Media should focus on development stories and not Boko Haram – Maku

 

The Minister of Information, Labran Maku, has called on the Nigerian media to change their strategy on reportage in the country. Mr. Maku speaking in an interview with Vanguard, said Boko Haram had taken away the spotlight from development issues.
Excerpt:

May 29 was the third anniversary of the Jonathan administration. It seems there is not so much to talk about in view of the security situation in the country.  What can you say has been achieved in spite of Chibok?

There is a correlation between the exposure of the development efforts received in the media and insecurity in the northern part of the country.  What has happened in the last three years particularly is that terrorism has taken the front pages and the prime time news from development and social issues in the country and that is why, most of the time, I have continued to insist that the media should have a change of strategy.

I would not say change of attitude because, with terrorism, once it takes hold, it takes quite a while for it to be dealt with and, because terrorists themselves are looking for opportunities to sell their ideology, to use the media to frighten society, to give themselves some invincible image, they keep doing those strikes mainly because they want headlines to be celebrated, they want society to be afraid, they want to divide society across public opinions.

So I believe the media should, side-by-side while reporting incidents of terror attacks unfortunately where they occur, must focus on development, on deepening our democracy; that is the only way we can defeat terror.  The day we allow development to lose out in favour of terrorism, they have laid the foundation to defeat the democratic enterprise.  They want to show that our democracy cannot endure so we must make sure we focus attention on development while reporting incidents of terror.

Even in reporting, it is my belief that we give it too much exposure, too much outlandish headlines.  Yes, if there is a strike and people are dead, you would not say the media should not report it, but when you look at some of the situations that we have had in recent times on weekly basis, the front page, the headlines, the lead stories are often all about terror.  In fact, after the last blast in Abuja, I made the allusion to the fact that it appears that whenever there is any landmark achieved by this government, bombs must follow and I have been trying to make the connection.

I give you an example, immediately we rebased our economy and it was told that Nigeria now has the largest economy in Africa, there were bomb blasts at Chibok.  Immediately they learned that we were going to host the World Economic Forum, there were blasts in Abuja and environs to make sure that Nigeria did not get the economic benefit of hosting the Forum, and to discourage the world from coming here and  make the attacks the centre point of international and local media so that the exposure the Forum was supposed to give to the Nigerian economy and investment opportunities would be lost.

You will also notice that immediately after the Ekiti election (adjudged free and fair and won by the ruling PDP), bombs started raining again.  So I can tell you that almost every milestone that has been recorded by this government is accompanied by bomb blasts, by terror attacks.