Media Reportage of Buhari’s Anti-Corruption War in Nigeria by Sun and Chronicle Newspapers

Abstract

Corruption in Nigeria has been an endemic problem with public officers unscrupulously using their official positions to enrich themselves at the expense of the country and its citizens. In May 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari, as part of his administration’s ten-point agenda, vowed to fight against the “pervasive corruption” which had crippled human and infrastructure development for decades. Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perception Index released in January 2017 placed Nigeria as 136^th out of 176 countries, thereby seeing her outside the 10 most corrupt countries in the world for the first time in 16 years! This paper assessed the media reportage of the anti-corruption war in Nigeria, using two newspapers – the privately-owned Sun, and Cross River State Government-owned Nigerian Chronicle. The study was limited to the first six months of 2017. Content analysis was the research instrument used in generating data; while the composite week sampling technique was adopted in choosing the sampled newspaper copies. Content categories of corruption used were bribery, forgery/perjury, fraud, misappropriation and mismanagement, while the units of analysis were news, features/opinions/columns, editorials, photographs/cartoons, and letters to the editor. Attention score was on prominence, depth, frequency, and slant. The theory adopted for this study was Kotler and Zaltman’s social marketing theory. Findings from the study included that Nigerian media adequately and prominently projected the issue of anti-corruption; and that mismanagement had the highest prevalence in relationship with the other categories of corruption namely fraud, misappropriation, forgery/perjury, and bribery. Recommendations made were, among others, that the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, 2011 should be fully implemented; mass media should work more closely with civil society; media employers should ensure that journalists are well trained and remunerated; and government should see the media as allies in the fight against corruption.

Keywords: Anti-corruption, anti-corruption war, corrupt practices, mass media, reportage.