MEDIA AND SOCIETY: The reality of tomorrow

We continue our conversation on the 150th anniversary of the Nigerian press. We thank our avid readers for their robust interventions on some of our observations last week.

We acknowledge and apologise for a factual error in our submission that Robert Campbell’s Anglo-African was influential in the fight against the colonialists’ discriminatory trade policies against Africans. That fight actually started after the Anglo-African stopped publishing.

We, however, restate that the North had been a poor competitor in the private press geopolitical power game until the promise of Daily Trust. To be sure, there were previous private publishing efforts in the North: Azikiwe’s Jos-based Nigerian (not Northern) Advocate (1949), the Kano-based Comet, relocated from Lagos as the North’s first daily in 1949, the Mail (1961), Democrat (1983), Hotline, Citizen (1991),

Reporter, Today etc were previous private attempts at news publishing in the north, but they were short-lived.

Gasikiya ta fi kwabo (1939), the Nigerian Citizen (1948) were published by the colonial government while New Nigerian (1966) was published by the government of Northern Nigeria.

Daily Trust has built on the efforts of these earlier initiatives by introducing products that compete well in content and positioning with their southern competitors and by so doing ensuring that there is one respected private voice from the North. That for us remains significant for national discourse in the last one decade.

Now to address the question with which we ended our piece last week: As the press begins the march towards its 16th decade, will tomorrow bring the rise of more independent papers or the coalescing of strong political interests into newspaper owners and barons?

We submit that historically politicians and public funds have oiled media organs in Nigeria in their hegemonic contest for supremacy. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo best perfected this. Their political parties, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (later of Nigerian Citizens) and the Action Group funded their papers through regional banks that received generous public deposits from the governments they ran. At independence in 1960, the Action Group controlled the Allied Newspapers and the Amalgamated Press chains; the NCNC, the Zik group of papers. Shortly after, the East established the Outlook (1960), the North the Daily Mail (1961), funded by the ruling party, North People’s Congress; the federal government, Nigerian Morning Post (1961) while the West introduced the Sketch (1964).

The fall of the 1st Republic in 1966 and the advent of military rule gave rise to many state-owned publications such as Observer, 1968, Tide,

1971, Chronicle, 1971, Standard, 72 as the military consolidated its grip on power and sought to banish independent thought. It took the examples of the Afriscope, Punch, Newbreed, and New Nation to alter the pattern of ownership by opening up independent channels in the 70s. The return of party politics in 1979 initially ushered in partisan efforts such as National Concord (1980) but was later followed by more independent organs-Guardian, Vanguard, Newswatch,

Thisweek and Champion. The 90s showed with the examples of Tell,

Tempo, The News, Thisday, Citizen, that increasingly there was room for more private efforts to deepen national discourse, challenge dictatorial governance, and run the news industry as a business.

The return of party politics in 1999 has seen more growth in the areas of political interests coalescing into press ownership; which is partly explained by the capital intensiveness of publishing and the promoters’ determination to hang on to public relevance and influence. The Sun, Weekly Spectator, Daily Independent, Nation, National Life, Nigerian Compass, the Westerner are the most visible manifestations of this trend, with some of them possessing the capacity for simultaneous printing. They have as their directing minds either past or serving governors and have attracted some fine minds in the business.

Although Section 39 (2) of the 1999 Constitution opens ownership of the press to all Nigerians, by becoming big media owners politicians may be insuring themselves against intense media scrutiny that they should receive on account of their public performance; which then raises the question of the integrity of the news diet served by the press. Ultimately, how much respect their organs attract in society will result from the professional latitude allowed the operators. If they degenerate into rabid partisan watchdogs of their owners’ interests, history teaches that their days are numbered.

On the other hand, independent news publishing targets enlightened patronage, not easily tied to narrow political or business interests, a difficult, but not impossible proposition in today’s Nigeria. While our wish is to have in the land more independent publications, sufficiently convinced of the transforming power of the press for good, publishing economics indicates that coalescing political interests will still have the upper hand in strong media ownership in the nearest future. They can be matched by a partnership of strong business capital and skilful professional expertise anxious to have a strong voice in how the prevailing social values are determined. Publishing remains a business of ideas for the strong-hearted with sufficient interests they want to protect or project. The challenge is clarifying those interests.