Nigeria starts crackdown on media

Nigerian authorities started a nationwide crackdown on media, ranging from seizures of newspapers to tough new regulations on live political programming. Human rights groups and journalists say there’s no freedom of speech in Nigeria. Nigeria’s media freedom record has fallen to its lowest ebb. The situation is worrying, the observed. The criticism comes after Nigeria’s broadcasting regulator announced this week that stations would now be required to provide written warning 48 hours in advance of changes to the schedules to fit in ‘impromptu’ live politics shows. The edict, which follows the controversial army crackdown on newspapers, was designed to ‘check increasing cases of unprofessional handling’ of live politics discussions featuring ‘provocative and highly divisive comments’, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) said in a statement. But it has prompted outrage among journalists and academics. They say it amounts to an authoritarian muzzling of dissent by the government, which is on the back foot over its handling of the mass kidnapping of more than 600 children, including 200 schoolgirls, by Islamist group Boko Haram. Requesting broadcast houses to give NBC 48-hour notice before airing any live political programmes would amount to unbridled censorship and gagging of the media and it is against the spirit and letters of all electoral laws in Nigeria,’ the Nigerian Press Organisation (NPO) said.
Newspaper crackdown
Five newspapers said earlier this month that soldiers had held up print runs and seized copies of their editions over security concerns. The government and military have denied they were looking to silence critics, even though at least two of the newspapers had published damning articles about the army. The Punch daily described the crackdown in a scathing editorial as ‘a rapid descent of a discredited government and its security agencies into undisguised tyranny’. The operation was ‘reminiscent of military dictatorship in the country’, it added. Nigeria's media came under heavy censorship during the military rule of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha in the 1980s and 1990s, according to AFP.