The press and the democratic question: Narrating ethno-religious identities and conflicts in Nigeria

Abstract

The heroism of a critical section of the Nigerian press under Nigeria’s military regimes in the 1980s and 1990s is hardly in doubt. This has been noted and celebrated both in academic and lay literature (Adebanwi, 2004, 2007; Ajibade, 2003; Dare, 2007; Diamond, 1991; Director, 2007; Olukotun, 2000, 2002, 2004; Ojo, 2003). From the early to the late 1990s, the radical press became the pivot on which the country’s effervescent civil society rotated in the struggle to end the tyranny inflicted on Nigerians by the military regimes.