 43 years, the hosting rights to the World Congress of the International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of journalists, editors and media executives dedicated to media freedom, the free flow of news wherever they are threatened, and the improvement of journalism practices.

    I am sure you all recall that Nigeria first won the hosting rights to the Congress at a time now regarded with nostalgia as its Golden Age.  The end of the civil war and the pace of reconciliation that defied doomsday predictions of mass annihilation loosed on the land a heady optimism.  The oil boom was superheating the national economy.  A dynamic foreign policy gave Nigeria a new, assertive voice and a new standing in international affairs. Nigerians everywhere walked tall, believing that nothing was beyond their country’s attainment.

    This conflation, plus Nigeria’s reputation as home of the largest and freest press in Africa, played no little part in the assignment of the 1975 hosting rights to Nigeria.

    Ironically, it was also Nigeria’s new assertive voice and new standing in international affairs that, in a way, truncated what was supposed to be a World Congress.

    Nigeria refused to grant visas to apartheid South Africa’s delegation, despite strong pressure from the IPI and Western nations.  The Soviet Union and Third World countries backed Nigeria.  In yet another debacle with Cold War undertones, a divided IPI held two parallel meetings in lieu of an official Congress.  Western nations met in Vienna, Austria, and the rest of the world met in Lagos, with our own Lateef Jakande as one of the driving forces.

    More than four decades later, the entire IPI, with membership from more than 130 countries will meet in Abuja from June 21-23, for its 2018 World Congress, which has as its theme “Why Good Journalism Matters.”

    Congratulations, Kabiru Yusuf, chair of the Nigerian section of IPI and publisher of the TRUST newspaper group, and the team whose six-minute video helped clinch the hosting rights for Nigeria.

    It is a good sign that, unlike other bodies and institutions that rarely get to work on undertakings of this nature until the last minute, the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) is leaving nothing to chance. Its Local Organizing Committee, comprising leading publishers, proprietors and some of the best media professions, has been moving on a broad front and engaging with the usual stakeholders to ensure a successful outing.

    The World Congress is coming to Nigeria at a difficult time for the global media.  The capacity to absorb continuing losses is what now sustains the media for the most part.  Given is discontinuities of the national economy, this condition is probably truer of Nigeria than it is of most countries credited with a vibrant media system.

    Hosting the IPI World Congress not going to be cheap.  But the NPAN must stoutly resist every attempt to turn it into a government-sponsored event.

    Government has a role, especially in protocol, logistics, and in providing security for the visiting delegates and at all the conference venues.  Beyond that, its role should be limited and circumscribed. But the Nigerian Newspapers Proprietors Association (NPAN) should in no way encourage political officials to believe that the IPI s coming to “showcase” Nigeria to the world — i.e. dwell only on the most positive aspects of Nigerian life.

    Visiting will no doubt give ample coverage to realities of Nigerian life – the good, the not so good, and the positively ugly.   They will report on the glamour and glitz of Abuja, but they will also report on the broken infrastructure, the epileptic power supply, and the squalor of the surrounding squatter camps.

    If the reporting should dwell for the most part on the not so good and the positively ugly, public officials should not regard that outcome as a poor return on whatever they might have regarded as an investment.

    That, unfortunately, is just the way journalists in most parts of the world, including Nigeria, have been socialized into news work.

    In Nigeria, events of this nature tend to rest on “donations” from the government, which has its own agenda, and the so-called organized private sector, acting out of a sense of corporate social responsibility.  The latter is not always totally disinterested, but the NPAN can handle any fallout of donations from that province.

    But government donations to professional organizations are especially treacherous. They often end up destabilizing, if not compromising, the recipient body.  No one understood that better than – who else? – military president Ibrahim Babangida, who  took pride in conducting a “government by donation” as the noted poet and public intellectual, Odia Ofeimun, phrased it.

    If Bagangida wanted to sow the seeds of rancor, factionalization or disintegration in a professional  body, he seized upon any pretext to award it a large donation, especially if he could not take its goodwill for granted.  Almost immediately fights broke out over what the donation was meant for, the precise beneficiary, and sometimes the exact amount.  The in-fighting made it harder for the organization to speak with one coherent voice.

    The larger the donation, the greater the propensity for conflict within.  Rarely did the organization recover fully.

    Ask the Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria.  Ask the Nigerian Bar Association, which received a multi-million Naira grant to host a conference of the African Bar Association.  Ask the Nigerian Union of journalists which received, per its chairman Sani Zorro, a donation of N30 million toward instituting a welfare scheme for journalists.   In particular, ask what happened to the donation.

    The NPAN needs all the resources it can find.  But given this capsule history, and not forgetting the kerfuffle that broke over what it unwisely received from the National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki as compensation for loss of business occasioned by government agents and Boko Haram insurgents, the NPAN will do well not to seek or accept any cash donation toward staging the 2018 IPI World Congress.

    Remember that in Nigeria, nothing divides like money, even among those we are used to regarding as prosperous.

    As much as possible, seek donations in kind.  If you must accept cash donations, make sure that they are properly accounted for.  It would be sad indeed if anything remotely indicative of a financial scandal should supplant news of a successful hosting or damage the NPAN’s reputation beyond repair.

    Good luck, and all the best.

     

                                            Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora

     

    There is little to add to the tribute my colleague Tunji “Cyclone”Adegboyega and deputy chair of the Editorial Board paid to Ambassador Dr Oladapo Fafowora in his January 21, 2018, column, on the occasion Dr Fafowora’s “retirement” from this newspaper’s Editorial Board.

    As one of several consultants, Dr  Fafowora, was a leading light on the Editorial Board on The Guardian  when I had the honour of being the editorial page editor and subsequently chair of the Editorial Board, from 1988 through 1994.

    He was, and has remained, everything you expect of a diplomat of the first rank:  exceedingly knowledgeable, impeccably mannered, uncommonly discreet.  Unless you researched his past, you would not know that, in a long and distinguished career, he had served as cabinet secretary in General  Obasanjo’s military government, deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador to Turkey, and director-general of the Nigerian Manufacturers’ Association.  Nor would you know that he earned his decorate from Oxford.

    Though he has some strong convictions, he is dispassionate for the most part, yet very engaging.  He had majored in History, but he wrote on economics with authority.  His weekly columns for this newspaper on a wide range of subjects shone through and through with insight, scholarship, and mastery of exposition.

     

     

  • Lewdpapers or newspapers?

    It troubles ones to observe that Nigeria’s clean weekday newspapers metamorphose into lewdpapers at weekends. Saturday and Sunday when you look forward to domestic company with child-friendly weeklies, you are trapped in an oppressive nightmare, wrestling with nudepapers. They flaunt naked images of female bodies not healthy for impressionable young minds. But these expressive photos also harm the larger society with destructive far-reaching consequences: they devalue the dignity of our womenfolk; they offer false and ungodly standards about intimacy between man and woman; they trigger an unending chain of loose moral conduct among the youths and the adults.

    We appear to have become quite tolerant of this creepy soft and hard pornography on the sacred pages of our newspapers. It used to be a coy feature in the gossip outlets and fashion magazines in the local media. Later, our submission to the decadent values of the capitalism of the Western world took us to an adventurous and bolder threshold that led to the publication of wholesale underground cover to cover magazines trading in sex.

    Since Playboy magazine, whose founder Hugh Hefner died recently, began the business in the 1950s in the print medium, producers of porn have deployed new technologies in filmology, starting in the late 1970s to push the trade to wider and more daring platforms.

    They moved from 16mm to the readily available camcorder which even the unskilled could operate to shoot bedroom scenes for commercial distribution. Finally in the 1990s, following the dawn of the Internet, man was completely overwhelmed by this carnal craze. It’s only a button away on your palm device. Of course it’s one’s choice to visit such sites or resist the urge and recoil from it. No one takes your finger there.

    But this line of defence isn’t acceptable because we need to protect our vulnerable youth and society from easy exposure to potential peril. We can’t be fence sitters if there are threats to our collective cultural purity, sanity and morality such as lewdpaper journalism poses.

    There is palpable danger to our humanity. Our traditional values will go under if we are sold to consuming depravity and licentiousness that manifest in displaying sensitive parts of the body that ought not to be so profaned. That is where you find the difference between sedate civilization and its antithetical obscenity.

    It is disingenuous to suggest that posting pictures of couples in love making act, half-clad females, models in thigh-high slits and those baring their breasts along with graphic literature on sex is part of the information and education as well as entertainment agenda of the media, which the Nigerian constitution guarantees. It speaks of freedom of expression, information (and dissemination) and access to it. But it isn’t unfettered freedom. For instance, despite the acclaimed principle of fundamental human rights, the law doesn’t give one the freedom or right to take one’s life.

    To be sure, we can’t rule that all photographic portrayal of coital organs or activity is porn. We can have them aplenty in educational or medical textbooks. But the text that accompanies them is dispassionately technical and instructional.

    On the other hand, our lewdpapers have a motive to trigger sexual arousal by bringing up pictures of seemingly impeccable women in seductive killer mood. They defile the minds of those who fall for them and force them into an addiction akin to the calamity caused by alcohol and drugs.

    When a man is given to porn, he is in a merciless three-fold hold. He has dehumanized himself because he is prey to fantasy and futile chase for gorgon goddesses who won’t spring alive from the screen or the nudepapers. His wife would no longer please him since she has paled beside the newfound youthful sex object in the pictures he is served every weekend. It is the beginning of the breakdown of the home—and alas of society.

    Secondly, an early authority, Jeff Olson, had this to say: “as pornography pollutes the mind, it often turns into an enslaving… addiction where there is a ‘continual lust for more’… an addiction to pornography doesn’t happen overnight. It sneaks out on a man overtime…”

    The third dangerous effect of this retail of porn in our weekend newspapers is that it rocks the settled sanctity of sex and ruins our respect for women who are the industry’s most violated. Porn attempts to demystify a sacred activity meant to symbolize man’s partnership with God in His plan of procreation and perpetuation of the human race. It seeks to give flippant flavour to a deep-seated pleasurable affair found only in a conjugal setting. Thus it gives the impression that men and women are nothing more than animals feeding only on sex.

    The danger lewdpapers constitute is regardless of whether the victim is married or single. As far as they arouse one the red button for adventurous quest, they represent an anathema and a no-go area. Researchers in the United States of America and other western countries report that exposure to porn leads to deviant cravings including rape, child molestation and divorce. In one study, 86% of convicted rapists admitted that they regularly used porn. 57% said they tried to re-enact what they saw in the sex video.

    Porn is a deadly assault on our society. It works on all aspects of society—the young, the old and adults.  It wages a mind war which is far more devastating than when physical weapons of mass destruction are at work. Such battles aim at the soul—the very essence of a human being. When we talk of the breakdown of society and insensitive leadership and institutions, we must trace the deficiency to a spiritually and morally stricken soul. That’s where you find loose values and insensitivity to character and integrity, which undermine the foundation of the community.

    The Pied Piper of Hamelin who caused national grief by killing scores of children in 1284 didn’t drop a bomb. He played seductive music that pulled the kids away from their parents into perdition. Nigeria’s own Pied Piper is in town, in the garish gab of porn.

     

    • Ojewale is a writer based in Ota, Ogun State.
  • Let the recipient beware

    Let the recipient beware

    There was a time, not too long ago, when newspapering was a profitable business.  Not quite “a licence to print money” as the British newspaper baron Lord Thomson of Fleet once said of television, but a profitable business all the same – if run on sound principles and managed well.

    In the age of the Internet, newspapers all over the world, even those run on the soundest principles, have become an endangered species, what with spiralling production and distributing costs, plummeting advertisement revenues, and declining paid subscriptions and street sales. Increasingly, the survival of the newspaper now turns not on its ability to generate a surplus but on its capacity to absorb continual loss.

    Subsidies by proprietors known and hidden, bank overdrafts, and funds generated through ancillary ventures are what keep the average newspaper afloat, plus, more crucially, especially in Nigeria, leveraging the media’s singular power to confer status.  I will return to this latter point presently.

    Each of these survival strategies usually carries a price.

    To cite just one instance:  In the 1980s, one newspaper once published a scathing profile of a well-known Lagos socialite who was chair of a major commercial bank,  to which the newspaper was heavily indebted.  The bank immediately called up the loan, which had long matured.  As atonement, the newspaper published a much more approving profile several weeks later, by the writer of the earlier piece.

    The survival strategy of choice of the Nigerian media these days lies, as I was saying, in their unrivalled power to confer status on individuals, groups and institutions. In a society where status counts for a great deal, that is no trifling power.  Just consider how the media transformed Nnamdi Kanu from obscurity to celebrity almost overnight.

    That power may well be the traditional media’s greatest asset today.  It was always there, but the way they are exploiting it these days, one might be led to think that they have just discovered it.  Hardly a day passes without one media organisation or another conferring an award, prize or other recognition, at a widely publicised and lavishly staged ceremony, on prominent individuals, groups or institutions, for achievements ranging from the barely substantive to the frankly contrived.

    These awards rarely go to individuals, groups or institutions on the fringe of society, no matter how substantive their contribution to the national well-being, or to those who cannot be trusted to reciprocate the gesture with hard cash or bounteous patronage.

    Naturally, the recipients are for the most part state governors, officials of the federal and state legislatures, chairpersons of local government areas, well-heeled traditional rulers, banks, oil companies, high net-worth persons, the better corporate institutions, and their senior executives.

    The process begins with an announcement of a date for staging the year’s presentation of the highly competitive and much-coveted awards, or in the case of an organisation just getting into the lucrative act, a prefatory declaration of intent of the high-minded kind.

    From the media organisations that have built a reputation on this kind of thing, a declaration that the recipients will in the final analysis be selected by their highly revered “Board of Editors” and that the awards will be presented by international statesmen and women – former presidents and prime ministers and their spouses, and we are not talking of some Fourth World nations, please — is usually enough to dilute whatever misgivings the attentive audience may harbour about the whole thing.   Live performances by recording artistes and entertainers of global stature remove all doubt.

    Naturally, media organisations just getting into the act adopt a more cautious approach.  They lay out the award categories, and actually invite nominations from the attentive audience. After toting the returns, they travel round the country, camera crew in tow, to inform those who have been nominated of their good fortune.

    The lucky nominees in turn congratulate the media organisation and its readership on their sound judgment and patriotism and matchless contribution to the peace and unity and progress of the nation.

    Having come this far to getting their status proclaimed or affirmed, few persons, groups or institution due to receive awards will balk at purchasing a table or tables for ten guests and multiples thereof for  at a five or six-figure price tag.  After all, they must know, the ceremony may well be once-in-a-lifetime outing, for which no price can be too high.

    The awards gala finally takes place in all its tinselled glamour, with recipients getting awards matching their financial investment in the ceremony.  Cash prizes are announced, but redemption may not be guaranteed.  Baubles and other tokens of recognition are handed out.

    Everyone involved is a winner.

    The media organisation consolidates or establishes its power to confer status; the recipients go home  buoyed that their status has been affirmed or confirmed.  And in grateful appreciation, they buy acres of media space to congratulate the media organisation on its sense of duty and propriety; their friends, clients, partners and admirers buy even more media space to “felicitate” with them on the epochal achievement.

    The Daily Times, once a generic name for newspapers but now a faded and tarnished memory, sought early last month to stamp on the public consciousness an identity as the online offshoot of a “legacy newspaper” eminently qualified to honour those it deems worthy.

    Even in its present online form, a work in progress at best, it can hardly lay any claim to distinction.  Yet, it chose the 91st (ha!) anniversary of its forebear to confer all manner of awards on 91 Nigerians who, by its light, “have impacted society positively,” according to Fidelis Anosike, identified by the organisers as chairman of Folio Publications, publisher of the journal.

    The Times Heroes Awards, as the organisers portentously called them, spanned five categories: Leadership, Politician of the Decade, Woman of the Decade, Company of the Decade, Governance, Life Impact, and Public Service Impact.  Recipients include the quick and the dead.

    It is a mark of the thoroughness of the selection and the nice sense of discrimination of the Awards Committee that Yahaya Bello, the beleaguered governor of my home state, Kogi, who was thrust into that position by spite and sanctified by judicial legerdemain of the most transparent kind  and can hardly point to any substantive achievement, nevertheless took home a Times Heroes Award, ranked with Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode,  among others, as “one of the most performing governors in Nigeria.”

    Under the circumstances, it must be accounted a sad and grievous omission that they did not name his enabler-turned-nemesis, Senator Dino Melaye (APC Kogi West), “Lawmaker of the Century.”   Melaye,                I gather, is set to present a draft resolution before the Senate at its next plenary session urging it to void the Bello award, retroactive to the date of its purported conferment. My sources tell me that the Delinquent, beg your pardon, Distinguished Senator, will settle for nothing less than a unanimous vote.

    The Time Heroes Award gala held all right at the International Conference Centre Abuja,  but under  the ominous cloud of a page-long advertisement in several newspapers the preceding day declaring the event “illegal and criminal.”

    Issued under the hand of “The Board of Directors of the Daily Times of Nigeria plc,” the advertisement stated that the organisers of the award were not officers of the Daily Times in any guise or disguise, and had no authority from the company to transact any business on its behalf.

    Any person, group or organisation “participating in the ceremony in any manner whatsoever,” the advertisement warned darkly, “will be complicit in a criminal conspiracy.”

    So, one can be presumed complicit in a criminal conspiracy and visited with the appropriate penalties for merely receiving an award, even a fake one?

    Even in Nigeria, that is a new one.  Beware, recipient.

  • Roundtable on indigenous newspapers holds next week

    The Federal Government is expected to host a two-day annual roundtable for indigenous language newspapers, as part of the efforts to promote indigenous languages.

    National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO), in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture, is organising the programme with the theme “Nigerian Indigenous Language Newspapers and National Development”.

    The Annual Roundtable, which comes up between May 15 and 16, at the Arewa House, Kaduna by 11am, will be hosted by the Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed.

    Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai will be the Special Guest of Honour.

    The Chairman, Senate Committee on Culture and Tourism, Senator Mathew Urhoghide will chair the opening ceremony. The Chairman/Publisher of Leadership Newspapers, Mr. Sam Nda-Isaiah, will deliver the keynote address.

    The lead paper presenter on the occasion is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Media Trust Limited, Mallam Manir Dan Ali and Professor Olu Obafemi of the University of Ilorin will serve as moderator.

    The forum is designed to build the capacity of publishers, editors and art correspondents of the indigenous language newspapers to keep them abreast of contemporary realities in the sector and also enhance their professional skills and competence for effective service delivery.

  • Newspapers’ advert revenues hit N143b

    Advertising income for Nigerian newspapers hit N143.1 billion between 2006 and December 2015, revealing a wavy pattern that reached its peak in 2014 with N25 billion; and declined to 23.7 billion at the end of 2015.

    According to a Mediafacts Nigeria 10 Years Trend Review (2006 to 2016) released yesterday by MediaReach OMD,   the newspaper advert income in 2006 moved from N4.4 billion to N4.8 and N4.9 billion in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

    The media sub-sector further experienced surge with N15.8 billion in 2009 and N16.5 billion in 2010.

    However, the report indicated decline in 2011 and 2012 despite general elections which amounted to N15.4 and N9.0 billion in 2012 respectively.

    The downward trend, however, changed in 2013 with an advert income of N18.5 billion with further rise to its peak in 2014, hitting N25.8billion.

    Also, during the 2015 election year, the sub-sector of the media industry recorded another decline by N2.1billion hitting N23.7 billion.

    Meanwhile,  mediaReach OMD explained that the newspapers tend to mostly attract their highest advert patronage in the second and third quarters, with exception of 2013 and 2014, which had their highest spending in the fourth quarters of the year.

    In terms of regional spending in the last ten years, the split is between Lagos and North, with Lagos constantly attracting the dominant share of advert spending year after year.

    The analysis, however, shows that Glo has consistently dominated the list of press advertising, rising steadily in the last three years to tie with Guaranty Trust Bank ahead of others while MTN currently occupies the third position.

    But in terms of advertising expenditure across board, the TV medium consistently enjoyed the lion share of advert budget over the years. It is followed by the Out of Home (OOH) medium except for 2014 and 2015, when the print medium followed the leading TV medium. The newspapers has, however, experienced the highest growth rate in terms of advert spends especially in the last three years.

    For total advertising expenditure, the year 2013 enjoyed the highest spending with N103.8 billion, representing a marginal increase over year 2011 spending of N 102.8 billion. There was a decline in 2014 as compared to the high spending in 2013.

    The general economic outlook during the period under review showed a Gross Domestic Product, GDP estimated at 6.1 per cent in 2014, owing to continued strong performance mainly in services, but also in industry. The oil sector was in decline, albeit at a slower rate than in the previous year. Also in 2014, oil and gas GDP was estimated to have declined by 1.3 per cent, relative to a decline of 13.1 per cent in 2013.

    The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, mediaReach OMD, Mr. Tolu Ogunkoya, said: “Nigeria’s media is one of the most dynamic in Africa. Each of the 36 states has at least a TV station and one radio. There are hundreds of radio stations and terrestrial TV stations, as well as cable and direct-to-home satellite offerings.”

    Not a few analysts however agree that the newspaper industry in Nigeria is caught in the web of great depression and recession. It has fallen victim to a combination of intertwined factors. The first is the tough economic environment, which has reduced advertising revenue, as well as the purchasing power of the reading public, and driven up the cost of production to an almost unmanageable level.

    With a foreign exchange regime that is unstable, and virtually every input required for production imported from abroad, or sourced locally at cut-throat prices, an average newspaper which used to cost almost nothing in the 70s, is now priced beyond the reach of many Nigerians.

  • Soldiers confiscate newspapers in Aba

    Soldiers confiscate newspapers in Aba

    Newspaper vendors in Aba, Abia State, are counting their losses following the confiscation of their wares by soldiers yesterday.

    The Nation gathered that the confiscated papers were both unsold and new editions of New Republic, Vesym, Freedom Journal and Authority.

    Sources said the soldiers, believed to have come from 144 Battalion, which is under Ohafia 14 Brigade, stormed St. Michael’s Road at about 7am, in two Hilux vans and seized the papers bearing Biafra reports.

    After attempts at arresting distributors and publishers failed, the soldiers packed the unsold and current editions of the papers and left.

    A vendor said: “At about some minutes past seven, soldiers in two Hilux vans arrived with one of the vendors that they picked along Mosque, asking him to point at the person who gave him the paper. But the vendor could not, because the person who gave him the paper had gone.

    “They asked to know the publishers or suppliers but got no response. Then they confiscated New Republic, Vesym, Freedom Journal and some copies of The Authority, which carried Biafra stories. “We are yet to be told the reason for the confiscation, but the truth is that we have lost money as many readers were disappointed.”

    A publisher, who pleaded for anonymity, condemned the action of the soldiers. He said they were overstepping their bounds and vowed that “attempts by the military to gag the press will fail. We are publishing reports about Biafra like other national dailies do. Let them close down all the media houses because they are carrying Biafra stories, after all, we are not the only ones publishing stories on Biafra.”

    Media Officer of the 144 Brigade, Major Sydney Mbanefo could not be reached for comments but a source at 144 Battalion confirmed the seizure, saying it was due to the hate and inciting reports allegedly being published by the papers.

    The source added that they were on the trail of the publishers and suppliers with the aim of nipping circulation of such inciting materials. He warned vendors to desist from selling such publication.

    A Non-Governmental Organisation and Civil Rights group, Foundation for Environmental Rights Advocacy and Development, in a statement yesterday condemned the action. It described it as anti-democracy.

    The statement by Comrades Nelson Nwafor and Emmanuel Acha said soldiers have no right to confiscate newspapers, no matter what is published, except on the orders of a competent court. It called on the Chief of Army Staff to call the soldiers to order before they take laws into their hands.

    “Nigeria is not a banana republic and therefore, the principles of democracy, as practiced elsewhere, should be respected.”

  • He’ll be remembered as a dependable professional, says Jonathan

    President Goodluck Jonathan was all praise for the late Dimgba Igwe acknowledging in particular his high sense of professionalism.

    The President, in a condolence message yesterday expressed commiserations to the publishers of The Sun Newspapers, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, and all friends and associates of Mr. Igwe, “for whom his unexpected death must be exceedingly painful.”

    He said the late Igwe will “always be remembered as a hardworking and dependable professional, who, through his various writings as columnist, author and public speaker, demonstrated a special ability to convey the truth and his convictions in lucid, compelling prose, and in a style that was shorn of cant and foppery.”

    He enjoined the family, friends and associates of the deceased to “be consoled by the knowledge that he put his God-given abilities to the best possible use in a very purposeful life that was wholly devoted to the defence of truth and the public interest, as well as the promotion of the highest standards of his chosen profession of journalism.”

    He prayed that God might grant them the fortitude to bear the loss of “the very forthright journalist and media administrator, and also grant his soul, peaceful repose.”

  • Asaba residents pay N10 to read newspapers

    Newspaper vendors in Asaba, the Delta State capital, now collect N10 from readers who prefer to read papers at the newsstands.

    Mr. Azuibuike Emmanuel, who sells newspapers at the Ibusa junction, said most readers preferred paying N10 and reading the newspapers to buying them.

    He said he introduced the levy since the readers, most of who were unemployed, wanted information but could not buy newspapers.

    Azubuike said he could no longer tolerate their reading the papers free because he was no longer making huge sales.

    Another vendor, Miss Abigail Onwuzulike, said she also charged each reader N10 to read the headlines, since they did not want to buy.

    Miss Onwuzulike said some of them even preferred pairing with others to pay the amount.

    She added that she realised money from the levy to augment her income.

  • Mr President, let newspapers be!

    Mr President, let newspapers be!

    ‘In testy times, we fight for ideas and newspapers are our fortress’——–Heinrich Heine

    This is indeed, a testing period when beleaguered Nigerians deserve nothing short of complete rescue from the clutches of Boko Haram insurgents, by the Nigerian military. But quite sadly, the institution has once again chosen to re-enact its sordid past. In five days beginning from last Friday, our soldiers have sustained a ridiculous feat: What they are incapable of achieving in Sambisa forest and other notorious hangouts of the insurgents, they (albeit temporarily), have unleashed on some of the leading newspapers in the country, including The Nation, Daily Trust and Leadership.

    During the better forgotten five gruelling days, the military unlawfully unleashed its notorious fangs on newspaper circulation vehicles, agents, vendors and even innocent readers across the country. Rather than deploy its best brains to the battle-field of Boko Haram, the military high command chose to deploy, in a barbaric manner, its soldiers in several states of the federation, hounding newspapers’ operational vehicles, the newspapers, agents and vendors, to impede circulation of news stories. And their mission: To attempt to impede constitutional rights to freedom of expression.

    In a country where cosmic unemployment rears its ugly head, it is worrisome that the military and its Commander-in-Chief could be so insensitive to the implications of their action on the businesses of affected media organisations and the likely fate of their employees. The seizure of newspapers, arrest of circulation drivers of several of their publishing companies as well as depriving the reading public access to information by operatives of the Nigerian military and other security agencies is reminiscent of the gory military era in this clime.

    Yet, under this democracy, the 1999 Constitution (as amended) generously provides in Section 22: “The press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this Chapter and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people”.

    In a democracy, it is sad that while the onslaught lasted, most vendors, against their will, were forced to reject The Nation and other newspapers for fear of being arrested or beaten up by soldiers. The few audacious ones amongst them were mercilessly dealt with for displaying especially The Nation newspaper in a show of what this column views as misplaced military bravado against free and lawful dissemination of information.

    The tepid response by Defence Headquarters that newspaper circulation vans were stopped based on security reports that they were to be used to ferry bombs from the North East to other parts of the country could not stand the test of commonsense. One is forced to ask whether the current top military hierarchy has intelligent people that think for them otherwise, they would not have come up with such infantile alibi. If newspaper circulation vans were to be used, as alleged, to transmit bombs from the north east to other parts of the country, the Defence Headquarters should come out and tell Nigerians how many of the detained circulation vans were coming from the north east at the time of its savagery conducts against the affected newspapers ? Were the harassed and brutalised vendors, agents, readers and drivers also coming from the north east to distribute bombs to other parts of the country? What a jejune reasoning from a military that is daily proving to be incapable of rescuing the country from internal insurrection! What happens if an external aggression against the country surfaces?

    May God save our dear country from this highly corrupt and politicised military relishing in an abyss! More saddening is the fact that the presidency has not uttered a word of condemnation against this attempt at fettering the human mind. Why do men of power forget the history of the significant role of media in enthroning good governance and dethroning bad governance so soon? The answer is simply because men of power in pursuit of self greed/inordinate ambition surround themselves with people that tell them only what they prefer to hear.

    A rare leader like Thomas Jefferson had decades ago realised the significance of the media when he purportedly declared: “Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The current commander-in-chief and his military top brass must realise the futility of criminal official onslaught against the media through the counsel of the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte when he admitted: “Three newspapers are to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

    The import of these momentous words has been well amplified in contemporary history of the country. No matter how hard a tyrannical leader might try to decimate the media, it is on record that the Nigerian media, like its counterparts in different countries of the world, has weathered the storm and in the end, survived such tyrannical inclinations. The Buhari/Idiagbon administration in 1984 tried so much using iron cast power to intimidate and suppress newspapers and the entire media. Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor of the Guardian newspaper were prosecuted and jailed for publishing the truth. In the end, the media had the last laugh.  During the infamous reign of Ibrahim Babangida as Head of State, courageous Dele Giwa, then editor-in-chief of Newswatch was murder in 1986 via a parcel bomb with inscription C-in-C, and delivered by a dispatch rider. Notable newspapers and magazines were proscribed and closed down. But the media surged forward and in the end outlived that better forgotten government of the self styled evil genius.

    Late General Sani Abacha was not a better ruler when it comes to allowing freedom of expression/ideas and free dissemination of information. This column asks: Where is he today even when the Nigeria media is still thriving and sitting in judgment over his tenure in power and those of other dictators like him?

    In case President Goodluck Jonathan has forgotten, this column wants to remind him that but for the Nigerian media, he would not be president today. Has Mr President forgotten so soon the selfless patriotic pursuit of truth, in his favour, when late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s cabal attempted to circumvent the intent and spirit of the constitution? Has the president forgotten how the media stabilised him in power by exposing the secrets of then northern cabal that were averse to a south-south person assuming the presidency? What about the favourable coverage that was given to his supposed pan-Nigerian mandate in the 2011 presidential election? Does he expect the Nigerian media to still be celebrating him now that he seems bereft of the required ideas and capacity to move the country out of the woods?

    Nigerian media will continue to criticise and raise justifiable questions when governance is going awry because Wilbur F. Storey once counselled that: ‘It is the newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.’ The president and all his service chiefs and soldiers’ phobia for newspapers despite their awesome powers cannot stop it from performing these functions.

    President Jonathan needs the words of Richard Kluger to fully realise that he is sliding into despotism. The latter once said: “Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism…” His latest siege on newspapers operations is just a pointer in that regard. But this column wants him to reflect on what becomes of previous tyrannies in Nigeria’s history. Your guess is as good as mine. Mr President, it is not too late for you to retrace your increasing wrong steps against the media. A word is widely believed to be sufficient for the wise!