The media are powerful because readers and listeners consume their products. They therefore derive their power from the audience. The significance of this is that the media should actually be made accountable to the people, not themselves, not the government… I propose a framework for a Participatory Media Accountability System, which potentially provides the pathway for a more robust media accountability without undue government interference.
Following the adoption of the Shari’a penal system in Zamfara, through to the bloody mayhem in Kaduna and its aftermath, Shari’a literally seized the national media space. Apart from providing the platform for elite actors on both sides of the Shari’a religious divide to engage in an ideological “fight-to-finish”, journalists themselves actively took part in shaping, interpreting, articulating, amplifying and projecting views, ideas and discourses on the Shari’a controversy.
“When Sani Ibrahim [sic] the Governor of Zamfara State, says he would support any state in the South which wants to adopt the Sharia, he is merely invoking the spirit of Alimi, the nemesis of Afonja and Solagberu of Ilorin, and the quip by the Sardauna in the 60s, that they would dip the Koran into the sea. When the Jihadists boast of Arab support for their cause, they only remind us of the terrible role played by the British in strengthening the Hausa-Fulani hegemony.
“The rivalry between the North and the South is vicious also because it is in many ways, a Moslem-Christian rivalry . One other problem is Obasanjo. He is the finest prong that the South has produced in contemporary Nigerian politics. He just turns out to be a Christian. For a Moslem Northerner, that is like Christianizing the state. It is even worse, the man is a born-again Christian, and he continuously makes a public show if that.
As mentioned earlier, one of the consequences of the Kaduna riot was the spate of retaliatory violence in the South-East, where people suspected to be Muslims and Northerners were hunted and killed, while mosques were burnt. This obviously complicated the security situation in the country. However, this writer saw it differently:
At least you agree that it should be regulated. That's a step forward.