Premium Times, Miyetti Allah, and Hasty Judgment
By Farooq Kperogi
I am busy working on my next book and straining really hard to meet my deadline. That’s why I’ve scaled back substantially on my social media participation. But I am compelled to intervene on the controversy over the quotes attributed to Miyetti Allah’s Danladi Ciroma, for which Premium Times apologized and fired its reporter. Here are the issues:
1. The Nation, incidentally Tinubu’s newspaper, which originally published the quotes attributed to Ciroma, hasn’t disowned its story much less apologize for it. In fact, a senior editor (who, by the way, is a northern Muslim) just told me a while back that he had spoken with a colleague of his who told him, “the Miyetti Allah guy actually said those words. The problem is that the reporter spoke to him on the phone, so he didn’t record the interview. In addition, he shared the story with colleagues who now wrote that the news item came via a press statement. The Nation is daring Miyetti Allah to go to court because the newspaper is prepared to ask the court to order the telephone service provider to produce the call log.”
What the Nation reporter did, that is, sharing his report with his colleagues from other media houses, is not unusual. It’s called pack journalism, and it happens even here in the United States. I hate it, but it is what it is. Let’s wait to see the log of the conversation between the Nation’s reporter and Ciroma. Interestingly, Ciroma admitted that he did speak with the reporter. So let’s hold our judgement for now.
2. The presidency basically said almost the same thing that Miyetti Allah’s Ciroma is now disclaiming. This was how the presidency traced the trigger for the bloodletting in Plateau in an official statement: “According to information available to the Presidency, about 100 cattle had been rustled by a community in Plateau State, and some herdsmen were killed in the process.” That statement isn’t substantively different from what Miyetti Allah’s Ciroma was supposedly falsely quoted to have said: that the carnage was a retaliation for the theft of 300 cows. Will the presidency also have the decency to apologize, like Premium Times did, for disseminating “falsehood”?
3. Most importantly, though, this is not the first time Miyetti Allah’s officials have been reported in the media to have claimed responsibility for, or issued threats of, mass murders, which they have never denied. Why did they keep quiet before now?
Farooq K
