By Ajibola Amzat
Two weeks ago, the founder of Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, CJID and publisher of PREMIUM TIMES newspaper, Dapo Olorunyomi, was at Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, where he delivered a paper titled Nigerian Journalism Under the Digital and Democratic Crossfire.
The title paints a picture of a perilous future for journalism enterprise already overwhelmed by relentless attacks from both technological and democratic forces.
Though the lecture in general also highlights great potential and opportunities for the media, the title offers no glimpse of optimism from the start.
Olorunyomi probably chose a shocking headline to get his audience’s attention, who, as expected in the academic community, are mostly youths. In the age of unfettered access to smartphones and endless bingeing on social media, attention is the new currency. Scholars such as Herbert Simon, Michael Goldhaber, Georg Franck, Jonathan Beller, Tim Wu and several others have written extensively about the attention economy.
Securing audience attention is therefore a primary concern of the modern-day public speakers. A body of work in advertising and media psychology has identified shock appeal as an effective strategy for capturing audience attention. In their 2014 journal article, Brandon Urwin and Marike Venter, however, have argued that shocking appeals no longer work. But someone who attended Olorunyomi’s lecture told me he got rapt attention.
This confirmation comes as no surprise. Dapsy is skilled at delivering profundity without effort. I have attended several of his public lectures as a witness.
In this particular lecture, he took his listeners on a journey of Nigerian media history, starting with the pioneer effort of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the clergy whom the University is named after, and to Henry Townsend, who published the first Nigerian newspaper, Iwe Irohin Fun Awon Ara Egba Ati Yoruba in Abeokuta.
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Few students of Nigerian media history perhaps would remember that Crowther is the grandfather of Herbert Macaulay, the man whose face adorned the N10 naira note. Macaulay indeed was an activist and a journalist, but more importantly, a visionary like his grandfather. Talking of apple not falling far from the tree.
After him and his co-travellers came the likes of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and other influential politicians cum journalists who used their newspapers to fight the colonial power until Nigeria gained independence in 1960.
Olorunyomi’s lecture, though, did not delineate journalism into its various strands; he, however, signposted the type of journalism that characterised pre-independence Nigeria. In media scholarship, it is described as resistance journalism. This brand of journalism is not necessarily characterised by the quest for objectivity and fact-checking, as the primary goal was to send away the colonialists. Ben Smith of the New York Times once criticised this journalism approach as being “unobjective, targeted, and truth-bending”.
One could say the same for the Yellow journalism practice of Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst days in the United States. Notwithstanding, it was effective. It is conceivable that the resistance Journalism of pre-colonial Nigeria set the pace for the vibrant journalism for which Nigeria is known within the African continent.
From the first republic to date, the Nigerian press indeed played an important role in shaping politics and policies, and Olorunyomi took his audience through the glory and gales that defined those moments.
Perhaps the most turbulent period for the Nigerian press was the military regime when nearly two dozen newspapers were banned, and five draconian decrees were promulgated to suppress the opposition voice. It was the period that Dele Giwa, one of the most iconic Nigerian journalists, was killed with a letter bomb allegedly by the Babangida regime. Giwa was the only African journalist killed by a letter bomb. Before him was Father Michael Lapsley, who also received a letter bomb from the Apartheid regime. He lived to tell the story. Giwa didn’t.
Olorunyomi, though, did not mention Babangida government as a suspect, perhaps as a way to avoid criminal defamation, one of the pernicious legal tools used by the Nigerian power gang to silence critics. I think he should have. Public engagement, such as the Crowther University Lecture, could rejuvenate the old question of “Who Killed Dele Giwa?”It would be interesting to see how IBB would respond to such an open allegation, if the retired general ever does.
Instead, Olorunyomi continued with the historical account of the media role during the return to civil rule, a period that brought some respite to media operators and practitioners, leading to the rapid establishment of independent media organisations and a thriving media ecosystem. PREMIUM TIMES and other watchdog news platforms came on stream during this period. Several NGOs also cropped up within this period to support and protect civil society and independent journalism.
Despite the thriving media environment, Olorunyomi noted that the return of the press did not resolve the tension between the state and the press. Again, that didn’t come as a surprise. As Professor Ralph Akinfeleye once argued, the relationship between the state and the media has always been that of a cat and a mouse. Although one could add a caveat that such bellicose relationships mostly apply in a society where the media operates as watchdog, and not lapdog.
The government loves the lapdog media, and the Nigerian press has acted in many cases as a lapdog instead of acting as a watchdog. For many media organisations, this servile corporate attitude is rather a strategy for negotiating the delicate political economy of the media in Nigeria. A watchdog media doesn’t get government patronage in this country, and this is the reason why many of them prefer to bark rather than bite. NEXT newspaper, which Olorunyomi edited, is a classical example of how watchdog media in Nigeria are suffocated to death without a whimper.
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But if any disruption has left a huge impact on the media business globally, it is the emergence of digital technology. Not only has technology disrupted production, distribution and consumption of news, it has also altered the business model of the media, leaving many media enterprises gasping for breath.
Olorunyomi laid out a kaleidoscope of the opportunities and challenges confronting the media in Nigeria in the digital era, and highlighted technological forces, such as artificial intelligence, that will shape the future of journalism. In this future, governments and platform owners will play a significant role, which will either strengthen or further weaken the role of journalism in democratic societies.
But how should the media managers and thinkers respond in navigating this future? What business model should replace the market or philanthropy model that no longer guarantees the sustainability of media enterprise? How do we recover journalism in the age of pervasive information disorder powered by deep fake technology and state-sponsored propaganda? How can we protect media business and media workers from the anti-press policies of the new fascist regimes springing up in different corners of the world?
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Olorunyomi did not directly offer answers to these questions, but his paper guides us to different areas for reflection that may lead us to the solution we seek. He charged all the stakeholders: journalists, media owners, regulators, civil society actors, and educators, including the audience, to collaborate in fortifying journalism as a pillar of Nigeria’s democratic experiment. If humans have the best capacity to collaborate among all animals, as Yuval Noah Harari noted in his book Homosapien, then hope is not yet lost to recover journalism with all its transformative power.
It is for this reason that Olorunyomi’s lectures need to be taken more seriously. The echo of his message should ring louder beyond the confines of the lecture theatre of Ajayi Crowther University.
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Ajibola Amzat is Africa Editor at the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, CCIJ. He is a PhD student at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
