“A note of warning to the so-called blogtivists”: Nwachukwu Egbunike replies Mark Amaza

by Nwachukwu Egbunike

I stand by my submission that most of us should take a walk, a little more often, down the streets of our cities and villages.

I read Mark Amaza’s rejoinder to my article with considerable interest. First let me start by thanking him for the very detailed attention he gave to reading the said article and for the very courteous manner with which he approached his rejoinder, it takes a lot of maturity to do. Nigeria needs more of this type of engagement where ideas contend and where we can disagree and still be civil and courteous.

In Mark Amaza’s review, strangely and pleasantly, our points of disagreement are few. I am happy that Mark accepts the accuracy of most of the observations I made in my article that he joins issues with. I hope that I am not being unfair to Mark to state that his principal objection is that although my observations are accurate but they do not define the behaviour of all bloggers and/or blogotivists. But that it characterizes a minority who crave for fame by being offensive and downright obnoxious. If this is Mark’s principal objection, then it stands on a fairly weak leg since in the said article I was careful to indicate that the aberrations I observed and described apply to “some” blogotivists and certainly not the entire universe of bloggers! I am sure that Mark will agree with me that the antics and excesses of this noisy minority can indeed stain the reputation of the silent and sane majority. This country is as large as the ideas that spew from it; no one has a monopoly of wisdom. Besides, what drives development in other climes is critical consciousness – based on facts and not bile. This need is one of the motivations for my article.

I agree with Mark on the democratization value of the internet. I have always admired this and here Mark and I stand on common ground. I have benefitted extensively from this democratization and the existence of my own blog and book is testimony to this. But this freedom also comes with dangers and challenges. A thousand ideas may bloom and contend but some basic ground rules are required if this process is not to degenerate into something ugly and sinister and that is precisely the point I tried to make.

My post was to highlight a growing but nonetheless real catharsis that has been personified by some mob-herd blogotivists. Net freedom is not only keeping the internet away from government censorship, it also entails leaving it open to all shades of opinions/ideologies. Unfortunately, there are blogotivists who do not subscribe to this notion. By all means we all have various agenda and we should use this digital platform to push them. However, when one thinks that he/she has an exclusive right to spin and frame, prescribe and proscribe solutions, then that’s plainly dictatorship.

I stand by my submission that most of us should take a walk, a little more often, down the streets of our cities and villages. The best of writers and social commentators that have engaged their generation down the ages are people who were able to synthesis intellectual abstractions and mundane realities. Also let none of us that assume that being a young blogger makes us the megaphone the “youths” of this country. That would be a delusion of grandeur.

There are some truths we cannot run away from too. One of these is the urban skew of internet access and the disadvantage of youths in rural and remote settings. The other is the gulf that separates urban based youths and their rural counterparts, a reality that makes any claims of the former to speak for the latter to be very doubtful. I still maintain that most blogotivists cannot claim to and do not speak for the underprivileged, for the rural dweller and for rural youths. For them to do this, they must be willing to leave the comforts of urban centres and touch base with the realities of those persons who causes they now claim to champion.

Finally, a cursory review of the some of the solutions proposed by these minority bloggers reveals an almost obsessive preference for simple solutions, for the single story and for the mono-causal analysis which in most cases always fail woefully to recognize the complexity of situations at hand.

It is pertinent to reinstate that I did not and have never dismissed the entire Nigerian blogosphere. To input that is both unjust and untrue. The social media has made our democratic experience more participatory and has propelled the media space to unconceivable heights. Nonetheless, the cost of freedom is not only eternal vigilance but a continual self-examination. This includes the courage to tell ourselves the plain truth.

I know my post may have struck sensitive nerves. But if that will be the catalyst to raise the bar of the conversation in Nigeria’s blogosphere, then so be it. This is certainly not about earning a bragging right or engaging in a self-incensing ego massage; I am not under any illusion that this article alone will change things overnight. Nonetheless, the sooner we are able to dispassionately dissect our many woes and move above the fray of personalizing our conversation; the better for us.

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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.

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