The online media of the Nigerian diaspora, as has been adverted to in previous chapters, have competed favorably with, and in some cases actually superseded, the homeland media in charting the course of far-reaching national discourses and in confronting and exposing corruption both in government and in the media. Chapter 4 illustrated some of the ways in which the diasporic news media exposed high-level corruption among the Nigerian domestic ruling elite, although some of the diasporic media are themselves not always immune from the ills they have railed against. This chapter highlights and discusses more case studies that instantiate the everrising significance of the Nigerian diasporic online citizen media formation. It shows that in addition to being consequential enough to cause governmental policy changes, the diasporic citizen media have also exposed corruption in the Nigerian press and thereby weakened the legitimacy of a hitherto vibrant but now thoroughly compromised traditional national media establishment.

The case studies in this chapter are organized and thematized as follows: cases where diasporic online citizen media stories led to homeland governmental policy changes and cases where the diasporic online media exposed high-level corruption in the local media. All case studies selected for this chapter have had momentous consequences in the domestic public sphere and are likely to define the form and substance of the relational dynamics between the Nigerian diasporic online citizen media formation and the traditional media and politics of the domestic public sphere in the foreseeable future. How the diasporic citizen media chose to report on the cases highlighted in this chapter will enrich and complicate the extant literature on the modalities and singularities of citizen reporting and illustrate how what Deborah Chung and her colleagues called a “form of amateur journalism” is challenging the role of traditional journalism in a transnational setting.

How Diasporic Citizen Media Reporting Caused Governmental Policy Reversals

One dramatic case that exemplifies the power of the Nigerian diasporic online media to compel homeland government to reverse policy decisions was the controversy over a proposed “capacity-building” training for Nigeria's state governors at Harvard University.

Intolerance of and unease with dissent is an abiding feature of the Nigerian state since its founding, as chapter 2 illustrates. As the later part of this chapter will show, the reactions of Nigerian governments from 2005 to 2019 to the critical searchlights beamed on them by the diasporic citizen media appear to be adopted from the germinal ideas initiated and executed by British colonialists against the critical gaze of the nationalist press. During Nigeria's colonial occupation by British imperialists, the critical journalism of the independent nationalist press was aggressively countermined through a three-pronged strategy. The colonial government sponsored rival, acquiescent, Nigerian-owned newspapers that endorsed and authorized colonialism. When that strategy was not successful, the colonial government chose to starve the independent nationalist press of advertising patronage, and encouraged British-owned private businesses to withhold advertising from the papers in hopes that they would wither and die. The continued vibrancy and stridency of the press in spite of these measures compelled the colonial government to enact repressive press laws, which gave a legal imprimatur to its all-out assault on the press. Nigerian military regimes borrowed from the colonial template in their dealings with the Nigerian press.

However, as shown in chapter 3, the brief periods of constitutional rule from 1960 to 1963 and from 1979 to 1983 saw a radically healthier and more tolerant attitude of governments toward critical journalism. Instead of the repressive suppression of dissent that we saw in colonial and military regimes, the civilian governments of the 1960s and the 1980s responded to oppositional, watchdog journalism by setting up their own newspapers to counter the scrutiny and attacks of the press, particularly of the politicalparty press, which dominated the media landscape in 1980s Nigeria. They also used spin doctors to influence news coverage and punditry, in common with many liberal democracies. There were no records of arrests and torture of journalists or the forceful seizure of newspapers.

In a curious twist, nevertheless, the reaction of supposedly democratic governments to critical diasporic citizen online journalism since 2005 is uncannily reminiscent of previous totalitarian colonial and military governments.

Misty Bastian's 1999 prescient prediction of the “possibility of a new synthesis, a drawing closer of the electronic world of the brain drain diaspora and the real worlds of both material diasporic experience and Nigerian quotidian life” materialized not just in the emergence of the diasporic citizen media formation that arose from where the guerrilla journalism of the 1990s left off. It also emerged in the vibrant domestic, digital-native media formation it spawned during the early 2010s. Inspired by the success, popularity, impact, and promise of the diasporic citizen online media, an abundance of home-based online news sites emerged starting in 2011. Many of them mimic Sahara Reporters’ erstwhile editorial template. At least one of these online-only domestic news sites matches, and sometimes outmatches, Sahara Reporters in its earliest form. Most of them, nevertheless, have not been able to replicate Sahara Reporters’ success and seem condemned to linger on the margins of the Nigerian journalistic landscape. However, a measure of their rootedness in the Nigerian news media landscape can be gleaned from the fact that a visible professional association, the Online Publishers Association of Nigeria, now exists for Nigerian digital-native journalists at home and in the diaspora.

Premium Times is a home-based online news site that shook the foundations of Nigerian journalism and that rivaled the earlier incarnation of Sahara Reporters in impact and hard-hitting investigative reporting. It was established in 2011 by home-based, professional, award-winning investigative journalists, some of whom were associated with the guerrilla journalism of the 1990s. According to Alexa Rank, from 2017 through 2019, Premium Times was among the top 40 most visited websites in Nigeria and the country's fourth most visited news site, topped only by Punch, Vanguard, and the Daily Post. It had edged out Sahara Reporters from the fourth spot in news traffic by 2018, in large part because Omoyele Sowore, Sahara Reporters’ editor in chief, devoted more time to his presidential campaign than he did to his website. Further, as a consequence of Sowore's relocation to Nigeria and his obsession with his presidential run, the site ceased to be the trove of sensational muckraking journalism that it had become famous for. For a long time, as will be shown in subsequent sections of this chapter, Premium Times was the unrivaled go-to site for exposés of malfeasance in government, although by 2019 it had lost its investigative vibrancy.

Diasporas are ethnoscapes formed by people who voluntarily or involuntarily deterritorialize from their homelands and reterritorialize in new environments. They conceive of themselves as being “outside the state but inside the people.” The fact of this emotional investment in the homeland in spite of geographic distance from it displaces the importance of territorial boundedness in the constructions of notions of citizenship and political participation. Although diasporas have traditionally been historicized as congeries of people who exist on the fringes of the societies in which they have reterritorialized, there is significant research that point to the central roles diasporas play in influencing domestic and global politics, shaping identities, reconfiguring notions of community and peoplehood, and navigating the contours of the global economy. In other words, in the age of globalization and the death of distance that the Internet has enabled, territorial displacement does not necessarily sentence ethnoscapes to what Adbelmalek Sayad has called “double absence.” Instead, it can activate manifold manifestations of presence, especially with the unceasingly dizzying proliferation of the “technologies of presence” and the logic of “connected presence” this reality enhances. Although diasporas have inspired changes in the domestic policies and politics of their homelands and instigated change of government, they can also be agents of instability. Nonetheless, the increasingly central roles that diasporas play in homeland politics has caused Robin Cohen to observe that they have moved “from victims to challengers.”

Digital diasporas, which are not delimited by national boundaries, have also emerged as core constituents of the structures and processes of the contemporary phase of globalization. Exilic elites of several countries have transformed the Internet into electronic agoras for transformative dialogic encounters with their homeland and with their current places of residence. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers unwittingly foretold digital diasporas in their book The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, when they pointed out that “electronic technologies have begun to shake the distinction between inner and outer space, by blurring the difference between being here or there.” Although they were celebrating the nascence of visual technologies that dissolved the limitations of time and space, their insights are relevant to the conception of digital diasporic public spheres, which dissolve, or at least complexify, the differences between home and abroad in deliberative encounters.

The terms Cyberia and Nigeria's digital diaspora are used interchangeably in this book to denote the dispersed collective of Nigerians on the Internet. “Cyberia” is used as a lexical and semantic double entendre. It simultaneously encapsulates the original meaning that Arturo Escobar assigned to it when he coined it in 1994 and its sense as a portmanteau word that blends “cyber” and “Nigeria.” Escobar deployed this term to capture the epistemic and discursive location of the emergent, postcorporeal cyberculture of the 1990s and to “describe, in part, how various groups appropriate or reject new technologies based on cultural, political and economic factors.” But this term also signifies the notional and substantive convergence of cyberculture and Nigeria. “Cyberia” is conceptualized here as the space on the Internet where Nigerians congregate for public-sphere deliberations, for quotidian dialogic encounters, and for increasingly multiple forms of engagements both with themselves and with the state.

To be sure, “Cyberia” itself traces its lexical descent from the term cyberspace. It is the consensus of Internet scholars that the first use of “cyberspace” is attested in the first volume of William Gibson's prescient 1985 trilogy and citation classic Neuromancer. In this fictional projection of the world, the concept of cyberspace is ideated by the following oft-cited passage: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… . A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding …”

Michael Benedikt derived inspirational strength from this Gibsonian schema of “consensual hallucination” to conceive of cyberspace as a “new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines.” Kevin Hughes, for his part, defines cyberspace as “an interconnected, computer-mediated environment in which all prior media are represented. Cyberspace has also been defined as a bioelectronic ecosystem that subsists anywhere there are phones, coaxial cables, fiber optic lines, or electromagnetic wave

The upsurge of diasporic Nigerian citizen journalism in the United States in the mid-2000s is almost coextensive with the mass migration of Nigeria's print newspapers to the Internet. On the surface, this development seems incongruous, even counterintuitive. The migration of news content from homeland legacy newspapers to the Internet, which frees it from the constraints of time and space, should have satisfied the yearning for domestic news by diasporic Nigerians in the United States and therefore obviated the need for the emergence of diasporic news outlets that publish news about the homeland. Nevertheless, diasporic citizen news outlets not only compete with but also vigorously undermine the credibility of homeland newspapers. As this and the next chapter will show, two fundamental factors account for this situation.

The first reason, as chapter 3 hinted, is the dearth—in fact, the outright death—of the brand of investigative and advocacy journalism that characterized the anticolonial and antimilitary eras, which found an especially concentrated expression in the guerrilla press of the 1990s. The absence of a robust, uncompromised domestic watchdog media system committed to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable in the face of the enormous venality that has accompanied Nigeria's return to democratic rule needed to be corrected. Homeland newspapers have proved either unwilling or unable to take up this challenge. The second reason for the rise and popularity of Nigerian diasporic online media was the technical deficiency of the websites of homeland newspapers. Their websites were neither updated in real time nor sufficiently interactive and multiplatform in the fashion of contemporary legacy media websites in the West with which diasporic Nigerians have become familiar. So whereas the mainstream media in the West ventured into online journalism out of anxieties about the potentially disruptive effects that emergent citizen online journalism might have on their professional authority, in an interesting reversal, the Nigerian mainstream media's lack of sophisticated web presence partly inspired the emergence of Nigerian citizen online journalism, which now potentially disrupts the authority and dominant journalistic practices of the homeland mainstream media.

This chapter distills and coalesces the data presented in the preceding chapters of this book. It draws conclusions about the future of online journalism and discursive democracy and makes recommendations for future research based on the ruminative and perspectival synthesis of the data in previous chapters.

The emergence, popularity, and progressively soaring impact of the Nigerian diasporic citizen media examined in the previous chapters were actuated and propelled by six underlying factors. The first was the death or dearth of a critical press tradition in Nigeria—especially the adversarial guerrilla press tradition that reigned in the 1990s—in the face of the profound moral putrescence that the restoration of democratic rule has paradoxically inculcated since 1999. At a time when billions of dollars were brazenly stolen and salted away in foreign bank accounts by political officeholders and when bald-faced cronyism and avarice had overtaken the public sphere, the national media, for the most part, either looked the other way or were actively complicit. This state of affairs was inconsistent with the progressive, agitational, and inquiring disposition that had defined the character, disposition, and performance of much of the Nigerian press since its founding in the mid-1800s. As was shown in chapter 2, the Nigerian press has historically been vigorously critical of the powers that be. It almost single-handedly dislodged colonialism and helped fight against military dictatorship. The guerrilla press of the 1990s especially had a powerful impact on the media practice and politics of Nigeria. One of its enduring legacies is that it has predisposed Nigerians to expect their press to be robustly fearless, critical, and uncompromisingly adversarial. Nevertheless, after winning the fight against military dictatorship, much of the national press lost its critical bite; the press appeared to have been anesthetized into a false sense of triumphalism at a time when corruption by the emergent political elite it helped to bring to the forefront took newer, more insidious forms. In many cases, the traditional Nigerian press was co-opted into the mindless looting of the national treasury that has attended the restoration of democracy, as the case studies in chapters 4 and 5 illustrate.