MEDIA AND SOCIETY: Tale of two stories

The country was resigned to ending the year with tales of rascality by the ruling class on how a nation could run for six weeks without a president, two stories conspired to alter these plans. Nigeria, which had contributed more than its own fair quota of violent responses to challenges of nation-building, recorded two stories, which confirmed that the nation was truly no longer at ease and mere anarchy was loose upon the world.

Within three days, two stories assaulted the national psyche that some terrorists had conspired to batter the soiled image of the country. The first occurred on home soil, specifically on December 22nd in Lagos, the commercial heartbeat of the nation. A 27-year old Nigerian, Olayiwola Ahmed, visited a television station, Superscreen, purportedly to see the station's chief operating officer with some story of delivering a Christmas gift to him from his boss. Minutes later, while returning to the 7th storey office with the gift he had gone to collect from the car downstairs, the package, a parcel bomb, detonated, damaging the carrier's hands.

The second occurred on December 25, mid air in Detroit, Michigan,

USA. A 23-year old Nigerian, Farouk Abdul Mutallab, bungled a plan to detonate an explosive device strapped to his body as Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam commenced its descent. Overpowered and handcuffed, he reportedly admitted that he had planned to cause havoc in American space as ordered by his sponsors.

Beyond the terse details supplied in the first few days of the December 22nd explosion in Lagos,which included the carrier's name the media went to sleep for about a week,lamenting the lack of cooperation from the police, whining that the police should not cover up this story. Save for telling the public that the agent of destruction was hospitalised, the press could not glean any useful information on where he was being hospitalised, who his targets were, whether he was working alone that fateful Wednesday or had accomplices. It was not until January 2nd that Toyosi Ogunsheye of The Punch supplied some details on his identity, home,and vocation: He is a video photographer, married, living in the Somolu area of Lagos, a strolling distance from Superscreen.

Knowing that the last parcel bomb explosion in a media house in 1986 claimed a frontline journalist's life the media need to be more aggressive in their reporting, documenting every failed effort to get police cooperation. Knowing that the September 20th murder of Bayo Ohu, an assistant editor with the Guardian, remains unsolved, the media should show more interest in what appears to be a creeping terrorism directed at the media. They need to mount more pressure to force the police to open up and supply some useful details on the story.

It appears that the media shifted attention early from the Lagos terror scare to the Detroit terror suspect, because the Detroit story appealed more to the global audience, and also because of name recognition. Umar Abdul Mutallab, Farouk's father, is a household name in business and political circles whereas Olayiwola Ahmed has obscure origins and Superscreen is a struggling private station.

The result is over concentration on the Detroit misadventure and the underreporting of the Lagos scare. What we have witnessed are tonnes of commentaries by the Nigerian media, and limited reports, which have followed the reporting leads of the Western press on how a Nigerian born, British-trained ‘terrorist' wanted to blow up an American plane.

Much capital has been made of the information supplied by Umar Abdul Mutallab, Farouk's father, to Nigerian and American intelligence officials a few weeks earlier, of his fears that his son was already courting radical Islamic company. Some effort has been made to trace Farouk's thought development over the years through interviews with past schoolmates and teachers.

AIT's report on his elementary education and Next's cover last Sunday stand out in this regard. A lot of fears have been expressed that Nigerians may be demonised by Western immigration officers on account of Farouk's example.

Predictably sections of the media are rising to fight this slur and contain the development as an isolated case, even as growing insurgency in the name of religion up north and resource control in the South South tend to suggest otherwise. Dele Sobowale's Monday piece in Vanguard alongside the editorial of same day and Bola Akinterinwa's in Thisday on Sunday fall into this mould.

More hardnosed reporting is necessary for us to have a rounded picture of the political re-education of the privileged Farouk. The public deserves to know why Olayiwola, the hardworking nursing father, and successful video photographer, became a parcel bomb carrier; and what makes Superscreen and its top operatives, terrorist targets? Such reporting makes the reader's adrenalin race while reading; unwilling to put it down until the end; the type that warrants re-reading in sheer appreciation of being pleasurably informed. Above all, it helps the country to appreciate the enormity of its challenges.

The stories are waiting to be told.