There is a peculiar silence that has settled over Nigerian journalism, and it is not the silence of the graveyard where heroes are buried. It is the silence of the living who have chosen to whisper when they should shout, to glance away when they should stare unblinking, to count their earnings when they should count the cost of truth.
And this silence, this self-imposed muteness, has become one of the most potent enablers of the corruption we purport to fight.
When President Bola Tinubu recently, at a Ramadan Iftar event, took media leaders to task, urging them to extend their scrutiny beyond federal projects to the state and local government levels, I found myself in an uncomfortable position: agreeing with a government official about the press’s failures.
For here was a president, himself no stranger to media scrutiny over the years, essentially begging the Fourth Estate to do what the Constitution mandates them to do without any begging at all.
Section 22 of the 1999 Constitution is unambiguous: “The press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”
At all times. Not when invited. Not when instigated. Not when a president graciously grants permission. At all times.
Yet here we are, in 2026, witnessing the spectacle of a head of government having to summon media executives to remind them of their duty. It is as if a general had to remind soldiers to fire at the enemy, or a doctor had to remind nurses to attend to patients. The absurdity of the situation would be laughable if the stakes were not so desperately high.
–Look inward first–
But before we point fingers solely at the government’s attempts to manage narratives — and there is plenty of evidence of such attempts, from the criminalisation of dissent under cybercrime laws to the recent Kaduna incident where officials initially denied a mass abduction, only to later admit they had downplayed it to avoid “public panic” — we must first look inward.
We must ask the uncomfortable questions that journalism is supposed to ask of others but so rarely asks of itself. Has the Nigerian media been shamefully docile? Have we lost the fire of our veterans? Have we been compromised and complicit? And if so, how and when will we catch fire again? The answers to these questions are not flattering. But they are necessary.
–When journalism was a contact sport–
To understand what we have lost, we must first remember what we once had. There was a time in this country when journalism was not for the faint of heart. It was a contact sport played on a field mined with decrees, detention cells, and death.
The names still resonate like scripture for those who know the history. Dele Giwa, the brilliant editor of Newswatch, whose life was ended by a letter bomb on October 19, 1986 — a murder that remains officially unsolved but is universally attributed to the military regime he had dared to scrutinise.
Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese, and Yakubu Mohammed built Newswatch into a trailblazing institution that made journalists celebrities because they spoke truth to power with such clarity and courage that the entire nation listened.
When the military government became too comfortable with Newswatch’s “coziness” as Nosa Igiebor would later put it, a new generation broke away to form _Tell_ magazine in 1991. The slogan they chose was itself a declaration of war: “Others watch the news, we tell it.” And tell it they did.
Under Igiebor, Dare Babarinsa, Kola Ilori, Onome Osifo-Whiskey, and Dele Omotunde, _Tell_ became the bane of the Abacha dictatorship. They referred to the general not as “Head of State” but as “head of the junta” and “dictator” — deliberate provocations that invited the full weight of state repression.
The repression came. In April 1993, after publishing an interview where Olusegun Obasanjo called Ibrahim Babangida’s regime “a fraud,” state security forces confiscated 50,000 copies of _Tell_. The staff was forced into hiding, publishing as a “guerrilla tabloid” — the first of Nigeria’s guerrilla tabloids of contemporary times.
In August 1993, Igiebor, Ilori, Osifo-Whiskey, and Ayodele Akinkuoto were arrested and detained for 12 days. While they were in custody, security forces raided their office, assaulted reporters, and tortured them.
On Christmas Day 1995, Igiebor was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for more than six months, denied access to family, lawyers, and medical care. The Committee to Protect Journalists launched international campaigns for his release. Amnesty International designated him a prisoner of conscience.
George Mbah, _Tell’s_ assistant editor, was arrested in March 1995 on charges of “attempting to stage a military coup” — an absurdity that carried a 25-year sentence from a secret military tribunal. Bagauda Kaltho of _The News_ magazine was killed, believed to be by agents of the military government.
Yet they persisted. They persisted because Nigerians supported them. As Dare Babarinsa recently recalled, patriotic Nigerians, including members of the security agencies, fed them information and warned them of impending arrests. A friend in the Directorate of Military Intelligence sent word to his wife: “That Volkswagen, they know it o, you had better tell your husband to change it.” When he did, the same officer assured him: “Though some of my boys know the Toyota Camry, they will not report it to the office, so my friend can continue to use the car.”
This was journalism as a national project. It was dangerous, it was costly, and it was glorious.
–What changed?–
What happened? How did we go from guerrilla journalists risking death to an industry that sometimes seems to risk nothing more than the displeasure of its sponsors? The answers are complex and uncomfortable.
First, the very victory of democracy created a new set of challenges. When the military left, the existential threat to journalists diminished. The adrenaline of defiance faded. The business of journalism, once a calling, became exactly that: a business. And businesses, unlike crusades, have overheads, shareholders, and a dangerous word called sustainability.
The economic pressures are real. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2025 Digital News Report found that rising operational costs, declining advertising revenues, reduced donor funding, and fluctuating exchange rates remain serious threats to media sustainability in Nigeria. A sharp decline in donor funding has affected media outlets that depend on these grants, resulting in “fewer investigative reports and a reduced capacity to pursue in-depth reporting.”
Changes to Google’s search algorithms have further strained the financial stability of Nigerian news media, which rely heavily on advertising for online monetisation. The result is a newsroom culture where survival often trumps significance, where the next payroll looms larger than the next exposé.
But economic pressures alone do not explain the depth of the crisis. After all, the _Tell_ journalists were not swimming in money while publishing in hiding. They were surviving on courage and public goodwill.
Something else has changed: the nature of the relationship between journalists and power.
–The new corruption: access and patronage–
Tonnie Iredia, writing in _Vanguard_ in January 2026, captured this shift. He noted that for a while, the strategy of political leaders was simply to use law enforcement to silence journalists who published embarrassing stories. Using the Cybercrimes Act of 2015, they effectively prevented journalists from fulfilling their constitutional mandate.
But the more insidious change has been the incorporation of journalists into the very system they are meant to scrutinise.
A recent analysis on the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria’s website put it bluntly: “Nigeria’s media is facing a growing credibility crisis that threatens its historical role as the conscience of society.” The trigger? The coverage of the Rivers State impeachment crisis, which was “overblown and often slanted, fueled by paid media ‘interviews’ and money-for-sympathy.”
The piece identified Nyesom Wike, the FCT Minister, as the central figure in this media saturation, inviting media organisations and their most prominent personalities, funding logistics, and setting agendas. Even when coverage appeared critical or neutral, the subtext consistently framed him as a dominant political figure.
Then, just as quickly, the narrative shifted toward Governor Siminalayi Fubara, with emotionally charged appeals designed to generate public sympathy. “What drives these shifts in news coverage, new facts or new financial interests?” the analysis asked.
“When money, directly or indirectly, dictates the tone, focus, and engagement of news programmes, journalism loses its integrity and becomes propaganda disguised as news.”
This is the corruption that dare not speak its name. It is not the crude bribe handed to a reporter at a press conference. It is the more sophisticated corruption of access, of logistics, of “support” for coverage, of the gradual blending of editorial judgment and political patronage.
–The Kano example and the tightrope–
The Kano corruption saga of September 2025 offers another troubling example. When investigative journalist Jaafar Jaafar published a report in _Daily Nigerian_ alleging that Abdullahi Ibrahim Rogo, DG of Protocol to Kano Governor Abba Kabiru Yusuf, had embezzled more than N6.5 billion, the media exploded.
The irony was rich: Governor Yusuf’s camp had risen to power by capitalising on Jaafar’s earlier exposé of former Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje’s infamous “dollar-video” scandal. Now they found themselves on the defensive.
But the government’s response escalated the crisis. The governor’s spokesperson issued a 30-paragraph statement that failed to provide verifiable evidence, instead diverting attention to the excesses of the previous government. Matters worsened when the spokesperson threatened legal action, prompting Jaafar to publish an even more provocative follow-up titled: “Governor Yusuf Defends Thieving Aide.”
The headline electrified readers. It also crossed an ethical line. As Umar Babangida observed, journalism codes caution against labelling anyone a “thief” without conviction in a competent court. By crossing that line, the veteran journalist left himself and his paper vulnerable to defamation suits. The embattled DG swiftly dragged him to court.
This is the tightrope modern Nigerian journalists must walk: between the urgency of exposure and the discipline of due process, between the public’s hunger for accountability and the legal protections that even the accused deserve. It is a balance the veterans of the Abacha era understood intimately.
–The crisis of audience–
But perhaps the most alarming diagnosis comes from Dare Babarinsa himself. In a recent reflection, he warned that the greatest threat to press freedom today is not the military and not any other section of power; it is “the increasing epidemic of ignorance that many of our young people find dangerously attractive.”
“What we are facing now is worse,” he said, “because Africa, not just Nigeria, is bringing up a new generation which does not believe in the liberating theory of knowledge. So, we have a generation which is embracing ignorance with enthusiasm.”
He illustrated this with a devastating observation: “You will be surprised that you ask an undergraduate, ‘What is the name of your vice chancellor?’ and he will not be able to tell you. In our day, vice chancellors were almost demigods.”
If the audience for serious journalism is shrinking, if young Nigerians are turning toward social media influencers who prioritise sensation over accuracy, then the business model for quality journalism collapses.
The Reuters Institute report confirms this trend: 94 per cent of sampled Nigerians rely on online sources for news, with 79 per cent relying on social media as their primary source. Traditional sources are losing reach, with “influencers and citizen journalists frequently breaking stories ahead of mainstream media.”
Yet these same influencers are perceived as the biggest sources of false or misleading information, with 58 per cent of Nigerians expressing concern about their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood online. The rise of AI-driven misinformation adds another layer of complexity to an already chaotic information ecosystem.
–How do we catch fire again?–
So, how does the Nigerian media catch fire again? How do we move from docility to daring, from compromise to courage, from silence to the roar that once shook dictatorships?
The answer must begin with a recognition that the challenge is not external but internal. The government will always try to manage narratives. That is what governments do. The military tried it with decrees and detention cells. Civilian administrations try it with cybercrime laws and strategic patronage. The methods evolve, but the impulse remains constant.
What has changed is the media’s response. In the Abacha years, journalists relied on public support, on patriotic Nigerians who fed them information, on printers who risked their businesses to publish them, on security agents who looked the other way or tipped them off. That public trust was earned through demonstrated courage and a clear sense of mission.
Today, that trust is eroding. The perception that media coverage can be bought, that editorial decisions are influenced by political patrons, that some journalists are more interested in access than accountability — these perceptions undermine the moral authority that once protected the press.
–The path forward–
The path to recovery lies in transparency and self-regulation. Media organisations must draw clear lines between editorial content and sponsored material. They must resist the temptation to grant access based on financial arrangements rather than newsworthiness. They must hold themselves to the same standards of accountability they demand of public officials.
There is also a structural dimension. The call by civil society organisations for greater fiscal transparency applies to the media as much as to government. Just as citizens need to know how public funds are spent, they need to know who funds media organisations and what interests those funders represent. A media house that depends on a single political patron for its survival cannot credibly claim independence.
The veterans of the golden era offer not just inspiration but practical wisdom. Nosa Igiebor, now president of TELL Communications, and his colleagues continue to work, though they are “reluctant in the practice of journalism” after the military era. Dare Babarinsa, through his Gaskia Media Limited, continues to champion the cause of truth, the very meaning of the Hausa word “gaskia” that he chose for his company.
Their legacy is not just a collection of past glories but a challenge to the present generation. They survived because they believed that journalism was worth dying for. They persisted because they knew that without a free press, there can be no free society.
The question for today’s journalists is simpler and more uncomfortable: What do you believe? What are you willing to risk? What price are you prepared to pay for the truth?
If the answer is “not much,” then the silence that has settled over the profession is well deserved. But if the answer is “everything,” if there remains, in the heart of Nigerian journalism, even a spark of the fire that burned in Dele Giwa, in Bagauda Kaltho, in Nosa Igiebor and Dare Babarinsa and all those who fought when fighting was fatal, then that spark can still become a flame.
–Rise, without invitation–
President Tinubu has invited the media to rise to the occasion. But the media should not need an invitation. The Constitution issued that invitation in 1999. The martyrs of the profession issued it with their lives. The Nigerian people issue it every day they spend in darkness, every time they lose a child to a preventable disease, every moment they watch their leaders drive luxury cars while their schools crumble.
The watchman who waits to be told to watch is no watchman at all. The watchdog that barks only when permitted is a pet, not a protector.
Let the Nigerian media rise gallantly to the occasion. Not because the president asked. Not because this column demands. But because the truth, as it has always done, requires a voice. And because silence, in the face of everything we have documented in Nigeria to Nigerians, is simply no longer an option.
● The Conscience Chronicler.
