To understand the Nigerian diaspora media formation, which influenced the emergence of vibrant domestic online journalism, it is important to undertake a bird’s-eye view of Nigerian media history. This is significant because there is a surprising interconnectedness, and even continuity, in the form, character, tone, tenor, and reportorial temperaments of the various epochs of Nigerian journalism history. Chris Ogbondah constructed a dichotomous periodization of Nigerian press history into “two major periods—the colonial, which is the period essentially marked by British imperialism, and the post-independence, the period that followed the dawn of independence essentially characterized by military rule.” Although this periodization has a heuristic utility, it conflates distinct temporalities in Nigerian press history and obscures many subtleties. As I show later in this chapter, the Nigerian press preceded British colonialism by many years, and postindependence Nigerian press has many discrete phases that cannot be lumped together without triggering taxonomic incongruities.

Nevertheless, irrespective of historical epochs, the Nigerian press has historically functioned as a discursive parliament for the articulation, ventilation, and circulation of transformative and politically consequential national discourses, and for the instigation of momentous social changes. That is why studies of political developments in Nigeria from the colonial to the postcolonial periods have always highlighted the roles of the Nigerian press and Nigerian journalists in energizing and galvanizing popular support for major, defining issues of the times. The Nigerian press was, for instance, the primary instrument for sustained nationalist agitation against British colonialism, a fact that inspired James Coleman to write that “there can be little doubt that nationalist newspapers and pamphlets have been among the main influences in the awakening of racial and political consciousness [in Nigeria].” Nigeria's first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was himself an anticolonial activist-journalist, similarly characterized the Nigerian press as “identical with the intellectual and material developments of this country,” pointing out that the “galaxy of immortal journalists produced by Nigeria” played tremendous roles “in this corner of the world in the great crusade for human freedom.”

But before and after the dislodgement of formal colonialism, to what extent did the Nigerian press serve as a site for public sphere debates, especially in light of the rather anticlimactic emergence of a corrupt, morally bankrupt, and intolerant postcolonial Nigerian state that Terisa Turner fittingly characterizes as a “gate-keeper state”?

Citizen journalism and alternative journalism are core constructs in this book and have been used to characterize emergent models of decentered, non-oligopolistic journalisms. An awareness of the differences between them is central to the preoccupations of this book. In this chapter, I define alternative and citizen models of journalism, map their conceptual contours, and point out their intersections in the age of the Internet. In reviewing the corpus of research that has been done in conceptualizing citizen and alternative journalism, I reveal the gaps in the extant literature. How might we conceive alternative journalism? How is it different from and similar to citizen journalism? And how are these categories useful for this book?

Although it is customary for some scholars to conflate citizen media and alternative media, I argue in this book that they are different. In the new media literature, citizen journalism is traditionally conceptualized as online “news content produced by ordinary citizens with no formal journalism training.” It needs to be noted, however, that citizen journalism does not necessarily preclude people with formal journalism training so long as they partake in nonprofessionalized, user-generated news-gathering and dissemination practices. Alternative journalism, on the other hand, is not merely nonprofessionalized and noninstitutionalized journalism produced by ordinary citizens; it is also purposively counterhegemonic and “closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of ‘objectivity’ with overt advocacy and oppositional practices.”

Whereas citizen journalism (at least the way this term is widely understood and applied in new media scholarship) is enabled largely by the emergence of the Internet, alternative journalism not only preceded the Internet but is as old as journalism itself. And although all online alternative media— to the extent that they are products of journalism by ordinary citizens outside institutional and professional structures, are citizen media—not all citizen media are alternative media. To be alternative, media citizen media have to be expressly oppositional and actuated by a progressive, emancipatory political agenda. However, these categories are not neat, unchanging, or invariably mutually exclusive. For one thing, as will be demonstrated throughout this book, notions of what constitutes progressive, emancipatory political agendas vary widely from country to country.

The online media of the Nigerian diaspora, as has been adverted to in previous chapters, have competed favorably with, and in some cases actually superseded, the homeland media in charting the course of far-reaching national discourses and in confronting and exposing corruption both in government and in the media. Chapter 4 illustrated some of the ways in which the diasporic news media exposed high-level corruption among the Nigerian domestic ruling elite, although some of the diasporic media are themselves not always immune from the ills they have railed against. This chapter highlights and discusses more case studies that instantiate the everrising significance of the Nigerian diasporic online citizen media formation. It shows that in addition to being consequential enough to cause governmental policy changes, the diasporic citizen media have also exposed corruption in the Nigerian press and thereby weakened the legitimacy of a hitherto vibrant but now thoroughly compromised traditional national media establishment.

The case studies in this chapter are organized and thematized as follows: cases where diasporic online citizen media stories led to homeland governmental policy changes and cases where the diasporic online media exposed high-level corruption in the local media. All case studies selected for this chapter have had momentous consequences in the domestic public sphere and are likely to define the form and substance of the relational dynamics between the Nigerian diasporic online citizen media formation and the traditional media and politics of the domestic public sphere in the foreseeable future. How the diasporic citizen media chose to report on the cases highlighted in this chapter will enrich and complicate the extant literature on the modalities and singularities of citizen reporting and illustrate how what Deborah Chung and her colleagues called a “form of amateur journalism” is challenging the role of traditional journalism in a transnational setting.

How Diasporic Citizen Media Reporting Caused Governmental Policy Reversals

One dramatic case that exemplifies the power of the Nigerian diasporic online media to compel homeland government to reverse policy decisions was the controversy over a proposed “capacity-building” training for Nigeria's state governors at Harvard University.

Intolerance of and unease with dissent is an abiding feature of the Nigerian state since its founding, as chapter 2 illustrates. As the later part of this chapter will show, the reactions of Nigerian governments from 2005 to 2019 to the critical searchlights beamed on them by the diasporic citizen media appear to be adopted from the germinal ideas initiated and executed by British colonialists against the critical gaze of the nationalist press. During Nigeria's colonial occupation by British imperialists, the critical journalism of the independent nationalist press was aggressively countermined through a three-pronged strategy. The colonial government sponsored rival, acquiescent, Nigerian-owned newspapers that endorsed and authorized colonialism. When that strategy was not successful, the colonial government chose to starve the independent nationalist press of advertising patronage, and encouraged British-owned private businesses to withhold advertising from the papers in hopes that they would wither and die. The continued vibrancy and stridency of the press in spite of these measures compelled the colonial government to enact repressive press laws, which gave a legal imprimatur to its all-out assault on the press. Nigerian military regimes borrowed from the colonial template in their dealings with the Nigerian press.

However, as shown in chapter 3, the brief periods of constitutional rule from 1960 to 1963 and from 1979 to 1983 saw a radically healthier and more tolerant attitude of governments toward critical journalism. Instead of the repressive suppression of dissent that we saw in colonial and military regimes, the civilian governments of the 1960s and the 1980s responded to oppositional, watchdog journalism by setting up their own newspapers to counter the scrutiny and attacks of the press, particularly of the politicalparty press, which dominated the media landscape in 1980s Nigeria. They also used spin doctors to influence news coverage and punditry, in common with many liberal democracies. There were no records of arrests and torture of journalists or the forceful seizure of newspapers.

In a curious twist, nevertheless, the reaction of supposedly democratic governments to critical diasporic citizen online journalism since 2005 is uncannily reminiscent of previous totalitarian colonial and military governments.