I have been a staunch critic of media performance in Nigeria for long for no reason. That is perhaps, may be because I am not in the field – a kind of barking academic with theory. May be. But to me it also means ownership of the supposed, noble profession. All my efforts are in attempts to perfect it, improve it, at the least.
My critique carries along some pride in them as well. Critiques are in themselves a long way to enhance performance of the media in Nigeria. It is the clear duty of seeking to improve your own, for no one will do it for you. I don’t know how much we have done. But we hope that at some points, it will not be all in vain. For that reason, I will keep the exercise, no matter the blacks-heaping.
I have also despised some of our seniors, the elite‘yanboko’ and their stooges – a class of ambitious graduates in public service, some pseudo-elite – middle class men and women, in middle cadre of their respective organisations who have battling every corrective measure anyone in or out of government says or does to improve service and protect public interest.
Solely, they account for the responsibility of many spoils in Northern Nigeria in many different ways. This ‘speculation’ stands repeated many times and for many years ahead, as smoke in our eyes because I am involved too, and telling self the truth is a virtue that we must all learn to do. It is a half way of doing something to solve problems even if you are involved in the risk behaviours that perpetrate them.
We have failed, instead, in our immediate responsibilities, abducting basic family and communal obligations of instilling discipline and correcting the many wrongs that our children and wives make at home, something that can be directly or indirectly an epidemic true to the general social decadence in, particularly, the north. It is more serious than what we see and hear.
Some of the pseudoelites’ colleagues in the media, who retain some sense of love for the job and professionalism, make a lot of effort and put much energy into media outputs, trying to impress and so discounter and arrest the fast collapse of society.
This is perhaps because their media work has the open public sphere to showcase evidences of the work done and seen, and not because it is personal duty, a national cause they pursue out of patriotism, although some of them are passionately patriotic as well.
In any case, a good number of young persons are doing a good job on their beats, trying their best in the face of lots of challenges. So today we pay rare respect and salute the immense efforts they put into different media and go on from here to spike how the spoilers of our society make useless the different media campaign against the menaces the custodians of families make out of them.
They have enforced a regime of subconscious culture of carefree, careless, wayward life, over the years, which render all of us exposed to social hazards and forced the majority to conform to the bastard value of neglect, like a hypodermic needle that infects almost everyone. This carefree rendered every other idea of life useless, divine or manmade; by subjecting them to a created, false debate that makes society waste a lifetime, arguing about its epistemology only or its source.
Some of our broadcast stations do lots of good work for public service. There are many programmes with beautiful messages that hinge directly on the many socioeconomic and political issues that bedevil our communities and the nation. We must celebrate some sorts of the brilliance that producers and presenters put on the dining table for audiences.
But that was mainly in programme concepts and productions, features, mainly, which try to educate us on the immediate and remote causes, reasons and solutions to the social ills we cry of – problems of courtship, marriages, parenting, loss of values, drug abuses, rampant divorces, crimes, money first in everything and the rest.
But in the area of news reporting a lot of damages still prevail in the mainstream of the media by deliberate corrupt attitudes that destroy society and affect the perpetrators themselves, who don’t enjoy any meaningful life impetus but only dangle in a vicious life cycle that eats them up on the hard job, reducing their health quality and shortening their lifespan.
A number of new springs tv and radio stations in the north – Rahama, Zamani, Liberty, Freedom, Farin Wata – and many others down the Niger – Wazobia, Rave, Berekete – have been investing huge ideas in amazing programmes that own up our communal, social and national problems. Please note that there are more stations than I can count here so this mention is strictly from personal experience based on my attendance.
That is not to mention our local stations, many of which are also global, having established online platforms. The radio stations – Bauchi Radio, Albarka, FRCN Globe FM, Freedom, Rahma, Borno Radio, FRCN Peace FM, Unity FM Jos and Progress Radio – have had, apologies to any research findings, massive impact on the audience as measured by the responses and two participatory programmes. Again, this has been from my experience as a listener to the stations over time.
Majorly, our local radios have connects with housewives, single girls, IDPs, victims of crimes and the distressed. The programme appeals make the relevance of audience engagement on the issues raised on different programmes. This is a good exercise of the media theory that uses the egg and hen analogy. Which is first, which gets which or which is the most important?
Both. The media mirrors society and gets both good and bad values to share. But when there is one value, say,, the bad one, is more than the good, the media cannot equate an imbalanced information or its frequency. It will portray it the way it is. This is one reason why the imperialists’ media of the west are usually condemned for the negation of reports on Africa.
But when I listen to the BBCHausa’s Adikon Zamani of the VOAHausa’s Yau da Gobe, for example, I can see ample opportunity of platforms where the entire north can rally to listen and to learn about serious issues hinging on our lives at every level.
The two programmes were anchored on key issues bedevilling our society as mentioned and they target our women and youth to engage them on different intimate issues that can solve personal, family or communal problems, help to improve quality of lives of the targets or avoid health risking behaviours that can have drastic, sporadic, epidemic consequences.
But it is sad that the bulk of the groups who are directly addressed by the media messages are not, in most cases, not even listening. If you conduct a research to find out radio listening habits among middle class working women in northern Nigeria, you will be shocked majority of them do not even know such programmes exist.
Each time I listen, I wish the right people I know who are pretending all is well in our families, communities and society and in the process aggravate the problems the more. They don t listen. They don’t listen even to personal advice. They are fast running on the speed train of life, seeking quantities and compromising much quality in the end. Life then falls short for them at the train station. They fall mysteriously ill and die before their time.
A close look at the north of Nigeria, you will find a spade of higher men mortality that triples the number of widows and orphans and multiply their burdens on society and the governments which can never solve half of them. And it is sad that even the women are not conscious of that. They don’t even know and they won’t find out why are their husbands dying early at prime?
They don’t know that some family lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours such as type and nature of food intakes, child delinquency and different shocks and stress in the course of pursuit of money, combine to inflict cardiac arrests, kidney or liver problems.
And when they die, it is life as usual. It is God that killed them. They won’t stop to ponder, demand reasons in immediate and remote actions or inactions that jeopardise life and put it in risks to end in the amazing ways we see it today. They are, after losing the patriarch or the loved one, are on another race again, until another family falls on the way. And so on and on. A real vicious cycle.
Our problems in the north should change the mindset of even the most radical chauvinist today. Their reality is so scary that no healthy mind can look and ignore. But more than just knowing them, what can you do?
Know more. Teach and enlighten others using scary statistics to stir concern even if by the injection of fear to pinch someone sit up. You can call for action to educate persons to engage in the world of technology to receive media messages and use them.
But sad again, what can one do to educate the already educated like the high and middle class northern graduates heading, manning families and managing persons at the work place? I have said often that ignorance has not been a problem to our situation for a long time now, for well over a score now.
Those who don’t care about communal, social and national interests and work to undermine and destroy them s well as sabotage individual, organisational and governmental efforts to solve them are the real educated elite and their stooges. It is not illiteracy or ignorance again. It is deliberate ignorance, contempt and despising the majority.
This is the elitist doctrine of northern Nigeria that divided us over time by the abuse of the agents of socialisation one of which is the media to instil selfish assumption on all fronts and issues, greed, wanton hatred for others outside the class club and making sure they dangle in the confines of the misery that we find ourselves in it today.
Tell me. How one can educate such groups on the need to listen to the media or to some of their programmes in order to understand the depth of the issues surrounding us, issues that you can be sure they think they are immune from? Their thoughts and lifestyles are allergic to listening and listening to radio even if it is by tunein app is an act of the inferior person. Infact, radio is associated with only the downtrodden, the Godforsaken.
While our local producers suffer to produce to reflect the shames in our homes and communities, the local audience’s eyes sore from watching foreign soaps – philiphino, latinos, Mexican and Indian forms from the epicentre mother India and the subIndia that South Africa has become. Thanks to the presence of the Gupta’s in many African societies.
But on a serious note, Zee World, Zee Cinema, Telemundo and few others are the bits of the tragedy that engulfs our families and society. How did we get here? We derailed. Understand from the preceding paragraphs and see how we tragically jumped over Arabia with which we share values and landed in Asia, Europe and America.
If you speak Indian but cant of Arabic, God Have Mercy, you are the problem itself. And we turn over to say our Nolly, Kanny and Nupe are still lagging behind the woods of the world. My God is patient with anything Nigeria. For four years, PMB and many Nigerians were preaching ‘Buy in Nigeria Gods’.
The other day someone was reminded to commit to the campaign by patronising the Nigeria, they said they thought the Government meant only foodstuff only. See what the hunger they created in name only has done to us. God.
Continue the good productions, anyway. Dash out the messages. Let no one watch. But let no one deter us. The north must step out.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
