By Ejiroghene Barrett
Nigeria is home to over 218.5 million people, the largest population in Africa, and an estimated 250 ethnic groups, and this reality has become a major burden as it confronts overlapping security threats. On the one hand is Boko Haram’s deadly insurgency, and on the other is widespread banditry and escalating farmer-herder violence. Another battle is being fought on the sidelines of these security threats, one of narratives. In Nigeria, the media has a history of swaying public opinion through sensational reporting. The apparent use of ethnic labels in coverage tend to oversimplify conflicts.
The Nigeria has one of the most active media scenes in Africa. Its content, however, often reveals deep ethnic, religious, and regional divisions. Both traditional and social media have been known to frequently present narratives that favour particular political or regional interests.
Nigeria’s media often reinforces ethnic, religious, and regional divisions. Academics say this is inherited from the colonial Indirect Rule system, which intentionally encouraged division. The framing of security crises, whether insurgencies, banditry, or communal clashes, frequently reduces complex issues to ethnic or regional stereotypes, casting entire groups as perpetrators or victims.
This prejudiced practice employs inflammatory terms and technical tags, such as the prevalent “Fulani herders,” a term that has been generally accepted as the official description of any criminal group that carries out mass abductions, murders and destruction of properties across communities in the country’s north central and southern regions. Media reporting has so normalised this narrative that the actions of shadowy criminal groups are now widely seen as an invasion and an attempted occupation.
The regional slant becomes evident in these classifications. southern Nigerian media outlets routinely attribute farmland violence to “Fulani herdsmen” in many instances without evidence, yet show the required professionalism and deliberately employ non-specific terms like “unknown gunmen” for security breaches suspected to have been carried out by operatives of the secessionist group, Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) This demonstrates a subtle attempt at controlling narratives based on self imposed censorships.
The psychological dimension of media influence is often overlooked yet critical. As Nazi propagandist Goebbels noted, “If you tell a lie a thousand times it becomes the truth” – a tactic evident in today’s reporting. Stanford researcher, Shanto Iyengar, captures this in his claims that “framing news stories in terms of specific causes or consequences… reinforces existing biases or creates new ones.”
When these narratives are oversimplified for the public, they promote collective blame, misrepresent underlying causes, and escalate sectarian tensions. The media’s reliance on technical tags is a deliberate strategy that amplifies regional narratives as identifiers of social differences, even intellectual distinctions.
Labels like “Fulani herders” for rural invasions to promote cultural extinctions, “bandits” in the northwest to explain a mass movement to extort and exterminate whole communities,” in contrast with “Yoruba agitators” that describes a coordinated agitation for cultural and political sovereignty, same as “IPOB separatists”, may explain a major reason for growing ethnic tensions in the country.
These terms do not simply name groups, they systematically categorise them to align with familiar stereotypes. For example, coverage of farmer-herder conflicts, which have killed over 200 people in some communities in the country’s middle belt, often frames disputes as battles between “Fulani herders” and “Christian farmers,” in spite of evidence that many of these clashes emerge from communal land disputes and climate-induced migration rather than ethnic or religious animus.
This dangerous pattern appeared in 2019 when an unverified social media video claimed Hausa farmers poisoned beans for the southeast. The rapid spread of this false narrative escalated hostilities between Hausa and Igbo groups in some quarters. This tagging strategy simplifies complex security dynamics into digestible but divisive stories, prioritising sensationalism over nuance.
Part of the goal is clearly to attract readership but this has a dangerous consequence that is largely ignored. The media’s focus on technical tags is driven by both commercial and political pressures. Popular dailies, like The Guardian and The Punch, have been known to use sensational headlines to attract readership as they fight to stay relevant within Nigeria’s crowded media space
A 2021 study observed that Nigerian journalists face pressure to prioritise “conflict-driven narratives” to boost ratings, often at the expense of balanced reporting. Regional media giants are known to frequently use stereotypes in their reports that support their audience’s existing prejudices.
there are instances where the media has shown both its incendiary nature and its ability to manage crisis. A random scan of Nigerian news reports on Boko Haram between 2013 and 2015, in the lead-up to the country’s general elections, revealed differing regional emphases. The southern press tended to focus on religious tensions, while northern coverage downplayed faith divisions in favour of community impact, so as not to trigger sectarian violence. This discrepancy showed how media framing adapted to the sentiments of a target audience
A common issue in Nigeria’s media is treating statements by regional groups as representing an entire ethnicity. Social media exacerbates this trend, with platforms like WhatsApp and Twitter acting as amplifiers for tagged narratives. With over 33 million active social media users in Nigeria, these platforms have become breeding grounds for disinformation, where technical tags gain viral traction.
During the 2023 elections in Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos, posts on Twitter labelled Igbo voters as threats to Yoruba political authority, fuelling intimidation and violence. This also occurred in 2015 and 2019 when a major smear campaign against Buhari’s candidacy led to a trend of targeting Fulanis, his ethnic group. The media amplified provocative statements from some group members, contributing to this pattern.
There is a worry that when security agencies fail to provide strong opposing narratives, extremist groups such as, Boko Haram and IPOB, use these stories to recruit new followers and spread their doctrines on these platforms. Politicians also capitalise on these reports to mobilise their ethnic bases. The media’s failure to challenge these stories risks creating a “post-truth” environment, where facts are secondary to emotional manipulation.
Fixating on technical tags obscures the real reasons for insecurity. Nigeria’s economic crisis, with inflation at 34.2% in 2024, makes the challenge of competing for the country’s resources worse, still media narratives focus on the ethnic blame game over issues like unemployment or climate change. Few local reports connect farmer-herder conflicts to the effects of climate change, such as northern desertification and the loss of the Lake Chad, which has forced Fulani herders and people in the Lake Chad region further south. There is little reporting on warnings by experts that 50 million people will displaced by climate factors by 2050.
Many have warned about the long-term implications of tagging, such as the use of terms like ‘Fulani invaders,’, particularly in states where ethnic tensions have led to deaths and displacements, like the north-central states of Plateau and Kogi.
The 2023 elections showed how these tags can escalate into real-world violence and intensify future contests if the relevant bodies do not intervene. Analysts have called on Nigeria’s media to adopt a strategic communication framework, as advocated by International Alert in 2025.
Some media experts say conflict-sensitive journalism, focused on forgiveness, community-based security responses, and survivor stories, can counter divisive tags. Training programs in the north-western states of Kaduna and Zamfara have shown success in equipping journalists to focus more on unity over sensationalism. Fact-checking groups like Dubawa, who set the record straight on false health claims in 2024, show a way forward to fight fake news.
The call for news agencies to adopt a more balanced approach is growing. More people are calling on the media groups to focus on investigating how structural issues, including climate change and wealth inequality, provoke these disputes and not rely on ethnic shortcuts, which continue to escalate communal conflicts and weaken the integrity of the media.
