Gender and Development Action (GADA

Blessed

Kadaria Ahmed’s Anti-BBC Article a Disservice to Journalism

By Farooq Kperogi

Kadaria Ahmed is my senior in the profession for whom I have tremendous respect not only because of her matchless brilliance but also because of the record she set at Bayero University’s Department of Mass Communication from where I also graduated years after her.

But her fuzzy attempt to criminalize BBC’s—and Daily Trust’s— praiseworthy investigative reporting on the heartrending terroristic banditry in Zamfara, her home state, which gave the inept federal government the justificatory lifeline it needed to muzzle the media is a huge disservice to the profession.

If I were her, I’d be ashamed of that article.

She is more worried about the uncomfortable truths revealed in the BBC report, which most of us already know and which journalists are professionally obligated to report, than the government’s crying ineptitude.

If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, breaking, covering, or ignoring it won’t change anything.

If the horrors of terroristic banditry weren't ignored or covered by the government, reporting on it wouldn't have come across as glorification of banditry.