@tundeleye: Dear @Telegraph, calling @followlasg lawless is rude! (Y! FrontPage)

by Tunde Leye

I had a little bet with the YNaija! Op-Eds editor, Ayokunle Odekunle, to write serious, ideological pieces surrounding how I believed Nigeria should run, avoiding current topical issues and see if you, the readers would still read as much as you would read the more topical pieces. So my last two articles have been in this regards, and the numbers from what I gather have been even better than when it was the topical pieces. Doing that forced me to do some long term thinking on the kind of ideological framework I believe Nigeria needs to run within to create the change that we all (or at least most of us) desire and unleash our much talked-about potential. I have two more pieces in that series and I will deliver them accordingly.

But something happened last week that struck a nerve within me. Maybe it is the depth of ideological introspection I’ve been having that made me have a heightened sensitivity to the issue. But I thought it serious enough to break the flow of articles to address quickly since I didn’t find anything on or offline that addressed it.

Sometime last week, there was an article in U.K paper, The Telegraph, which had the headline MEET THE MAN WHO TAMED NIGERIA’S MOST LAWLESS CITY. In the article which read like a PR job, Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola was praised for his running of Lagos and to borrow a word from the president’s portfolio, transforming it.

Almost immediately, I reacted to the tweet containing the headline and told The Telegraph I thought the title was not only unscrupulously sensationalized, it was a misrepresentation they would not dare commit about any European, Arab or Asian city. But Lagos is in Africa, and it can be referred to as lawless in order to praise it’s governor and no one would raise an eyebrow. What exactly is the measure of this lawlessness. How is it more lawless than most of Nigeria that it is a part of, or other cities with its kind of population pressures worldwide? None of this is important. The Telegraph conveniently slaps a label on the city and that is it.

But is the U.K newspaper really to blame? In a country (and continent) where everything foreign is seen as credible and good, Nigerian newspapers went to town to trumpet the “high praise” found in The Telegraph. Most copied and pasted the story along with its ridiculous headline. There was not one domestic newspaper report in which the errors in the article was corrected. Take for example the last line where Fashola was referred to as a member of a minority tribe as the reason why he couldn’t be president. Every newspaper that replicated the story in the country carried this error as it was. A cursory Google search or even the most basic knowledge of Nigeria would have told the author that Fashola is Yoruba, which is one of the three majority tribes in Nigeria. And none would say the real reason Fashola cannot contest. In the scheming within his party, he has been passed over for Buhari or Atiku. The Telegraph fails to realize that Goodluck Jonathan, the current president is from a minority tribe and hence being from a minority tribe is no longer a reason a person cannot be president in Nigeria.

It leaves me wondering and concerned about the level of intellectual rigour that goes into the editorial process of most of our newspapers. The foreign media will characterize us anyhow the like for as long as we continue to act in this way, regurgitating what they say and pointing to the foreign-ness of the source as the credibility granting power to the stories. We need to take responsibility.

Unlike many though, whilst I will give The Telegraph and other foreign media plenty flak for treating Africa as a country that needs labelling, where every decent story must be qualified against a backdrop of how bad it is, I am a lot more irritated by our own people’s attitude to these things. We need to shape up and do things a lot better, with more responsibility and better intellectual rigour.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

One comment

  1. Nice piece. Regarding the tittle of the article however (MEET THE MAN WHO TAMED NIGERIA’S MOST LAWLESS CITY), I wouldnt blame the telegraph for calling Lagos a lawless city. It’s just a reflection of their perception of our Lagos. I have seen articles where Napoli, Glasgow, London, Belgrade etc have all been labelled lawless. I think it gets to us when these foreign media peeps label us as such. Besides I am sure the author of the article is just trying to show is literary skills, as is evident in “MEET THE MAN WHO TAMED NIGERIA’S MOST LAWLESS CITY”.

    About our journalists as you have expressed…….SMH for them

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