Big Brother Benin: On Journalists, Jihadists, and Jurists

These are interesting times. 

A PDP member is the 8th Minister of the FCT under an opposition APC government.

An LP prosecution Lawyer, Mike Ozekome, hugs the victorious defendant, Vice President Shettima, just after his client lost, right there in the court.

A Journalist is held as a Jihadist in a city, not Benin.

A Nigerian journalist, Damilola Faith Ayeni, was arrested by authorities in the Benin Republic, a country neighbouring Nigeria on the West, while on a trip to the country for his environmental journalism work. According to the FIJ, a man who identified himself as the ‘Commissioner of the Central Police Station of Parakou in Benin’ claimed that Ayeni was being held for being a jihadist. 

Despite evidence presented to them that Ayeni is a journalist and not a jihadist, the police continued to insist on their claims.

But all of that is in the past now. A Benionise court freed him after intense pressure from the Nigerian Embassy in Benin, international media societies, and civil rights organisations.  

Before Ayeni became a full-fledged journalist with the FIJ, he wrote about environmental challenges in Africa, particularly Nigeria, and used self-sponsored media (TV and Radio) features to engage the populace and leaders, his Tired Earth profile read back in 2019. 

The profile also indicated that Ayeni, who holds a Degree in Forest Resources and Wildlife Management, initiated the Students Enlightenment Program that discusses environmental science, sustainable interaction with the environment, climate change, and climate action and justice in different high schools in Nigeria. 

He also coordinated the Fridays For Future movement in Nigeria. The movement is “a youth-led and organised movement that began in August 2018, after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis.” 

FIJ reported that the police in Benin Republic demanded a bribe of 800,000 CFA (around N1.2 million) to secure Ayeni’s release. 

However, data shows that the country’s treatment of this journalist, as unsavoury as it could be, still pales when compared with the level of indignities and harm that journalists suffer in Nigeria.

In fact, Nigeria’s record with regard to the safety of journalists within its borders is worse than the average of the world’s six divisions – the Americas, Africa, Asia Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union and the Balkans, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

However, both Benin, ranked 112th, and Nigeria, ranked 123rd, are placed below the median rank of 100th for the ranking of countries in Africa.

This shows that both countries rank below the global median rank of 91st and the African median rank of 100th.

Journalists: Are they freer in Benin than Nigeria?

Yes. Journalists are freer in Benin than in Nigeria, but Journalism is freer in Nigeria than in Benin. 

At least Damilola Ayeni’s wrongful arrest and swift trial in the Benin Republic agree with the data here.

As problematic as Benin’s economic and political limitations might be for a maverick media, it is more tolerant of the journalist’s personal rights and physical safety.

The data shows that the journalistic establishment in Benin Republic suffers more economic and political repressions than that in Nigeria.

The Reporters Without Borders (RSF) methodology explains these contexts of media freedom thus: 

Political Freedom

• the degree of support and respect for media autonomy vis-à-vis political pressure from the state or from other political actors;
• the level of acceptance of a variety of journalistic approaches satisfying professional standards, including politically aligned approaches and independent approaches;
• the degree of support for the media in their role of holding politicians and government to account in the public interest.

Economic Freedom

• economic constraints linked to governmental policies (including the difficulty of creating a news media outlet, favouritism in the allocation of state subsidies, and corruption);
• economic constraints linked to non-state actors (advertisers and commercial partners);
• economic constraints linked to media owners seeking to promote or defend their business interests.

Sociocultural Freedom

• social constraints resulting from denigration and attacks on the press based on such issues as gender, class, ethnicity and religion;
• cultural constraints, including pressure on journalists to not question certain bastions of power or influence or not cover certain issues because it would run counter to the prevailing culture in the country or territory.

Legal Freedom

• the degree to which journalists and media are free to work without censorship or judicial sanctions, or excessive restrictions on their freedom of expression;
• the ability to access information without discrimination between journalists, and the ability to protect sources;
• the presence or absence of impunity for those responsible for acts of violence against journalists.

Safety

The questions concern journalists’ safety. For this purpose, freedom is defined as the ability to identify, gather and disseminate news and information in accordance with journalistic methods and ethics, without unnecessary risk of:

• bodily harm (including murder, violence, arrest, detention, enforced disappearance and abduction);
• psychological or emotional distress that could result from intimidation, coercion, harassment, surveillance, doxing (publication of personal information with malicious intent), degrading or hateful speech, smears and other threats targeting journalists or their loved-ones;
• professional harm (for example, the loss of one’s job, the confiscation of professional equipment, or the ransacking of installations).

It appears then that the comparative goodwill that the Nigerian government shows towards the media’s economic and political independence, it then overcompensates through legal and physical threats against journalists.

Conversely, there might be fewer legal and physical threats against journalists in Benin because the media ecosystem in the country is already constricted economically and politically more than in Nigeria. This reduces the need to stifle voices of dissent through legal and physical threats, as in Nigeria.

Jihadists: Are they freer in Nigeria than in Benin?

Yes, Jihadists are freer in Nigeria than in Benin, going by how long terrorists have thrived in Nigeria compared to Benin.

Yet, Benin has been facing an unprecedented rise in cases of Terrorism since 2019.