*BY Olatunji Ololade*
The Nigerian tragedy is seldom written in the ricochet of bullets alone. Sometimes, it is scripted in newsrooms, goaded by keypad confidence. Thus the journalistic frenzy to thump the “publish” button, a mania amplified by a press that forgets, that journalism, even at its freest, is never free of consequence.
Today, Nigeria is locked in an existential struggle with terror, weakened by governmental missteps, and a press that often mistakes adversarial passion for professional duty.
I do not, hereby, plead for capitulation or censorship. The media must never become lapdog to a captured state, nor submit to the patronage of criminal actors. But there is a difference between watchdog journalism and rabid barking that alerts the burglar to the location of the sleeping homeowner. In the case of Brigadier General Musa Uba, executed after being captured by ISWAP terrorists following an ambush, Nigeria witnessed the devastating consequences of a press that prioritised speed over discernment and exposure over prudence.
Taiwo Adebayo, an investigative journalist, was one of the few to articulate the tragedy with clarity, dispassion, and professional responsibility. His reflections reveal uncomfortable truths about journalistic practice and the deeper malaise of contemporary reportage.
His well articulated piece highlights the abandonment of social responsibility ethics in an age of hyper-competition, digital ego tripping, click-bait survival, and the commodification of despair.
There is a lot that distinguishes terrorism reporting from random reportage; it is strategic terrain, in which a seemingly harmless sentence may save or destroy lives, where an innocuous headline or rider may either protect neighbourhoods or expose them to slaughter.
Brigadier General Uba, Commander of the Nigerian Army’s 25 Task Force Brigade, in Borno, initially escaped the ISWAP ambush and communicated with colleagues, from his hiding in the forest, while awaiting rescue. But he was exposed by Nigeria’s digital media sphere. News media, raring to update and publish first; eager to sate the lust of a public addicted to breaking news, compromised Uba.
The first wave of reports declared him missing or abducted. Another set, possibly published to reduce embarrassment within military circles, suggested that he had been rescued. But ISWAP, like every insurgent group with digital intelligence capability, was listening. They monitored the reports, identified the window of vulnerability, mobilised a unit, and swept the area. The general was recaptured near a village in Damboa. His phone confirmed his rank and value. Soon after, he was killed.
While this manifests as military failure; it was also a newsroom-assisted catastrophe. The Nigerian newsroom must hold itself accountable for endangering Uba, for failing to ask the crucial questions in a conflict where human lives hang in the balance: Is this information confirmed? Could publishing it worsen the danger? Is the intelligence incomplete, unverified, or strategically sensitive? Does the public’s right to know in this moment outweigh the risk of losing a life?
Had those questions guided the reporting, as Adebayo rightly observed, the press could still have informed the nation, without informing the enemy. Responsible editorial judgment is hardly censorship. It is the basic social duty journalism owes the society that protects its freedom.
General Uba, therefore, was betrayed by the press that should have protected him through thoughtful, sequenced, ethically weighted reporting, until his rescue was complete or his fate was certain.
But the problem exceeds procedural lapses, it is complex and deeply embedded. Vast segments of the Nigerian press have adopted a posture of reflexive cynicism, an adversarial tone that casts the nation as a perpetual disappointment and its institutions as irredeemable. In the process, patriotism has become outmoded, even suspicious. Love of country is treated as a sign of naivety or complicity.
Thus, many journalists will celebrate the American military, the British special forces, the IDF, or the French Foreign Legion as the gold standards of military competence. But when reporting on Nigerian troops, they prefer frames of cowardice, incompetence, corruption, or buffoonery. Some of those criticisms are deserved, taking into cognizance, the tactical lapses and operational misconduct that have marred counterinsurgency operations.
Yet to consistently strip one’s own defenders of dignity while upholding foreign counterparts as flawless heroes constitutes both irresponsible journalism and ideological self-harm. The Nigerian soldier—the one sleeping in foxholes in Sambisa and the one patrolling across vast, hostile terrain—may not be perfect. But those men and women are the living wall between Nigeria and fragmentation.
The press that reports their battles, therefore, ought to do so with balance, sobriety, and an allegiance to peace above sensationalism.
Yet media irresponsibility is an illness that extends beyond the newsroom. It is the symptom of a broader civic decay as the journalist is rarely the lone saboteur of the Nigerian enterprise.
Doctors, engineers, bus conductors, teachers, bankers, students and unemployed youths, to mention a few, have adopted a bitter doctrine of mockery of their homeland. Too many Nigerians speak of the country as if it were a cursed burden rather than a shared project. Thus the gleeful taunt: “If Nigeria happens to you, you will learn the hard way.” This is despair masked as humour. It is helplessness weaponised into collective self-disdain. And until this disposition shifts, no reforms will yield enduring transformation.
That is why the media and the literary arts must be courted both as observers and active participants in national renewal. Nations that have overcome great crises, from post-war Japan to post-genocide Rwanda, did so through policy and narrative. They re-authored themselves, telling new stories about who they were and what futures they deserved.
Nigeria must do the same. Our press and cultural institutions must become partners in reframing patriotism as a responsible civic posture, even as we replace mockery with narratives of ownership and duty. National progress is not a spectator sport thus the need for a practical national reorientation plan, anchored in Nigeria’s capacity to actualise radical reforms and sustain its proceeds.
The stakes have grown higher amid internal threats posed by terrorists, bandits, separatist militias and external pressures. There are desperate actors abroad, including a missionary political lobby in the United States, agitating for intervention under the guise of protecting Nigerian Christians from targeted genocide. No serious student of geopolitics doubts that humanitarian pretexts have historically served as covers for invasion, regime change, and neo-imperial disruption.
If Nigeria becomes the next theatre of “saving Africans from themselves,” the loss will be borne by Nigerians, not Washington. It’s our children whose classrooms will be shelled. Our farmlands will become battlefields and our cities will be bombed to rubble. The economy will collapse under artillery and sanctions, and the multi-ethnic federation that we are so proud of, will splinter beyond repair.
Nigeria has far more to lose from foreign intervention, than it stands to gain. Thus, the press as a chronicler of national events must always protect the country’s security and sovereignty through socially responsible reporting. Going forward, journalists must weigh every revelation with the seriousness of a surgeon deciding where to cut.
The media must collectively build stronger newsroom ethics for real-time conflict reporting; journalists must be trained on how insurgent groups mine media coverage for tactical intelligence; even as we build institutional structures for dialogue between the media and security agencies.
The intent isn’t to turn the fourth estate into a propagandist arm of government, but to renew civic patriotism and remind journalists that freedom of the press exists so that society may live, not die prematurely.