The Roles Centralised Medias Outlets Play In Governance in Most African Countries

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Every radio station and every television house in Nigeria is currently talking about covid-19 and this irks me to know that inasmuch as this should be a public service announcement, it's s government agenda being shoved down the throat of people. There has been no caused championed as this before and even the bid to end police brutality and bad governance never really got any traction as this.

One thing I have discovered about the Nigeria government is that they want to adopt policies that would make them look good for foreign PR, but would never ever adopt a policy that would look good on their citizenry. Now back to the radio station and television houses.

Free speech is always preached and championed but there are always limits to how a media house can talk. The regulations that are given to media houses by regulation bodies are often unknown to the general public. To paint a logical truth providing facts and documents against a sitting government is something I have never seen.

Truth is, the media is considered very influential in the opinion people holds, this somehow concerns the actions of government. People being exposed to the harsh truth can make them make irrational decisions even it it's virtually justified. During the protest in Nigeria, the general public burned down a radio station simply because it belonged to a politician.

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Now this politician is hated by the public, he's said to have income being raked into his pocket from the 36 states in Nigeria. He's also rumored to have an illegal exporting business that majorly run in Lagos state straight to overseas. He's rumored to be the brain behind the shootings in Lagos state during the #endsars protest and cumulatively this has earned him the badge of a national villain in the eye of the public.

However owning a radio station seem like the perfect way to sell a different identify to the general public but then using the media to do so hasn't worked because his noterity has been sold. Even if he's not really as terrible as he's being painted, everyone knows he's corrupt, a money launderer and s cooperate thief, he's less than he's being painted as.

However his media house was burned down because it was deemed that he uses this channel to sell bad PR to the public but then legitimate people employed by him lost their jobs due to the inferno and this is why public opinion which is created as a result of hatred can have repercussions. This is majorly why the government are careful as to what is disseminated in the media.

African leaders use this method to keep their public at arm's length. Most Africa countries can match countries like the US when it comes to resources relating to finance, mineral resources, internal wealth generation and many more but these documents that proves this is never shown neither are they talked about in the media. Most citizens in African countries depends on what they hear from the media to form their own perspective apart from visibility experiencing bad governance in terms of inflation and many more.

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So there's a minor control of the media especially when it relates to government parastatals and expenditure because it's been proven that people can have a plausible cause to physically engage a government that was duly elected by them. There are no regulations on baseless criticism. On twitter, one of the consistent trending topic for Nigeria has been bad governance and people can only tweet and if they can't bring proofs then these tweets are considered social media rants.

Needless to say, the government are only concerned about silencing logic statements backed by raw and provable facts against them. There has been talks about regulations twitter in Nigeria because they say it instigates people to take unreasonable actions. The media, is highly centralised and the information we get has been formatted to suit the regulations.