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Jos Crisis Exposes Us! By Yusuf Muhammad Inuwa
Going by the unfortunate events that occurred recently in Jos and its environs and the subsequent commentaries and publications in our media, it has exposes the psychic of we Nigerians and as such has once again brought out the question of our oneness as an entity called Nigeria. These events have showed the world the disdained sections of the country has against each other culminating into playing to gallery the lives of innocent victims of these barbaric atrocities committed by the so-called local marauding champions and the avenging armies of psychological and mentally retarded blood sucking coward celebrated by their clans as the defenders of their clannish enclaves.
Basically some Nigerians like sensationalising and exaggeration of facts and events by misrepresenting the exact happenings, thereby making others to capitalise on it and to mislead these gullible sets of people. Sensationalising events is the hall mark of these agents of falsehood thereby sustaining the tempo in vilifying anything contrary to their irredentist belief, its only in Nigeria where same event is being reported differently by the same people covering such event at the same time but differ in its reportage simply because of hidden or inherent hatred of a section of the society. It happened before and it is happening now and so sure it would happen again and again, exaggeration of casualty figures so as to draw sympathy or burying the story or even down playing casualty figure so as to suppress the agitation for seeking justice is common knowledge in our media industry. It is only in Nigeria where reporters’ story is re-written by editors sitting in the comfort of their offices in either Lagos or Abuja to attract sympathy or condemnation and also to SALE!
In every society media is the watchdog of that society thereby reporting the happenings of events as it happened and backing such stories with exact facts and figures and again balancing such stories from both angles. Sometimes there are stories that are carried with uttermost restrained so as not to escalate or degenerate palpable tension into chaos, but here in Nigeria reverse is the case a casualty of hundreds would be reported in thousands so as to either escalate or aggravates the problems systematically. Security agencies need to take into cognisance the technicality of escalating crisis by our media houses.
Somebody asked what is wrong with Nigerians and he aptly captures and summarised them into selfishness, disorganisation, wickedness, sentimental and lawlessness. These are the issue that hinders our nation’s growth and development, in as far as we silently prayed evil to befall on others but hypocritically and publically praying otherwise then we have a problem. We cannot make any meaningful headway unless we remove these bad tendencies from our individual and collective lives as Nigerians. These issues have eaten deep into the fabric of Nigerian societies destroying the entity as a nation, which is more devastating than corruption.
Objectivity, decorum and ethics are thrown to the dogs giving way to subjectivity and quackery in this noble profession just as this endemic manifest in other fields but not as calamitous as in media because the destruction a single line of a sentence could cause is more than what we can comprehend. That is why some of us depend on foreign media for balance news reportage. The oneness of this country depend on the ability to tolerate one another irrespective of our creed or religious affiliations hence the need to forge ahead so as to develop or not oblivious of the calamities awaiting us.
We like to pretend that all is well but deep down we know that we hate each other, I wonder how we came this far? We do not need any American permutation to predict our doom because all the indices of disintegration are starring us in the face and God help us!
Yusuf Muhammad Inuwa Kaduna |