The publisher of Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), Mr. Fisayo Soyombo, has opened up on why many young people are so scared to join the journalism profession in Nigeria.
While speaking on Channels TV, the investigative journalist cited intimidation, harassment, and state actors who treat journalists as adversaries.
He said it’s impossible to practice journalism and live a normal life in Nigeria.
Soyombo said: “There’s a lot of scaremongering, and that’s the part that is the most worrisome to me.
“We now have people saying to young people, graduates, ‘You want to become a journalist? You want the government to keep going after you? You want to end up in prison, in a police cell?”
Speaking further, he bemoaned the retrogression of press freedom under the current administration, saying police officers see journalists as cyber criminals.
“In a country where the country considers journalists cyber criminals, there’s no other way to put it. Between 1986 and 2003 when Bola Tinubu became the President, 1,034 Nigerian journalists were detained.
“By the end of the first year of Tinubu’s reign, 28 journalists had been detained; that figure is equal to the annual average of the last 38 years.
“More than half of that happened under the military regime, which tells you that in a democracy, press freedom is just as bad or even worse than what it was in the military regime,” he added.
Mr Soyombo also pointed to systemic patterns of harassment, including misinterpretation of laws to criminalise journalism.
“The police working in cahoots mostly with corrupt politicians will always find a way to interpret what has been published as a cybercrime.
“You know it is just semantics. You amend it, you use different sets of words, they come back and it’s still that you published something injurious to another person.
“But the law is clear: when that happens, you go to court. Even without going to court, cybercrime law exists just to hound journalists.”
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