The Radical Press and Security Agencies in Nigeria: Beyond Hegemonic Polarities

Abstract: The dominant trend in the literature on civil society in Africa, particularly in the context of undemocratic regimes, assumes that civil society activists (including progressive, radical, or guerrilla journalists) are committed only to counteracting the preeminence of a repressive state. Within such a paradigm, evidence of collaborations between agents of the state and elements within civil society-particularly in the interest of advancing political liberation, democracy, justice, and equity-tend to be understated, if not erased altogether. Based on ethnographic details of secret collaborations between the Nigerian security agencies and radical journalists in the fight against military fascism, this article argues that the commonly assumed division between the state and the media is in fact breached regularly in practice. Such evidence should draw scholarly attention to a largely neglected area of research on state-media relations in Africa: the penetration of the apparatuses of power and repression by their targets and victims. Resume: La tendance dominante dans la litterature existante sur la societe civile en Afrique, particulierement dans le contexte des regimes non democratiques, suppose que les activistes civils (y compris les journalistes progressistes, radicaux, ou de la guerilla) sont engages seulement dans la lutte contre l'etat et ses actes de repression. Dans un tel paradigme, l'evidence de collaboration entre des agents de l'etat et des civils - en particulier pour faire progresser la liberation politique, la democratie, la justice et l'egalite - a tendance a etre minimisee, voire passee sous silence. Apres examen de rapports detailles sur des collaborations secretes entre des membres de la securite nigerienne et des journalistes radicaux dans la lutte contre le fascisme militaire, cet article soutient que la division presumee entre l'etat et les medias est en fait rompue regulierement dans la pratique. Une telle evidence devrait attirer l'attention des erudits vers un sujet de recherche largement neglige sur les relations entre l'etat et les medias en Afrique: la penetration des appareils du pouvoir et la repression perpetuee par leurs cibles et victimes. In the literature on the media and democracy in Africa, there is a great deal of evidence, and even praise, for the role of the media (including progressive, radical, and guerrillajournalists) in breaking what Kasoma (1995:543) called "the mytii" that dictatorial regimes in Africa are "invincible and could not be criticised" and for creating a forum for promoting dissent against the established order. Examples of countries where this has been evident include Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana.1 However, in the analyses on the adversarial relationship between the state and the media, few scholars have focused direcdy on the security/ intelligence network. Even tiiough the secret world of security agents is often a prominent subject of interest in studies of state-sponsored repression, it is often subsumed under the rubric of "government" or die "state" in studies of state-media relations and in the larger scholarship on democracy or personal rule in Africa. And some of the works on Africa that refer to the security/intelligence network in the context of democracy and state-civil society relations, as well as the specific literature on state-media relations, also tend to concentrate on the roles these agencies play in suppressing democratization.2 At the same time, while the scholarly literature continues to expand the focus on the role of the media in Africa's democratic struggle, and the literature on civil society also has had a lot to say about the media in Africa in die last two decades, the dominant strand assumes that civil society - in the dominant associational sense in which it is often expressed in the literature (see Obadare 2005) - exists basically to counteract the preeminence of the state. …