My Disappointment with Nigerian Newspapers of Today, By Peter Enahoro

MY DISAPPOINTMENT WITH NIGERIAN PAPERS OF TODAY

By PETER ENAHORO

(Excerpt from Segun Osoba, The Newspaper Years, by Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe)

More than a quarter of a century after I left Nigeria, one would have expected the standards of journalism to be much higher than what we had.  I don’t think the standard is high enough now.  It has not gone far enough for 25 years.  Instead, there has been a deterioration in some aspects where there should not be.

Inasmuch as the English language is our official language, inasmuch as we are publishing in English, I think we owe it to ourselves and to our profession to try to write the language in a way the people will understand.

Certain bad expressions have crept into Nigerian journalism and they do influence the public.  You find the expression: Mr. So and so assured that.  That is bad English.  The correct usage is: You give an assurance or you assure yourself of something.  But you don’t say when he is confirming something that: he “assured” that.

There are cases where Yoruba is literally translated into English.  Take the case of a magazine quoting the mother of a detainee speaking in Yoruba.  The magazine quoted the woman as saying: “Babangida should not kill my son for me.”  It was used in bold headlines on the cover of the magazine. Another common mistake you find in Nigerian newspapers these days is “book launching.”  There is nothing like that.  The proper usage is a book launch.  We launch a book.  Not book launching.  Such things annoy me when I see them because they show carelessness.  We say: At the launch of the book.  Not at the launching of the book.  One can cite many examples.

Secondly, you don’t find the crusading spirit in Nigerian newspapers these days.  You don’t have crusading newspapers.  Thirdly, there are so many columnists and no star reporters.  We don’t have star reporters; everybody wants to be a columnist.  Herbert Unegbu was to my mind the complete reporter.  He wrote a column called “Unu Habib”.  In those days, when a big story breaks, there were star reporters like Herbert Unegbu and the late Rabo Abaide on the scene to report.  These days you don’t find the stars of news reporting: the one who breaks the news, the one who investigates.  When we talk of investigation, I think there is a tendency to believe that it has to be digging dirt.  No.  Let’s take the example of the Molue bus that got burnt on Third Mainland Bridge, claiming so many lives.  In Europe, which is the standard I expect now, we would have known more about the victims.  Reporters would go and dig into who they were and whom they left behind.  They would put a human face on the story.

In my time, I reported on the plight of Nigerian labourers in Fernando Po (the present day Equatorial Guinea).  Nigerian labourers were being recruited to Fernando Po and I got to hear that they were ill-treating our labourers there.  And I flew to Fernando Po.  I didn’t speak Spanish but I managed to investigate, took photographs of the ill-treated labourers.  There were large plantation farms owned by absentee landlords in Spain.  The Spanish landowners would send young Spaniards as foremen of the farms.  At the weekend, these foremen will come into town, get themselves drunk, look for women, and if they don’t succeed they return to the farms and demand the wives of some of the labourers.  It was ridiculous.   I went, came back and reported the story and the Daily Times continued to fuel that story until it became an issue in the House of Representatives.  The Nigerian government was forced to and negotiate an agreement with the Spanish authorities.  I believe in that sort of crusading originated by a newspaper report and followed up, not because some labourers had given me brown envelope.  The Nigerian press should identify with the so-called common men and try to right the wrongs in the society.

Lastly, there is not enough continuity of stories.  We handle a story and between two, three days, it dies.  Three months later, nobody asks: “Whatever happened to that story?  Let’s go find out.”

If I had a newspaper that I was editing, I would have said that Molue story I mentioned above would run for two weeks minimum.  There was enough in that story to write to persuade officialdom to do something about this constant problem of Molue accidents.

THE PRESS AND DEMOCRACY

When the forerunners of today’s journalism took on the British Empire, it was not an easy thing.  The enormity of the task they set themselves will not strike today’s generation.  The British Empire stretched right across the globe.  You look at the picture and here are in one small place in Nigeria against this mighty empire which had sedition as a weapon to put you in jail.  Why was my brother (Anthony Enahoro) jailed under the British?  As a 22-year-old young man, he wrote an article.  The governor had just got a pay rise at a time when we had a general strike and we were told that there was no money to pay the workers in this country.  So the young man wrote to question why the governor was accepting a pay rise when there was no money to pay the workers in this country.  The colonial authorities said it was seditious.  The press had a great role in preserving the spirit of democracy.  I am not saying corruption should be condoned.

As a young journalist, I remember the late Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa appealing to editors to be cautious and not to publish things that would fuel crisis.  There was a threatened strike and the drivers of Bolekaja (the forerunners of Molue) abandoned their vehicles and blocked Lagos.  Balewa summoned us the editors to a private briefing, I am sure, based on security reports.  He said certain people were trying to undermine the society.  They wanted to bring down the government.  At that time, the threat of Communist infiltration and the Russians aiding and abetting certain radicals was the big thing in this country.  And he was trying to tell us that we should not take things on the face value.  I remember as a young man sitting back and saying to myself: “Why is he trying to join me in this?  I am not in government.  I am not a politician.”  I remember Balewa telling us: “If this crisis erupts, all of us will suffer.”  And I remember thinking to myself: “Why should I suffer?  I am not part of it.”  But he was right.  When the crisis came in 1966, poor Balewa lost his life and Peter Enahoro went into exile that was to last more than 26 years.  So, journalists should not feel that they don’t belong to government and as such should always be looking for crisis to fuel their news stories.