The ceasefire in the Middle East, the restrictions on the media and the public…

Nigeria is a strange place. And most Nigerians are insufferable. The same goes for some countries in the world and their natives. But my goal is Nigeria, my country. It flows with a saying of the Edo people of Nigeria; “Egen omwan ere agwa yi”; The hoe accumulates next to a man’s legs so long that it is life-sustaining food. But when digging the well, the sand is thrown to the side. There goes another from the same Edo; “Owa ighi ma omwan, aighi kporun vb’ ugbo”. When things are not going well with one’s home front, one should not call out strangers in the vast farmlands.

In Nigeria, the country you and I call our own, charity begins abroad, rather than at home. It’s comic relief to be called a Nigerian. In a domain where many people have light fingers, not everyone can be a thief. And when there are many thieves, the dishonor is that “an entire family is called a thief”. Nigerians like most stage shows, senseless and exaggerated and disproportionate acts. But a comedy is not worth the salt when it lacks substance and suspense. This is why critical minds hardly appreciate Nigeria’s Nollywood dramas, because of the pliable certainty and emptiness.

This is therefore a strange case where most Nigerians do not pay attention to the enormous problems facing their own country, and instead pay rapt attention to happenings in other spheres. Currently, Nigerians, after dependence on the victims of war and taking sides, are once again absorbed in the ceasefire in the war between Israel-America and Iran. To the mega question, what is there for Nigerians in the external squabbles affecting them, in a distant war, when, back home, they abandon the never-ending insurgency and huge death toll, economic hardship, unbridled corruption and sloppy political leadership confronting the country?

A worried Reuben Abati, an ace broadcaster of the Arise Television talk show, is an exemption from the media constituency, who is often condemned as playing the role of the ostrich. He simply justified his question on citizens’ obsession with such external events that jeopardize public peace in the country.

Albert Camus, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” a sensitive and in-depth article that leans into the “Theater of the Absurd,” once admitted that the human condition is in fact more ‘unreasonable’ and incomplete than the common purpose.

And the Nigerian mass media is mostly accused of siding with the upper class and neo-colonialists, who induce naive public actions that increase abuse of power (a failed Nigeria) and human weaknesses. Usually, it is the mass media, elites and outside traitors who make or break a society.

“Our barbarians come from above.” Henry D. Lloyd, American journalist, confesses to the dangerous actions of the upper class, since the era of the American “Old West” or the “Victorian” of the English.

Before losing their monopoly, due to the advent of the excessive dominance of social media, the traditional media – television, print newspapers and radio, often at the complete disposal of the state and the powerful and prejudiced individuals, who finance them, had had a field day of public abuse. Now, traditional media faces little cronyism: fewer advertising revenue and fewer subscriptions, where they go cap in hand, to support the once-omnipotent newspapers that dominated the newsstands and the ubiquitous shouting street vendors.

I will recall a verse from my previous treatise, that every Adamu, Okonkwo and Dele (in shades of Nigeria), became a journalist or reporter of sorts, because they have access to internet-enabled desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, and thus could manipulate the gimmicks of artificial intelligence (AI) or access and share them with others.

It is in this area that I feel compassion for many of my fellow countrymen, who committed themselves to simple Artificial Intelligence (AI) creations, which Israel-America were winning the war, and vice versa. They are the same AI concoctions that have caused so much uproar and animosity between regional, religious and political opposites.

With modesty, I am one of the very few computer and Internet-savvy journalists, and I was part of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), a pioneering global cyber coalition, where I served on its Human Rights Caucus. In some of our past global forums I had made several premonitions: “process journalism” and “citizen reporting” (social media), which have free access to the Internet and its browsing components, would come into permanent conflict and tear the world apart.

Long before that, the late Chief Anthony Enahoro, one of the doyens of Nigerian journalism, once carefully told me and I recorded it for posterity; “Journalism has come with a sharp knife cutting through Nigeria’s ‘bloc’, and would stop at nothing, but should do better to expose and annihilate the heresies of a balkanized society that feigns unity and exploits the ineptitude of the people. Ignorance must be eradicated by mass education and objective journalism.” Chief Enahoro was a visionary mentor, who professed what the mainstream media had meant (and means).

Indeed, social media is a catalyst, but it is sick because it is a detractor. He dishonestly plays poker with the sanity of man. Why is a man so absorbed and unaware of himself, to the point of laughing about it until, for example, he hits a moving car? Why does he laugh and punch the air, like a madman chasing nothing?

I thought I was the only one left perplexed, until the Nigerian President, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, (aka Jagaban), “unflappable” as he is said to be, once expressed that he too is scared and afraid of social media. Poor boy! He confessed to having “strong heartbeats” when he read about himself on social media, to the point that he stopped accessing it.

Most Nigerian social media influencers are so evil, they mostly use social media content to add to the president’s sufferings, whether he reads or not. In their view, where the president avoids social media, his many aides should receive the same “punishment” on his behalf.

An average Esan person from Edo State, Nigeria is resolute in this; “Ulinlin i-sabo gbe ehelen, ramude eke ede ole ada biole.” “A slight cold cannot kill the fish, because it was originally born in the cold river water.” As much as this strengthened my tenacity to fend off the same threats on social media, I had the misfortune of receiving President Tinubu’s treatment. Between WhatsApp, FaceBook and other social media group platforms I belonged to, I had many enemies from friends, simply for expressing my opinion on burning issues.

In one particularly memorable incident, a 96-year-old mother-in-law told me, point blank, that I was an unrepentant liar. My offense was her insistence that the fight between a farmer and his yam tuber, which she watched on the Internet tablet, given to her by our confused nephew, was nothing more than a fictional AI animation.

I’m not alone in my “satanic verses” on social media (with a shout-out to Salma Rushdie, who risked having her “Rushed-to-die” surname live on a headhunter “fatwa”). Here, Matt Goulart, a Canadian digital expert and essayist, comes to my rescue; “Social media is about people. Not your business. Cater to people and people will cater to you”

New York Times bestselling author and motivational speaker Jay Baer also confirmed this; “Social media content is fire. Social media is gasoline.”

“These things (artificial intelligence) could become smarter than us and decide to take over, and now we have to worry about how to prevent that from happening.” Said Geoffrey Hinton, the man known as the “Godfather of artificial intelligence,” for his pioneering in the field. Suffice it to say that in 2023 Hinton resigned as vice president and engineering researcher at Google, so he could campaign on the dangers of artificial intelligence.

For a world that is still euphoric with the lust of artificial intelligence, who knows if the “regrets of a working life” of an inventive Hinton, would not have changed the path of Alfred Noble, whose next regrets were the invention of dynamite and other explosives, although they influenced the industrial revolution, soon became the greatest instruments of war and substantial human and material destruction.

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