On World Press Freedom Day last week, Nigeria's Information Minister, Labaran Maku, publicly asserted that the country's media "is one of the freest in the universe." On paper, Nigeria's 1999 Constitution guarantees the freedom of the press to "uphold...the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people." But seven journalists who attempted to put this principle to practice on World Press Freedom Day experienced a different reality -- one all too common for independent journalists working in Africa's most populated nation.
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Will China's quickly expanding media presence in Africa result in a fresh, alternative, and balanced perspective on the continent--much as Al-Jazeera altered the broadcast landscape with the launch of its English service in 2006--or will it be essentially an exercise in propaganda?
Protesters in Nigeria are not only angry at their government's New Year's Day decision to eliminate a fuel subsidy -- they are also upset about news media coverage of the citizens' movement, dubbed "Occupy Nigeria," and have taken their protests to local media outlets.
There is a deserved celebration in the Nigerian media over the recently passed Freedom of Information Act, which provides citizens with broad access to public records and information held by a public official or institution. It is the climax of an 11-year struggle to pass such a law in the Nigerian parliament. Indeed, the call for such a law was first made under military rule, in 1993, when the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Civil Liberties Organisation, and the Media Rights Agenda began to clamor for it.
Augustine Sindyi, a veteran photographer for the state-owned weekly Standard newspaper in Plateau State, was walking home from work on Christmas Eve when a nearby bomb explosion killed him instantly. Sindyi resided in a busy Nigerian neighborhood near the local government offices in the center of Jos. The assailants targeted an area that would receive immeasurable damage where Sindyi happened to live, state radio reporter Murtala Sani, told me.
A few minutes before deadly explosions
ripped through Nigeria's 50th Independence Day
celebration in Abuja on Saturday, Twitter user Achonu Stanley wondered about darkening
skies over the festivities:
"Would the day be marred by rain? It has become cloudy and dark. Sorry for the
thousands of people at
While South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) discusses the party's proposal for a media appeals tribunal, delegates should take note of a landmark ruling in Nigeria this year in which a High Court judge declared a government-dominated press council unconstitutional.
Twenty-three years
ago, on October 19, 1986, the sun quite suddenly set at noon. In the brutal
darkness, we lost Dele Giwa, just two short years after he and I, along with two
other professional journalists, launched 
We've launched a new section of our Web site, and we hope you
take a few minutes to read some of its pages. There is one, for example, on Russian reporter Natalya Estemirova, who dared to examine human rights crimes in 
The killers of Nigerian Editor Bayo Ohu are still a mystery, three
weeks after his
murder. Now the family of the former Guardian
newspaper journalist lives in
fear. Ohu was shot dead early on Sunday morning, September 20, by a gang of
five armed men and a woman in his apartment in Egbeda, a Lagos suburb in
Nigeria. His killers made away with his laptop and cell phone, raising
speculation that he was killed for his work as a journalist. Nigerian Police Commissioner Marvel Akpoyido told CPJ that investigations are ongoing.
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