By Musdapha Ilo, Maiduguri

The Nigerian Army has said that the Boko Haram sect will be defeated soon in spite of the pledge of allegiance by the insurgency group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, to the terrorist organisation, Islamic State, ISIS.

The assurance was given on Sunday by the a acting director, Army Public Relations, Sani Usman, a Colonel, in an interview on Hausa service of the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC,  monitored in Maiduguri.

Usman said that the Boko Haram leader’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS was an act of desperation aimed at securing external aid in the face of certain defeat in the hands of the Nigerian Army.

The army spokesman also allayed fears that the development might lead to renewed reign of terror by the insurgents, assuring that the military was in control of the situation.

“With or without allegiance to IS, the days of Shekau are already been numbered, because all the insurgents’ training camps and hideouts in the affected Northeast, are destroyed, while the terrorists have been routed from their camps and hideouts; and those who have escaped our ‘condone and search operations’ in the Sambisa Forest and the Lake Chad Basin Areas, are on the run; abandoning their operational vehicles, arms and ammunitions,” Usman stated.

Continuing, the army spokesman said that “Shekau’s public allegiance to IS, clearly indicates that he may surrender or be killed in the ongoing joint military operations of Nigeria and three neighbouring countries of Chad, Cameroon and Niger,”

 By Godwin Onyeacholem

For anyone who truly lays claim to the practise of journalism in Nigeria, this is the time to shield the face from a big shame. It is a season of great disappointment and embarrassment. Not to talk of immeasurable sorrow and unrelieved nausea. This period really induces vomiting. And, boy, does journalism on this space stink!

To be fair, a few honest practitioners have admitted that the quality of practice has indeed taken a steady plunge beyond belief, and this is very worrying.

This is not a misplaced sentiment, especially against the backdrop of the crucial activist role the press has played on two memorable epochs in the evolution of Nigeria. The first is the frontal confrontation with the colonialists in the agitation that eventually culminated in Nigeria’s independence.

And the second is the bitter struggle with a string of military dictatorships which gave birth to the democracy that is today being violently bastardized by a reactionary political class – a class that never fought for democracy but relishes its benefits to the point of debasing it.

If anything, you would expect that at this time when the country’s chequered democracy is under serious threat of total annihilation – with impunity at its highest of maturation and the rule of law in abeyance – the press would once again vigorously mobilise to re-enact that historic duty of halting the drift and pointing the way forward. But no, that is not the case.

Besides one or two online newspapers, the Nigerian press is failing steadily in its effort to retain its place as a staunch fourth power of the estate, surely to the utmost let down of Edmund Burke, the Irish political theorist and statesman who described the press as the fourth estate of the realm.

Many news stories appear on the front and inside pages of newspapers and many materials are broadcast on radio and television that make you wonder whether those managing those outfits are actually journalists.

Nigerian newspapers and magazines are routinely packed with stories dripping with appalling grammar and disjointed sentences, and radio and television broadcasters pollute the air in equal measure, including feeding the public with damaging manipulations and poisonous bias.

And then, again, you wonder whether these are journalists. And if the answer is yes, are there editors in these media setups? If there are, you ask what their worth is.

For the Nigerian press, it is sad to say this is one era of unprecedented scandalous decline in practise as demonstrated in the total neglect of the training of its foot soldiers, and an obsessive fascination with the frantic competition for the physical modernisation of the newsrooms.

An era swamped by grovelling journalists who lack the guts to ask the right questions, and on the rare occasions when they find the courage to ask tough questions that their subjects term to be offensive, my colleagues smile shamelessly, roll on the floor more or less and vomit apologies.

They forget that journalism is not the same as public relations: that they have a duty not to ask patronising but hard questions; that the notion that journalists must not take sides is an irrefutable fallacy; that in the end, being practitioners of a profession whose singular loyalty is to the citizens, journalists must always take sides with the people and ensure power accounts for its deeds, in spite of the constraints placed in their way by media owners.

But a great majority of the journalists do not know this. Yes, they know a few valuable tricks about the trade; they know little or nothing about the profession itself. In fact, more often than not the way it works here is that once somebody becomes an editor in whatever category, reporting for such a person automatically stops. He or she simply sits on a swivel chair behind a massive desk equipped with a desktop computer and swirl around with the authority of the position.

In the face of this flagrant lack of appreciation of the essence of journalism, you will never stop pondering the functions of the association of journalists called the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), or the smaller, exclusive club of editors christened Nigeria Guild of Editors (NGE), and the regulatory arm of the profession called Nigeria Press Council.

It is from these bodies with statutory powers of ensuring the sanctity of journalism that you would, at least, expect a strident expression of outrage at the manner in which the profession is deteriorating. But, again, no. Not even a whimper.

Instead of working to rescue the profession from what is undoubtedly an obvious degeneration, NUJ leaders and their counterparts in NGE prefer the company of big politicians, organising courtesy visits to state governors and attending state banquets. Like Nero, they’d rather fiddle while journalism burns.

The fiddling has also made them not to see the grave danger currently facing democracy in Nigeria, so much so that in a country whose major custodian of democracy has been a hitherto watchful press, neither the NUJ nor the NGE has up till this moment voiced its anger at the Ekitigate scandal and demanded an independent investigation into that contemptible assault on the electoral process and barefaced subversion of the will of the people.

And whether the Nigerian military would break its insulting silence to explain the role of Brigadier-General Aliyu Momoh in that infamy does not seem to bother the NUJ and NGE. This is disgraceful.

Even if other stakeholders feel no obligation to act in defence of democracy, certainly not these two bodies.

Hopefully, they would sooner wake up to the fact that by closing their eyes to identified lapses in journalism practise, they are not only killing the profession, but also unwittingly helping anti-democratic forces to lead Nigeria’s democracy to its grave.

Godwin Onyeacholem is a journalist and can reached at gonyeacholem@gmail.com

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The extremist Islamic group Boko Haram has pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, ISIS, Abubakr Al-Qurashi.

Abubakar Shekau,  leader of the Boko Haram group which is responsible for acts of terror and insurgency in the North east and in neighbouring country such as Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, made the pledge in an audio recording released on Saturday via the Internet.

The announcement was released in audio format, a marked departure from former instances in which the group released video clips to communicate with the public.

The audio message announced the group’s allegiance to the cause of ISIS, with a vow to obey ISIS leadership in times of prosperity and difficulty.

Shekau stated that the decision to form an alliance with ISIS was in accordance to divine provisions in the Quran and in obedience to the instruction of founder of Islam, Prophet Mohammed.

“We announce our allegiance to the caliph of the Muslims, Ibrahim ibn Awad Ibrahim al-Husseini al Qurashi, and will hear and obey in times of difficulty and prosperity, in hardship and in ease, and to endure being discriminated against, and not to dispute about rule with those in power, except in case of evident infidelity regarding that which there is a proof from Allah,” the group announced in the audio message.

The group also urged Muslims across the world to pledge allegiance to the caliph and support him, stating that it is their duty to submit to “an Imam that looks after them according to Allah’s rule and fights the enemies of Islam and those who fights the Rule of Allah” and that being united “under one Jamaa’ah” is prerequisite for success in their undertaking.

The group also encouraged unity amongst all Muslims, stating that it would “enrage the enemy of Allah, by Allah, our gathering under one banner, under one Imam, is more heavy to the enemy”.

Boko Haram has pursued an agenda of establishing an Islamic caliphate in Northern Nigeria while ISIS, which operates across the Middle East, has occupied large territories in Iraq and Syria.

Both groups have engaged in the devastation of cities and town, murdering thousands in their respective regions.

Boko Haram had recently adopted the ISIS media strategy, including the release of well-produced videos, which are sub-titled in French and Arabic.

The group also recently opened and operated a Twitter account like ISIS did, until it was shut down by the tech company.