Not media enabling security, but FG and elites

 

THE recent imposition of a N5 million fine each on Trust Television Network, Multichoice (DSTV), TSTV and NTA-Startimes by the National Broadcasting Commission for airing a documentary on bandits, and threats against the BBC for a similar programme are misplaced and diversionary. Earlier, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, had threatened sanctions against them for alleged “terrorism glorification” in their separate documentaries that featured interviews with bandit leaders. Rather than harass the media, the Federal Government should direct its fury and instruments of coercion against the sundry terrorists threatening the country’s corporate existence.

The federal and northern state governments and elite should also start rolling back the policies and actions that embolden criminals and address the root causes that give rise to and sustain insecurity. The assault on the media shows that the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), and his regime are still in denial of the real threat and reverting to their default mode of inertia and blaming others for their failures.

Emphatically, the media outlets were only carrying out their legitimate duty. For sure, insecurity and terrorism are global scourges afflicting many countries, with its “centre of gravity” shifting to sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Global Terrorism Index. Nevertheless, Nigeria’s elite pursue actions that facilitate their staying power locally. Government and its agencies have failed woefully to secure lives and property, deter crime and criminals, and to track down, arrest and prosecute the terrorists of diverse garbs destabilising the country.

Similarly, the elite, including successive northern state governors, clerics and traditional institutions have over the years, created conditions, pursued policies, and acted in ways that provide fertile ground for insecurity and terrorism to flourish. They should change course and halt the country’s spiral into chaotic failure.

The documentaries only confirm official incompetence. Elsewhere, it is the security agencies that would need to explain why they have for so long failed to pinpoint and storm the outlaws’ hideouts.

The tragedy of the unravelling Nigerian union is that by manipulating and politicising religion above unifying values, the elite have inadvertently encouraged insecurity, impunity, and entitlement. By promoting religion in defiance of the constitution and trampling on rights, fanatics who believe that the state has not gone far enough in imposing sectarian diktats have resorted to violent jihadism.

Similarly, years of brigandage, mass murders and violent invasion of farmland by Fulani herders/militants in the North-Central and in Southern Kaduna State without consequences have fostered a culture of entitlement. Like Buhari and other regime actors, the herders constantly lay claim to and demand untrammelled rights to non-existent “grazing routes” and “grazing reserves,” including the right to occupy public forest reserves.