Media

On January 6, the Nigerian security services raided the offices of one of Nigeria’s largest circulation newspapers, apparently angry at its published reports about upcoming army operations against a Boko Haram faction, the Islamic State West Africa (ISWA). According to a statement released on Sunday by Manni Dan-Ali, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Daily Trust, and a subsequent statement from the military released on Monday, Nigerian security services entered the main Abuja office of Media Trust Limited, the paper’s publisher, and its regional offices in Maiduguri, Lagos, and Kaduna.  The security services took into custody Maiduguri bureau chief, Uthman Abubakar, and several journalists. Abubakar and at least some of the journalists have since been released, but the security services have retained the mobile phones and computers they confiscated during the raid. The military was also reportedly seeking information on the whereabouts of other journalists involved in the publication of the January 6 story as well as a prior publication from December 31 that reported on the initial ISWA capture of towns in the north. The January 6 story reported a massive military operation that seeks to retake towns in the northeast that had recently been seized by ISWA militants, a Boko Haram faction affiliated with the Islamic State. The military accused journalists at the paper of “divulging military plans,” and said that it “would not tolerate [a] situation where a publication would consistently side with terrorists and undermine our national institutions.” The statement also stressed that the military had “no intention of muzzling the press.” The military eventually vacated the premises of the newspaper’s offices on Sunday night following a directive from President Muhammadu Buhari. In a tweet announcing the directive, Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesperson, said, “issues between the military and the newspaper as they affect the coverage of the war in the Northeast will be resolved through dialogue.”  There has been an upsurge in Boko Haram activity in northeast Nigeria. As recently as January 8, Nigerian media reported that Boko Haram had killed three, including an Islamic cleric, and that hundreds are feeling from multiple attacks.  President Buhari campaigned in 2015 on a platform of restoring Nigerian security and destroying Boko Haram. Boko Haram’s continued vitality is an liability as President Buhari seeks reelection in February. Nevertheless, the Daily Trust has the largest circulation in Northern Nigeria and it is one of the leading newspapers in the country. The president would see the political negatives in the army moving against a respected newspaper, and he ordered the withdrawal from its premises. For its part, the army is frustrated by its failure to destroy Boko Haram, and there is anger at the press coverage it receives. The military's claim that it had no intention of “muzzling the press,” made in response to the Daily Trust raid and arrests, lacks credibility. It is unclear who, exactly, ordered the security services to move against the newspaper. The president’s quick move to end the occupation of the newspaper’s facilities raises the question of whether the military was moving without the prior consent of the Buhari administration. This would not be the first time such questions were raised.

Adam Valavanis is a volunteer intern in the Africa program at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. On November 5, the New York Times ran on the first page of its business section a long piece on the emergence of luxury lifestyle publications in Nigeria. Four full-color images cover the page, each of the creators and editors of influential culture and fashion magazines based in Lagos. In the article, author Adenike Olanrewaju describes the emergence of publications Genevieve Magazine, Exquisite Magazine, Today’s Woman, and Glam Africa. With an increasingly cosmopolitan elite, Olanrewaju writes, “luxury brands are eager to establish firmer footholds there.” Although all of these magazines discuss the latest fashion trends, some also choose to take on taboo issues such as drug abuse and domestic violence.  The fact that the Times chose to profile the heads of Nigeria’s lifestyle magazines on the front page of its business section is even more notable, as it illustrates the growth of Nigeria’s international cultural influence. While Nigeria has always been politically and culturally influential on the African continent thanks to its large population and enormous oil wealth, the Times coverage is the latest example of growing Western interest in Nigerian culture. This attention comes after increased international consumption of Nigeria’s hugely popular film industry, Nollywood, which is already well-established across the African continent. Nollywood movies are beginning to reach audiences in Europe and the United States, with cities such as Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Toronto now hosting Nollywood film festivals. In addition, Nigeria is home to an influential music scene, notably Afrobeat, which combines West African music styles with American funk and jazz. The pioneer of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, became internationally famous in the 1970s and 1980s and has inspired generations of Western artists, such as Talking Heads and Beyoncé.  In literature, Chinua Achebe, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and, more recently, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have significant readership in the United States. Nigerian literature and its emerging figures were themselves the subject of a Times piece in November 2017.  Nigeria’s culture rooted in fashion, film, music, and literature translates into enhanced international prestige. At the time of independence, many hoped that as a huge, democratic country, Nigeria would provide Africa with a “seat at the table” among the traditional international powers. Perhaps that is happening first with respect to art and culture, rather than by the more conventional political and security means. 

The full text of this article is available here on ForeignPolicy.com. What in the world? No seriously, what the…? When it comes to Saudi Arabia these days, things could not get weirder or uglier. Last November, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman forced Lebanon’s Prime Minister to resign—from Riyadh in a television appearance that had all the characteristics of a hostage video. At the same time, Saudi authorities detained almost 400 people in the Ritz-Carlton over corruption charges, only to release them after they handed over significant sums of cash and assets in what appeared to be little more than a shakedown. This past spring and summer, the government began arresting women activists, some of whom had been at the forefront of the decades long fight to drive that ended with a lift on the ban in June, and declared them traitors. Then, in August, Saudi leaders lashed out at Canada over a tweet criticizing their treatment of oppositionists—canceling flights, preventing Saudi students on government scholarship from studying at Canadian universities, and transferring sick Saudis from Canada’s hospitals. All of this was going on against the backdrop of the ill-conceived war in Yemen. And now, a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi—a onetime confidant of senior Saudi officials and princes—has vanished. He disappeared into Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2 and has not been heard from since. The Turks say he is dead, killed in the consulate by a hit team, with his body removed in boxes. The Saudis have declared this grisly tale nonsense and insist Khashoggi left the consulate not long after he arrived.

This article first appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com on October 9, 2018. What in the world? No seriously, what the…? When it comes to Saudi Arabia these days, things could not get weirder or uglier. Last November, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman forced Lebanon’s Prime Minister to resign—from Riyadh in a television appearance that had all the characteristics of a hostage video. At the same time, Saudi authorities detained almost 400 people in the Ritz-Carlton over corruption charges, only to release them after they handed over significant sums of cash and assets in what appeared to be little more than a shakedown. This past spring and summer, the government began arresting women activists, some of whom had been at the forefront of the decades long fight to drive that ended with a lift on the ban in June, and declared them traitors. Then, in August, Saudi leaders lashed out at Canada over a tweet criticizing their treatment of oppositionists—canceling flights, preventing Saudi students on government scholarship from studying at Canadian universities, and transferring sick Saudis from Canada’s hospitals. All of this was going on against the backdrop of the ill-conceived war in Yemen. And now, a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi—a onetime confidant of senior Saudi officials and princes—has vanished. He disappeared into Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2 and has not been heard from since. The Turks say he is dead, killed in the consulate by a hit team, with his body removed in boxes. The Saudis have declared this grisly tale nonsense and insist Khashoggi left the consulate not long after he arrived. When the story broke on Saturday by way of a thinly sourced Reuters story followed by more substantial coverage from the Washington Post—where Khashoggi had become a columnist last year—a social media uproar ensued. Twitter was alight with frightened and outraged fellow journalists, analysts recounting a litany of alleged Saudi crimes, politicians demanding accountability, activists with maudlin paeans to a now apparently martyred critic, Saudis arguing that Khashoggi disappeared because he got cold feet over his impending marriage to a Turkish woman, and a few voices cautioning that the declarations of known Justice and Development Party (AKP) provocateurs and unnamed “Turkish security sources” should be taken with a grain of salt. It was a massive outpouring of bile and one-upmanship that was notable even by the notoriously low standards of Twitter. The most important question has been left unanswered, of course: What happened to Jamal Khashoggi? It seems abundantly clear that he never left the consulate, and the Saudi explanation that they cannot prove it because their security cameras weren’t working that day has a “dog ate my homework” quality to it.  If he is not dead and really is a runaway groom, then surely someone must have seen him somewhere—there must be a trail of credit card charges, ATM transactions, or grainy footage from the departure gates at the airport in Istanbul before he made his getaway. For their part, Turkish police sources claim it was premeditated murder, but thus far they have not offered any proof. The Turkish state’s Anadolu news agency, which has often had a problem with the truth, added to the story with ominous reports that 15 Saudis flew into Istanbul aboard two different private jets, that this apparent hit team was in the consulate at the time of Khashoggi’s disappearance, and they all left on Oct. 2. Still, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to back away from these claims on Sunday, before taking a tougher stand the following day. Either he is being atypically diplomatic—the Saudis and Turks are wary of each other but have worked to remain cordial despite significant differences—or the Turks have suspicions, but little evidence of Saudi misdeeds. It also seems odd that Khashoggi, who was fearful enough for his well-being to leave Saudi Arabia and live in self-imposed exile in the United States, believed that visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—twice—was safe. The press reports that Khashoggi went there to obtain paperwork attesting to the fact that he is not married—he is divorced—before tying the knot with a 36-year old Turkish woman named Hatice Cengiz. To make things weirder, the Saudi press claims that Khashoggi’s son, who is still in Saudi Arabia, knows nothing of Cengiz and his father’s engagement to her. Of course, given the response to Khashoggi’s disappearance, the son is almost certainly under significant pressure to stick with Riyadh’s version of events. One can imagine that the Saudi authorities, already paranoid about the Qataris and their allies, were suspicious of Khashoggi’s fiancee given her alleged connections to Qatar and someone in Erdogan’s inner circle named Yasin Aktay. He has been identified as a friend of Khashoggi’s and an “AKP advisor” in the press, but he is much more than that. Aktay is more like a troubleshooter and troublemaker on behalf of the Turkish president. Indeed, Cengiz’s Twitter feed reveals that she does follow people who are critics of Saudi Arabia, organizations known to enjoy Qatari funding, Muslim Brothers—to whom Khashoggi was sympathetic—and Turkey’s ruling party, but so do a lot of people, including myself. Everything that everyone has said about Jamal Khashoggi to date remains speculation. The only thing that has been confirmed is that no one has seen the man in over a week. He is presumed dead. Are there any lessons to be learned from this episode? A few. It is surprising that there are so many who seem all too willing to accept the version of events that are attributed to Turkish security sources. These claims were uncorroborated—and remain so—but were quickly accepted as fact. This does not mean that they are untrue, but Turkey is a country with a poor record of press freedom, and its leaders and their supporters have embraced disinformation as a political strategy and a tool of foreign policy. Even if the Turks have no incentive to lie, commentators should be cautious before engaging in public melodrama over Khashoggi’s fate based on Turkish leaks. Second, the Saudis need to ask themselves why they have even less credibility than the Turks. It is likely that they will blame everyone but themselves for this state of affairs, but the disappearance of Khashoggi is just the latest in a list of bizarre series of events for which the Saudis have offered a variety of explanations that have more often than not been met with collective disbelief. No doubt there are dedicated Saudi critics out there who would assail the Saudis no matter what they do, but even to fair-minded observers, they seem guilty because their stories rarely add up, leading one to conclude that they must be guilty. To many, the Saudis are now cold-blooded killers, and Mohammed bin Salman is not a benevolent despot—an image that he and his advisors have cultivated—but a despot in the mold of Saddam Hussein. Finally, and most poignantly, journalists, academics, dissidents, and oppositionists should fear for their lives. Governments have long targeted these groups, but now seems to be a particularly dangerous moment, especially for journalists. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been ordering the killing people he does not like at will—on St. Petersburg streets, at Washington hotels, in small British cities, and elsewhere. Turkey, the leading jailer of journalists in the world, has kidnapped followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen in Asia and Europe—and just before the Khashoggi disappearance, one of Erdogan’s closest advisors warned that Turkey’s dragnet would extend across the globe. Egypt is also a notorious jailer of reporters, holds countless other who oppose the regime, is responsible for the brutal death of an Italian graduate student, and killed at least 800 people in a Cairo neighborhood in a single morning in August 2013. China recently disappeared the Chinese head of Interpol and has interned a million people in concentration camps. Now, the Saudis stand accused of murder. If they did it, they will likely get away with it—not on Twitter or the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, but where it counts: in the White House. Ours is an era of international thuggishness combined with a total absence of norms. That makes everyone a target.  

The Nigerian formal judicial system, based on colonial precedent, is notoriously slow and often expensive. In effect, accessibility to justice is limited, and some would say its non-existent for the majority of Nigerians that are poor. Hence the popularity of courts conducted by traditional and religious rulers (many times the same individuals). These are often of colonial or pre-colonial origin. Islamic courts based on Sharia, or Islamic law, are especially popular in the predominately-Muslim parts of the country. Such courts have credibility with the people, especially in rural areas, and, as a practical matter, government officials usually accept their decisions. (Appeals to the formal judicial system from traditional courts are possible, but very expensive.)  Unable to rely on the state, urban Nigerians are also finding alternative ways to address their grievances. Some are turning to a radio show, “The Bakete Family,” hosted by Ahman Isah and broadcast by Human Rights Radio six days a week from Abuja. Participants reportedly present themselves at the studio or call in. Those selected present the alleged injustices they have suffered, ranging from unjustified firings to domestic disputes. The show names and shames government officials and unresponsive departments and also tries to mediate disputes, especially domestic ones. On occasion, it publicizes the phone numbers of government officials, urging listeners to call them to demand they take action. There is anecdotal evidence that the method works—at least sometimes. There are no listener figures, but media reports that there are large crowds that gather outside the show’s studio each morning.  “Shaming” would appear to be especially effective in a profoundly religious country, such as Nigeria. Ahman Isah says, “The laws are there, but the enforcement is nothing.” According to Isah, “It is as good as not being there. The laws only favor the rich and the mighty in the country, ordinary Nigerians are not being protected by law.” But, he also says, “One who has nothing has God, and one who has God has everything.” Most Nigerians would probably agree. For more on Nigeria, Matthew Page and I provide an overview of its politics, history, and culture, including the threat of Boko Haram and religious conflicts in our new book, Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, which was published by Oxford University Press in July.

In this edition: the effects of internet censorship in China, the malicious uses of artificial intelligence, and U.S. Cyber Command's strategy to achieve domain superiority.

Each year, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) publishes a list of 180 countries rank-ordered according to the degree of freedom the media enjoys. RWB uses objective criteria, which it outlines on its website. It cautions that it is measuring media freedom, not media quality. Its list is divided into five bands, from best to worst.  The top band consists of seventeen countries, mostly in Europe but none from the African continent. The second band consists of thirty countries, five of which are African. For comparison’s sake, it includes countries like Canada (no. 18), France (33), the United Kingdom (40), and the United States (45). The African countries are as follows: Ghana (23), Namibia (26), South Africa (28), Cape Verde (29), and Burkina Faso (41). In these African countries, freedom of the media is roughly equivalent to that of the United States and big NATO allies. In fact, they all actually rank higher than the United States and, with the exception of Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom.  The third band runs from Botswana (48) to Bolivia (110). There are twenty-one African countries, including Senegal (50), Liberia (89), and Kenya (96). Others in this band include Hong Kong (70), Mongolia (71), and Israel (87).  The fourth band runs from Bulgaria (111) to Kazakhstan (158). This band includes seventeen African countries, including most of the large ones: Uganda (117), Nigeria (119), Angola (121), Ethiopia (150), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (154). This band also includes India (138), Russia (148), and Turkey (157).   The fifth and final band, representing the countries with the worst media freedom, runs from Burundi (159) to North Korea (180). It includes five African countries in addition to Burundi: Somalia (168), Equatorial Guinea (171), Djibouti (173), Sudan (174), and Eritrea (179). This band also includes Cuba (172), China (176), and Syria (177). The bad news is that the twenty-eight African countries in the bottom half of the list outnumber the twenty-one in the top half. Further, Africa’s largest states by population are in the bottom half: Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The good news is that the top half includes almost all of the states of the southern cone (Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Lesotho), Ghana, and several francophone states around the continent, such as Senegal, Madagascar, Niger, and Ivory Coast. Other good news is that the five African states comparable in media freedom to the United States include two large, important ones: Ghana and South Africa. The RWB index provides a useful tool for comparing media freedom around the continent. It also provides yet another example of the diversity of the African continent. With respect to media freedom, Ghana and South Africa, for example, are far removed from Sudan and Eritrea.   

The 2017 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism went to a group of three media outlets that investigated and reported on the Gupta brothers, cronies of Jacob Zuma and widely accused of exercising improper influence or “state capture.” The three were News24, The Daily Maverick, and the amaBhungane Center for Investigative Journalism. News24 is an online news publication company, the Daily Maverick is a daily online newspaper, and amaBhungame is a non-profit. Even under the assaults of the Jacob Zuma administration, South Africa was characterized by constitutionalism, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law. Strong civil society, a free media, a sophisticated parliamentary opposition, and judges who regularly ruled against the government played interdependent roles in protecting South Africa’s democratic institutions. The media publicized corruption to the general public, civil society did not hesitate to sue the administration in the courts, and the formal parliamentary opposition was able to delay or block unfavorable parliamentary initiatives put forth by Zuma. Taco Kuiper, a wealthy publisher and businessman, established the Valley Trust before he died in 2004. Its purpose is to develop investigative journalism. South African media estimates that it is worth more than 70 million rand. The trust is closely associated with the School of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”) where it funds a chair of investigative journalism. It makes available up to 350,000 rand annually for print journalists or print publications seeking help to investigate and report on issues of public interest and awards the Taco Kuiper award each year. The award is an example of the close relationship between civil society and the media. The Valley Trust and amaBhungame are in some way both civic and media organizations. News24 and the Daily Maverick are for-profit media outfits. The Taco Kuiper Award statement focused on the close collaboration among the three organizations in their investigation of and reporting on the Guptas and their influence on the South African government.