A former chairman of the Nigeria Union of Journalists died in one of the states died because he could not raise about N30,000 for basic medical care. He had spent decades recording other people’s misfortunes, and when his own came, there was no one to record it. His death tells us more about the condition of Nigerian journalism than any industry survey could.
The signs were visible long before, and our recent history is full of people who failed to read them. In the early 1990s, African musicians, Nigerians among them, built whole careers on two subjects: the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. Reggae was the vehicle through which those songs were carried across the continent.
When Mandela walked free and apartheid fell, the music lost its reason for being. Few of the singers could reinvent themselves. Some moved into gospel, while others faded out of public memory and died poor.
Banking took the same road. When Olusegun Obasanjo became president, many bank managers and directors held no university degrees, only secondary school certificates and professional qualifications. The reforms of Joseph Sanusi at the Central Bank, and later the consolidation under Charles Soludo, pushed a good number of them out and opened the doors to young graduates.
For years afterwards, a banking job was what every ambitious Nigerian wanted. The Nigerian Television Authority followed the same pattern under Ben Murray Bruce. Many of its staff held only diplomas or school certificates, and few knew their way around a computer. When the new demands came, those who could not meet them were retrenched.
Journalism had its own golden years. From the 1960s until about 2015, newspapers sold in hundreds of thousands, and a single editorial could unsettle a government. Then, the ground shifted. Newsprint became unaffordable, advertisers withdrew, and titles began to close. A paper that once printed 100,000 copies a day now prints perhaps 2,000, and some of those are never sold.
Outside a handful of television stations, roughly four fifths of Nigerian media houses cannot pay salaries, and the salaries in question are never generous.
Television adjusted early by moving online and streaming across platforms. Print hesitated, and into that gap stepped outsiders, many with no training in journalism, who built blogs and took the readers.
Content creators came next, monetising their pages and earning serious money, sometimes from nothing weightier than spectacle. The trained journalist had been taught ethics, headline writing and how to command public respect. Nobody had taught him how to earn a living from any of it.
The result is a profession that is dying in small, private ways. Reporters are lost to hypertension, to illnesses they cannot afford to treat, and to plain poverty. Many go through the day without a proper meal. Young people see this and decline to come into the trade, so the newsroom is ageing with no one coming behind it.
Contempt makes matters worse. Public office holders routinely insult reporters and, at times, assault them. Ordinary citizens, whose interests the press defends, often show the same disdain. An organiser will spend millions on a master of ceremonies, a hall and refreshments, then expect the media to carry the event to the nation for next to nothing, as if information cost nothing to gather and publish.
Media owners are mostly politicians and businessmen with little feeling for the craft, and they are chiefly interested in returns. Even so, journalists have been slow to find new ways of earning.
All of this should concern every Nigerian, whether or not they ever read a newspaper. The press is how power is made to answer for itself. If trained journalists disappear, rumour, propaganda and careless content will fill the space they leave, with no one checking facts or digging for depth.
A people fed on falsehood cannot vote wisely, and the bill will come in worse governance and a more corrupt public conversation. We will all pay for it.
There is still room to act. Journalists must be willing to swallow their pride and learn the new tools. Those who can afford it should return to the classroom for further degrees, or train in video, data and digital storytelling.
Teaching, lecturing, the development sector and content creation all offer ways to eat without giving up one’s principles. Those who commission coverage must also accept that credible information has a price and budget for it honestly.
The musicians and the bankers got no second chance, and journalists will not get one either. If the newsrooms go quiet, the country will no longer hear what is being done in its name.