Dear Lai, Why Should i Believe Traditional Media?
The past few days have birthed a lot of events in Nigeria, from the #EndSARS protest to the Lekki Massacre and now to the fight on who controls the social media space in Nigeria. This is not the first time the political elites in Nigeria are either trying to put an end to social media or regulate how social media users use the space in the country.
Lai Mohammed who is the minister of information in the country but is out of touch with the digital means of communication as he is an advocate of the youths depending solely on traditional media for what he termed ‘confirmed news’.
There is currently a mistrust between Nigerians and their leaders and this mistrust has also stretched to the media which the youthful population believes they are on the side of the government and will never report the news the way it should be.
An event in 2011 changed my perspective about the traditional media in Nigeria. In 2011, there was a protest in Federal Poly Nekede, it was supposed to be peaceful but students being students, they started destroying school properties and that lead to the school management involving the police, ATU (Ndị Okpu red) and even Army.
One of us, a first-year EE student was shot and he died while they were rushing him to the hospital.
The following day, on my way back to Onitsha, i stopped by at a popular paper stand at Douglas to read the headline and I saw how the dailies changed the whole narrative of the protest and even mentioned that the police started shooting when students allegedly cultists hijacked the protest and started shooting the police with AK 47.
I was at the protest ground, I was among those protesting and I never saw any student open fire. At a time, I was confused about what I actually saw on the day of the protest.
Nigeria newspapers have so much aided impunity and police brutality that even survivors sometimes doubt their sanity.
Thank God for social media and making the people have a medium where they can challenge the local media.
That’s freedom and voice to question the status quo is what Lai Mohammed is fighting, to fight our voice, to fight the new courage and to fight the freedom of speech.
We must not allow him, we must never allow him to win, we must never allow them to regulate and control the social media space.
If Lai Mohammed so much wants to control the social media space and drag us all back to 2003, he can go ahead and partner with Ahmed Garba in creating up their own social network and control the narrative.
