Award-winning Nigerian journalist baffled by nation’s splits

Nigerian journalist Godwin Nnanna has won more awards for his reporting than most entire newsrooms, but there’s one story that he always struggles to understand – why Africa’s most populous nation is still so poor and riven by religious strife.

Godwin, who says he might have become a Christian preacher if he hadn’t gone into the newspaper business, has been watching with anguish a campaign of bombings in Nigeria by the Islamist militant sect Boko Haram that has killed more than 900 people since 2009.

“Our Christmas was not too happy one for us because the Church was bombed back home, and then people my wife knew, people she is related with, people she has worshipped with, were killed,” he said. Thirty-seven died in that Dec. 25 attack.

“This country ordinarily should be a giant,” he said in an interview at the Knight Science Journalism office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is living with his wife and two children and studying as an affiliate at Harvard and MIT. Nigeria has 160 million people, almost double that of any other African nation.

“This is a time in history when numbers matter,” he said, pointing to the rise of nations led by China and India partly linked to their populations of more than a billion people each.

“We are such a huge market. We have a huge population and we have such enormous resources…there is no reason why we should not compete.”

One big drawback, dating from British colonial rule, was the 1914 creation of a country split between a mostly Muslim north and a mainly Christian south that have been uneasily living together ever since.

“I have really never seen a country with our uniqueness, almost on a 50-50 basis Muslims and Christians. Most countries have one religion dominant,” he said. Boko Haram, loosely based on the Taliban in Afghanistan, wants to impose sharia law across Nigeria.

With better leadership, Nigeria could have grown to be prosperous like Malaysia or South Korea since independence in 1960, he says, rapping the table to drive home his point. Nigeria has plenty of resources – it is a big oil producer and an exporter of farm products such as rubber and cocoa.

But still things don’t work.

“It’s an impossibility to be in Nigeria for a whole day and the light doesn’t go off,” he said. One recent study showed that 93 percent of Nigerians felt they were poor — the official figure is lower, but still an alarming 60 percent.

“Nigerians’ loyalty is not to the center, ironically. Unlike Americans who say ‘God bless America’ and are ready to die for their country, not too many people show that kind of passion for Nigeria.”

“Everyone is keen about where they come from. ‘I am a Yoruba man’, Or ‘I am a Hausa man’ or ‘I am an Ibo man’. Or each one says ‘I am a Christian or ‘I am a Muslim,” he said. And in politics, each religion, region and group expects “its turn” to rule.”

That just might lead to divorce, or an agreed shift to devolve more power to the regions. “If you read newspapers in Nigeria today, a lot of people are clamouring for a sovereign national conference…to agree as a people if they want to be together,” he said.

Godwin, who will be 38 in May and whose surname Nnanna means “grandfather”, said he was propelled towards journalism by a love of writing. He gave his teachers cans of coca cola to read and mark the extra essays he wrote beyond the normal school work. (see box below)

He is head of investigations at BusinessDay and a co-founder of the Economic and Financial Times and said he was also driven by a desire to expose injustice.

His writing skills have paid off since he started journalism in 1997 with a string of more than a dozen national and international awards, including two from the United Nations. His work has ranged from exposing the dangers of flaring of gas in the Niger Delta to writing about a political crisis in Ivory Coast. (see box below)

Godwin said he will always be a writer even if he moves on to do more editing of stories rather than working on the front lines.

He said that his disappointment about Nigeria’s failure to live up to its promise are summed up by Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Wole Soyinka…said he hated the word potential because that seems to be the only identity of Nigeria today,” Godwin says. “Everybody talks about Nigeria in terms of potential. Potential, potential, potential, for almost 60 years and still it’s the potential.”

 

GODWIN NNANNA

WORK AND (MANY) AWARDS)
Head of Investigations at BusinessDay
Co-founder, Managing Editor of Economic and Financial Times
Awards (14 in total; highlights):
2010 – Winner, Citi Journalistic Excellence Awards (Nigeria)
2008 – Finalist, CNN African Journalist of the Year
2007 – Silver medal, Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize for written media (UNCA Awards)
2007 – Winner, Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NMMA), Environment Journalist of the year
2006 – Gold medal, UN Foundation’s prize for reporting Humanitarian and Development issues.
2006 – Fellow, Dag Hammarksjold Scholarship Fund for Journalists (UN Journalism fellowship)

HOW TO BECOME A JOURNALIST: WORK HARD!
“I have always loved writing. In secondary school, I took it upon myself, before I did my high school exams, to put together all the exams from the past 15 years and then I did all the essay questions — I would write it and submit it to my teacher. I would take my pocket money and get a can of coke for the teacher and he would mark it for me…I did other self-inflicted exercises, I did like to sit and watch television discussion on national issues I would listen to it and make an essay out of it.

“If I wasn’t a journalist perhaps I would be a preacher.”
I feel strongly about injustice, I feel strongly when things don’t work very well
When I was growing up I was very religious. I still am. I was involved, at one point I was doing a great deal of aid, leading a team to the prisons in Lagos, the maximum, the medium prisons. It was a case of giving them hope, letting them know that there is a life beyond the prison. I did that for a couple of years before journalism came to take the better part of me.

Knowing Neha Narula

What happens when computer scientist studying distributed systems gets mashed up with the Media Lab’s own mashup of news and participatory media? We’re all finding out as we get to know Neha Narula. She’s a 5th-year Ph.D. student at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) who works on distributed systems and security, blogs about Indian food and turntables, and confesses that the cartoon “Jem” may have been her inspiration for pursuing CS. Some of the questions Neha’s pursuing remind me of the life of Chekhov. Learn why from our conversation highlights: http://web.media.mit.edu/~arlduc//process/2012/02/29/NehaNarula/

Better Know a Classmate: Eugene Wu

At only 26 years of age, Eugene Wu is already an expert in the design of computer databases. He’s a fifth-year PhD student at MIT’s world-renowned Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Wu has published sixteen scholarly pieces (the first in 2004, when he was only 18), and has balanced his academic study with internships at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM.

Yet Wu didn’t start using computers in any serious capacity until he took a computer class in high school. Computers weren’t easily accessible, outside of basic word processing and the occasional educational game in an elementary school classroom. Wu’s story underscores the power of advanced educational opportunities, and the long-term ramifications of these encounters early in a career.

Wu has wisely used his summers to advance his education and career. When he was still in high school in Berkeley, California, Wu spent his summers taking college classes at nearby UC Berkeley. By the time he graduated, he had finished the pre-requisites for Computer Science, which allowed him to get a running start his freshman year of college.

The summer after his freshman year also proved to be a pivotal time. After being turned down by Microsoft and a couple of other computer scientists he sought to work with, a Teaching Assistant from one of his classes recruited him to work on a database project. The project proved very successful, and spawned most of his following undergraduate research.

He’s a Teacher

Wu has rounded out his scholarship by actively teaching others. After finishing his Master’s degree, Wu traveled to the Middle East to coach Israeli and Palestinian students in a program called Middle East Education through Technology (MEET). He mentored teams of high school seniors as they worked together on technology projects. Wu’s also taught a course on introduction to Java, which is now listed in MIT’s Open Courseware. He also created a course on Data Literacy, which ended up training biologists, doctors, and other professionals across disciplines to better understand their professions’ data.

He’s an Athlete

In addition to his graduate and teaching work, Wu also appears to have a life outside of the academy. He’s traveled the West Coast playing in Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, and designed the jersey for MIT’s Ultimate team, the Grim Beavers.

He’s a Developer

For an earlier assignment in his Participatory News course, Wu built a Chrome browser extension called IdeaPrint to track his media diet, as measured by the major websites he visited most. Offline, though, he admits that he primarily reads comics, not books. His preferred genres are Japanese and Chinese manga and graphic novels. In the face of his workload, Wu struggles to keep up with popular culture and world news.

He’s an Artist

The comic books inform Wu’s artistic side. When he’s not using people to crowdsource database queries, he’s drawing. A housemate, who asked to remain anonymous because she lives with Wu, remarked that he has a talent for drawing and noticing the details: “Like, he’ll draw a monster and name it “Gregory” and everybody will be like “YES, that is a GREGORY.” Wu’s illustrations have been commissioned by a group at the Media Lab, for which he was compensated with an Xbox 360 and several videogames.

Other students at MIT admire Wu’s combination of technical and artistic talents. Classmate Travis Rich remembers being impressed by Wu’s sketchbook illustrations, only to walk into a Python course and find that Wu was the instructor. “He’s like Brad Pitt,” says Rich. “He’s got it all.”

He’s an Eater

“Every time he eats food, it looks like he’s never eaten before in his life,” says Wu’s anonymous housemate. “A lot of people call him Kobayashi. His favorite item is this green chopper thing that chops up onions by putting it underneath the thing and then pumping vigorously. He made me by one too because there was a buy one get one free deal.”

What Else Will He Be?

For someone with so much under his belt already, Wu’s not entirely sure what the future holds in store. His experience has informed the parameters for his next moves, though. He’d prefer to work in a consumer-facing organization rather than academia, and his experience with the giants of the internet has inspired him to work at a smaller organization. He’s considering possibilities involving the news and media worlds, either in the form of startup or nonprofit.

Future plans could involve Wu’s desire to improve the news media, and could specifically address reader and producer biases. Wu’s concerned that context is often missing in individual news pieces, where one data point is presented without the related trends and information. As a human, he says, we should really only have to read one or two articles per day, he says, rather than an entire Twitter stream.

But Most Importantly, Is He a Robot, Pirate, or Ninja?

“Robots are kind of clunky, you don’t want to go with that,” Wu says. “Pirates are out of date, and they don’t really have any abilities, other than like, being dirty and shooting guns, right? Ninjas require actual skill.”