Who decides what Nigerians need to know?
Last Thursday, Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, stood before a room full of journalists and told them, plainly to stop reporting on terrorists and criminals.
“Please, take these terrorists and criminals off your front pages,” he said at a national security summit organised by the Nigeria Union of Journalists. “This is what they crave for, free of charge.”
It’s quite easy to dismiss that as government overreach. It is also easy to nod along and call it patriotism. However, neither reaction can get us very far. Because buried inside the minister’s request is a genuine tension that Nigerian journalism has not fully reckoned with and that tension deserves an honest conversation, not a quick response.
The government is not entirely wrong, but let’s start with the uncomfortable part.
To state clearly, there is real academic evidence that constant media coverage of terrorist attacks can amplify their psychological impact far beyond what the violence itself achieves. Terrorism, on its own, is a fear strategy. The bomb is not the point. The fear that follows is. And nothing spreads fear faster than bomb ridden houses boldly plastered on the front page.
When a newspaper leads with the number of people abducted in Zamfara, the name of the bandit commander responsible, and a photo of grieving families, it is doing something that, in a narrow sense, might serve the bandit’s purpose. He does not need a publicist because he has the press. Minister Idris is not inventing this argument.
Governments, from the United Kingdom to Israel to the United States have wrestled with the same question and arrived at similar conclusions that some information of reported at the wrong time or in the wrong way can genuinely costs lives. That is actual documented reality, so the government has a point. It might be partial, but it’s a real one.
However, this request is the wrong answer to the right problem and here is where it falls apart.
When the Minister says “the best editor is the one that knows what not to report in the interest of nation-building,” he is not describing responsible journalism. He is describing state-friendly journalism. Those are two vastly different things.
Responsible journalism means verifying before publishing, considering the consequences of how something is framed, and giving security agencies the chance to respond before a story runs. It means not publishing the location of a military operation in real time or revealing the identity of an informant. Journalists broadly accept these limits not because the government asks, but because the harm is obvious and specific.
What the minister is asking couldn’t be any more different. He is asking journalists to remove entire categories of news from their front pages. Not how to cover terrorism but whether to cover it at all.
The reporting is far from the problem. Now, if bandits are raiding communities in the north-west every other week, the problem is not that newspapers are reporting it. The real problem is that it is happening every other week.
There is a version of this conversation where the government’s frustration is legitimate, where journalists amplify violence without context, chase body counts without analysis, and give airtime to criminal groups without proper rigorous scrutiny.
It’ll be permissible if that is what Minister Idris said but no that wasn’t. He said front pages are “underplaying” the successes of security agencies while overplaying the activities of criminals. That framing tells you something important about what this request is actually about. It is not about security. It is about narrative management. The government simply wants a better story told about itself.
The deepest problem with the request is that when the government can tell journalists what is and is not worth reporting, the public loses its only independent check on whether the government’s version of events is true. We are told security agencies are neutralising terrorists and rescuing kidnap victims. That may well be accurate. But we only know it is accurate because journalists can go and verify it independently. Remove that independence, and we are left with press releases.
What patriotic journalism actually looks like
The minister asked journalists to be patriotic. It is a fair ask, just not in the way he means.
Patriotic journalism in Nigeria right now does not look like keeping criminals off the front page. It looks like asking why the same communities have been reporting the same attacks for ten years and the situation has not improved. It looks like following the money on defence contracts. It looks like naming the officials who promised security and did not deliver it. It looks like giving ordinary Nigerians, a voice in the national conversation about what is happening to them.
That is hard, unglamorous, and sometimes dangerous work. It does not make for a flattering headline about the government. But it is the kind of journalism that actually serves the nation not by hiding the problem, but by creating the public pressure necessary to solve it.
The question nobody is asking
Here is the question that the summit in Abuja did not seem to address: if Nigeria’s security situation were genuinely improving, would we need a minister to tell journalists not to report on it?
The front pages are full of bandits and kidnappers because the country is full of bandits and kidnappers. The solution to that is not fewer front pages. It is fewer bandits and kidnappers.
Until then, the job of the Nigerian press has and will always be to tell the truth about the country. That is not unpatriotic. It might even be the single most patriotic thing a journalist can do. After all, reporting with utmost truth and accuracy is the first responsibility of the press. Everything comes after.
