A photograph of a man with an assault rifle in front of cattle
is frequently used to illustrate Nigerian media stories about bloody
clashes between farmers and herders.
Another shows men armed with machetes on the rampage.
The
issue with both is they have nothing to do with Nigeria or the
violence: one is from South Sudan, the other from the Central African
Republic.
The conflict in Nigeria looks set to be a key
issue in the run-up to next February's presidential election at which
President Muhammadu Buhari is seeking a second term.
How
it is reported could be key to the results but the Nigerian Union of
Journalists (NUJ) and Buhari's spokesman, Garba Shehu, are already
unhappy.
Shehu said "the frequent expressions of hate
speech... (were) a source of concern" and drew comparisons to the
incitement to violence before the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
"Those
beating the gongs of war and fanning the embers of discord" should be
brought to order, he said in a statement in February.
Parliament is now debating new legislation to criminalise hate speech.
Outright fabrication
Buhari's
response to the crisis has by many accounts been tepid, despite the
deaths of hundreds of people since the start of this year, mainly in
Nigeria's central states.
The so-called Middle Belt,
where the predominantly Muslim north meets the largely Christian south,
has long been a flashpoint for clashes between the two sides.
But
what is primarily a battle for land and water fuelled by climate change
and rapid population growth has been seized upon by identity
politicians and religious leaders.
In Benue state,
where Governor Samuel Ortom banned open grazing for cattle, 73 people
from farming communities were killed in one attack in January.
He
alleged afterwards there was an orchestrated plot by the nomadic Fulani
herders, who are Muslim, to exterminate his people, the Tiv, who are
Christian.
The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) rejects the claim.
Many media reports of attacks, however, suggest religious differences are a prime motivation.
Social
media users and bloggers in particular have been accused of
sensationalism and developing the trope about "killer herdsmen" with
outright falsehood.
The Kogi state police commissioner
Ali Aji Janga told AFP last month that several reports were entirely
fabricated or ascribed to Fulani herders when it was general
criminality.
One report, in which Fulani herders were
said to have killed 10 people in a village, including the local chief
and his wife, was "a figment of imagination", he said.
"The report was not only false, it was mischievous aimed at distorting the peace in the state," he added.
'Ethnic profiling'
Critics
of Buhari have said the herders have become emboldened since he came to
office three years ago because of his failure to address the underlying
issue.
Thousands of people have been killed over
several decades but the former military ruler is also a Fulani Muslim
and has been accused of not wanting to act against his kinsmen.
Nobel
laureate Wole Soyinka, whose property in southwest Nigeria was overrun
with cattle, has even said the herders had "declared war against the
nation".
"Their weapon is undiluted terror," he wrote in January. "Why have they been permitted to become a menace to the rest of us?"
NUJ
president Waheed Odusile said the overall media coverage of the
conflict was fair and there were expected differences of opinion.
But
he added: "What is disturbing is the ethnic profiling of the conflict.
They tend to make the violence look like a north-south, Christian-Muslim
problem."
Describing all herdsmen "as Fulani Muslim is
dangerous and can jeopardise the peace and unity of Nigeria", he added,
warning the media "not to heat up the polity by playing up the nation's
faultlines".
MACBAN for its part has blamed cattle rustlers and foreign criminals for the frequent raids on farming communities.
As
elsewhere around the world, Nigerian media organisations, reflect the
views of their owners — many of them politicians or the politically
well-connected.
But readers increasingly needed to be
cautious about what they were being told, according to David Ajikobi,
Nigeria director of fact-checking website Africa Check.
"It's not true that every herdsman is Fulani," he said, pointing to the involvement of Yoruba and Igbo in cattle herding.
"A blanket categorisation of herders as Fulani is stereotyping the issue and such a tendency should be avoided."
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