[OPINION] June 12, press freedom and human rights
History tangles the past with the present in webs of fact. Its practice is to treat things that exist here and now as though they concern the past and to use them in new compositions designed to equip people for the future.
However, June 12, democracy and governance should be a means to an end: improving people’s lives; and delivering wellness, development and prosperity. Democracy Day deserves truthful confrontation with the socio-economic political conditions that we have brought into being to plague ourselves and thus, compel our acceptance of responsibility for whatever, and wherever.
Since May 1999, administrations from the Olusegun Obasanjo’s have adopted a high-handed strategy and approach in dealing with journalists and media houses perceived as being independent of government control through security agencies. The ranking of Reporters Without Borders , an international non-governmental organisation based in Paris, that conducts political advocacy on issues relating to freedom of information and freedom of the press, has seen Nigeria fall from 111 in 2015 to 116 in 2016, and 122 in 2017. In 2018, Nigeria moved to 119 and dropped a place again in 2019 to 120 among 180 countries. Nigeria’s rankings have fallen within the “red zone” for press freedom.
Many could still recount how the military junta flooded the space with fake editions of opposition titles during the June 12 struggle. It was alleged that the SSS produced fake editions of these notable pro- democracy newspapers to confuse the public. Fake copies of the Tell, Tempo, The News and TSM magazines were especially in circulation in March 1994 when the Abacha junta began to employ the dirty scheme.
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