The Igbo lawyer

Nigeria’s problems are, indeed, intractable. And multi-pronged. While poverty and insecurity ravage the land, and staggering sums of money that should be enough to address the material challenges of citizens continue to disappear into inexplicable official holes, peculiar irritating tendencies keep inserting themselves in already frazzled public discussions.

Take the otherwise ordinary matter of identification of Nigerians in the media, for example.  What, or who, precisely, is an Igbo lawyer? Or a Yoruba engineer? Or an Urhobo pilot? Or a Kanuri doctor? Or a Bini entrepreneur? Or an Ijaw pharmacist? Or a…. thief? Maybe the “Nigerian journalist” has the answer.

The place of honour for the press in the historical records of the making of Nigeria as a sovereign state is already secured. Its pre-eminent role in the nationalist struggle has gained for journalists the epaulette of knighthood that they continue to adorn with justifiable pride. Remarkably, the same spirit of dogged commitment to freedom of Nigerians from any form of shackles, also manifested in the uncompromised war waged by the press against military dictatorship in the country.

As often happens with the offspring of illustrious forebearers, however, a segment of the press of the present times appears to be inhabited by a different spirit, determined to undo that which their forebearers did.

Whether unconsciously or not, the press is evidentially playing a role at the moment which threatens the prospects of a tottering Nigerian state steadying itself and developing a viable, sustainable value system that transcends the antics of some irredentists.

Already, the press has substantially lost its reckoning as a guardian of moral and ethical values in the society. Where its forebearers pursued their functions with recorded elan, the press at the moment appears to be beholden to transient considerations. The problem is even beyond this. So, what happened to the press in Nigeria? A disquisition on that is a matter for another day.

On Friday, September 11,2026, the United States of American marked the 25th anniversary of the massive terrorist attack on America on September 11,2001. The audacious multiple terrorist strike which became promptly coded as 9/11, left slightly less than 300 people dead. The epicentre and symbol of the attack was the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York city.

Three Nigerians are on record as casualties in that dastardly act. One of the three was a 33-year-old lawyer, Godwin Ajalli from Ebonyi State. Ajalli reportedly hailed from Akaeze Local Government Area. Somehow, Ajalli had his name distorted to Ajala, but no matter.

Ajalli died a hero to many who knew him in America. He lost his life from exhaustion, working to save lives at the World Trade Centre scene of the terrorism attack. He may have saved his life had he taken the natural step of finding safety in the face of what had seemed like Armageddon. However, he threw himself into saving others at the scene of the tragedy.

Few years back, in remembrance of the 9/11 and the innocent souls who perished in it, residents of the neighbourhood where Ajalli lived in New Jersey, and some others around the vicinity of the World Trade Centre in New York, paid tribute to the young Nigerian lawyer.

The tributes were touching. Americans and Nigerians alike remembered a young Nigerian who was diligent in his security job at the World Trade Centre. From accounts, he was working while also studying for his New York Bar exams. As with many immigrants from Africa, he had taken the security job to pay his bills and get by, while studying to pass his bar exams and upgrade in life. Ajalli was said to be popular with many, both at work and his area of residence in New Jersey. He was the leader of a workers’ union at the World Trade Centre and seemed to get on well with people.

Now, while all those in the United States of America who remembered Ajalli and paid tribute to him, whether they were Americans or Nigerians, rightly identified him as a young Nigerian immigrant lawyer, the press in Nigeria as represented by a report on him last week, thought differently and acted differently. In the report last week on the 9/11 featuring Godwin Ajalli, it was about “The Igbo lawyer who died saving others in 9/11 terror.”

Presenting Ajalli as an “Igbo lawyer” as the reports had it, followed a pattern that has gradually become common in the Nigerian press and online news platforms in recent years. Identifying Ajalli as Igbo which he was, is neither factually wrong nor offensive. He must have been proud of where he came from. But that is not the point.

When identification of citizens in the press or in public documents resorts to   ethnic identity rather than individual identity, or in the case in focus, reference to the nationality, an underlining troubled sociological pattern cannot be missed.

Make no mistakes about it, where ethnic identity finds its way into a headline or a news story, especially as a means of identifying a citizen, bigotry is usually not far away.

How could an editor, so called, work on a script of a young Nigerian lawyer who died in an international tragedy in United States of America and come to the decision that his best headline was “the Igbo lawyer” who died in a global arena? The fact that the editor did not see the incongruence in his choice of identification marker is, in itself, instructive.  But then, the Ajalli headline is reflective of the prevailing mindset that processes news stories and casts headlines in the present-day Nigerian press.

Very little out of the news media of the present times promotes the often-touted aspiration of Nigeria to nationhood. As a matter of fact, the press, either out of weak professional training or in obedience to inducing pocket nationalism, appears all out at the moment to promote that which undermines a common Nigerian identity.

The house style, if any such thing exists in many of the news media organisations in Nigeria, must be so permissive and lax in enforcement that the import of the phrases, words and tendencies they throw up for public consumption, are lost on them

There is hardly any week these days that a consumer of news stories is not confronted with the affront of profiling headlines such as; “a Yoruba… killed” “an Igbo… arrested”, “a Fulani…. jailed”, “a Bini… declared wanted.”

Interestingly, after the press has done with compartmentalizing citizens in news reports according to their ethnic identities, it turns round to commence a search for patriotic, “detribalized” Nigerians committed to whatever the ideals may be of a united country.