The law, the most outrageous and pernicious by any military dictator in Nigeria, forbade reporters from publishing or broadcasting what the authorities “calculated to bring the Federal Military Government or the Government of a State or a public officer to ridicule or disrepute.”
Thereafter journalists were shy to write on local issues. You didn’t know when Buhari’s Procrustean-bed law could make you lie in it, regardless of your size. It was an elastic contraption that took in everyone, fat, skinny, tall or short, or averagely formed. So, Nigerian journalists, columnists especially, would opt for far-flung foreign events. And the Soviet and US proxy war in Afghanistan was the talk of the day.
“This is a catastrophe,” Edgar Jone of Tearfund, a charity body laments. He adds: “Cyclone Idai has destroyed so much in an instance and it will take years for people to recover what they have lost.” And a couple of international aid agencies have sent an SOS saying they are “racing against time” to rescue the perishing, because they can’t reach survivors trapped in areas of Mozambique where some villages are buried in floods.
Even Cyclone Idai we are all demonising didn’t spring on us. For instance, BBC’s reporters Jack Goodman and Christopher Giles have quoted the Zimbabwe Minister of Defence Oppah Muchinguri as saying her government was alerted by the meteorologists on the imminence of Idai and its route, but the authorities “failed to anticipate its strength”, and that undermined the level of preparations for evacuation of those in the trajectory of the cyclone.