When I started out as a news assistant in 2010 at a local radio station in my hometown of Yola in northeastern Nigeria, I was determined to make a difference and to give voice to the voiceless.
I was interested in telling stories about women and girls suffering domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, forced marriages, and financial deprivation. The male-centric way these stories were covered by the Nigerian media angered me. Not only were the reporters and editors mostly men, but – for cultural and religious reasons – many of the women and girls I wanted to interview needed the permission of their husbands or senior male members of the family to speak to journalists.
And even where such permission was forthcoming, there was no guarantee the women and girls could be interviewed alone. They might be accompanied by minders – usually their husbands, brothers, or other male members of the family – making it hard and sometimes impossible for them to express themselves freely.
At the time, I had to navigate these challenges with no formal training. However, I am now in a graduate programme in journalism at New York University, learning about the ethical standards of the profession and being introduced to ideas such as creating and maintaining distance between myself and my sources, and being open and transparent about who I am and how I intend to use the information I collect.
The more I learnt about journalism ethics from the American point of view, the more I wondered about the ethical validity of the methods I had used in Nigeria, where, especially as a female journalist, hiding your true identity is often necessary.
However, as I sit through conversations with my professors and classmates, I have come to believe that the realities of covering culturally different societies on the other side of the world are not always accounted for by ethical codes based on Western standards. In my opinion, those realities should be at the centre of such discussions.
The more I learnt about journalism ethics from the American point of view, the more I wondered about the ethical validity of the methods I had used in Nigeria, where, especially as a female journalist, hiding your true identity is often necessary. It is difficult to navigate through assignments successfully without being harassed and exploited, including sometimes by the families of the sources whose stories you intend to tell.
In addition, assignments in conflict areas can mean putting yourself in vulnerable situations. You feel naked and extremely exposed, like a tuber of yam that a sharp knife could easily pierce.
I often hid my professional identity from the male relatives of the women I wanted to interview, and either visited when the husband was at work or met with the women at the local market when they went shopping.
These were usually women who were suffering domestic abuse, or pregnant women whose husbands didn’t believe in ante-natal care during pregnancy.
Today, reading about the ethical requirement for journalists to keep a distance from their sources, I perceive a conflict between my role as a journalist and as a human being; between my personal feelings and the rules of the profession.
What actually constitutes right or wrong?
Last year, I was producing a short film in Kebbi State, in northwest Nigeria. It was the story of Margaret, an 11-year-old girl who had been trafficked by her uncle to the city of Jos, 300 miles away, to work as domestic staff. After about 24 months in service, Margaret was tortured and burnt to death by her employer.
I read about Margaret's death in a newspaper article, which contained no details about who the little girl was. After much digging, I found out that she was originally from a small village called Ribbah. It was 14 hours by bus from Abuja, the Nigerian capital, through three bandit-ravaged states – Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara – but I grabbed my camera and went to find her relatives.
In Ribbah, I met Margaret’s 29-year-old mother, Deborah, who was still taking care of her three younger children. She looked tired, pale, and sad but her eyes lit up when I told her why I was in her village. She was willing and anxious to speak to me about Margaret.
She gently explained how Margaret was taken away, and how she was denied access to speak to her child for two years. Despite persistent begging, she was told that women in her culture are not allowed to question the decisions of the male members of the family. It was taboo and bad luck, and nobody messed with that.
From my brief first chat with Deborah, I realised that her husband’s family had kept from her the circumstances that had led to her daughter's death.
Before I could interview Deborah further, I had to spend a day meeting with all the male members of the family to explain to them the nature of my project and my process. They also wanted me to tell them whatever I learned from Deborah, but I knew telling them everything would shut me off from my source. Eventually I earned the men’s trust, even though I wasn’t completely honest with them.
With their permission, and after agreeing to have a minder assigned to me throughout the reporting trip, I began filming and interviewing. But often the minder, Deborah’s brother-in-law Philip, would stop us and tell Deborah not to answer some of my questions, which were considered too sensitive or revealing.
Part of the process was a trip to Jos, the city where Margaret was taken in 2022. I intended to film Deborah speaking with people who had met and helped her daughter during her last moments. Four of us -- Deborah, Philip, my videographer Solomon, and me – made the trip, but I booked three rooms, opting to share one with Deborah and the baby she was carrying.
Sleeping in the same room with Deborah was the only chance I had to speak with her alone and to hear her speak freely. At 2am, when Philip was fast asleep in his comfortable hotel bed, I woke up Solomon and set her up for an interview. Free of her minder, Deborah was completely honest. She broke down in tears for the first time during that interview as she spoke of the feelings she was hiding from her family: her fear of being questioned for crying over the dead child or for not believing in God.
Earlier, Philip had warned me never to show Deborah the gory pictures of her daughter’s tortured body, which had already been circulated on the websites of Nigerian newspapers. It was these images that had given me sleepless nights and pushed me out of my home to seek out Deborah. While I respected the family’s injunction, she had been shown the horrifying photographs when I took her to the prosecutor dealing with Margaret’s case, and she reflected on this during the interview.
How does one ignore the reality of these people in my home country, and reduce the profession to one that only extracts information?
I cried with her, but I was happy she was able to express herself freely and say things that would have been impossible for her to speak about in a different setting. At the end of the interview, she told me about a plan by the family to take her seven-year-old son, Jerry, to work for a man she didn’t know. Deborah had no objection because of the difficulties of her life. She was sharing a single tiny bedroom with her three children, her husband, and her mother in-law, and had no way to pay for Jerry’s food and school fees.
She couldn’t stop the family taking Jerry away, and neither could I. But what I could do was empower Deborah financially, and I took that option. A few weeks after I interviewed her, I gave her 150,000 naira, equivalent to $150, to buy a sewing machine and enrol in a tailoring training programme in her village.
My NYU education tells me that ethical journalists must never pay their sources. But how does one ignore the reality of these people in my home country, and reduce the profession to one that only extracts information? When I read American textbooks and articles about how journalists are expected to be with their subjects, I question both myself and the ethical framing of such issues. At the same time, I don’t want to be unprofessional or a cheat.
Personal experiences that motivate me
Why did I become a journalist? I could have considered becoming a teacher, a generally acceptable profession for women in my community, but I never heard any of my teachers speak out against the abuse of women and girls. Even when their students dropped out of school to be married to older men, the teachers never saw anything wrong with that. In some situations, they attended the wedding, ate the jollof rice, and accepted the traditional bride price offerings of salt, kola nut, candy, and dates as gifts.
Journalism seemed to be the perfect fit for me. My reporting has changed and influenced local laws in my community, in Adamawa State, and made women realise that they could report their abusive husbands to the authorities.
Being a journalist in Nigeria can be dangerous in ways that my NYU classmates and professors probably have not imagined.
My viewers also learned, from my reporting, that there is treatment for vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), which was common among young women in some of the villages in Adamawa. I gained confidence and belief in my work from a doctor I had interviewed, Francis Asogwa, who was working in a local clinic in Yola. He called one afternoon in 2013 to say that some people told him they brought their daughters to his hospital for VVF treatment specifically because they had heard about him in a story I had reported.
Hearing how journalism has empowered women, including myself, to speak out in the face of aggression and repression has been therapeutic. The time and resources I invested in my work have shaped my life and I’m super grateful.
But being a journalist in Nigeria can be dangerous in ways that my NYU classmates and professors probably have not imagined.
Sitting in my ethics class made me recall an incident from 2013 when I was covering local government workers protesting six months of non-payment of salaries. The protesters, mostly women, removed their clothes to show sagging skin on their stomachs and visible ribs from hunger. They blocked the entrance and exit gates of the government office building, and stopped the chairman of the local authority leaving. For a radio story, I interviewed some of the protesters, but could not include comments from the chairman because he was locked up in his office.
The day after the story ran, my boss received a phone call from the chairman expressing his dissatisfaction with the way it was told and requesting a chance to give his side. He was upset that I had also reported that most of the protesters who had locked him up were women, which made it especially embarrassing.
I was assigned to go and interview him. The moment I walked into his office, he locked me inside, shut off the lights, and left with the keys. I was in the darkness for three hours before he finally let me out. He never granted the interview. Nothing else happened; it was the end of that chapter.
What I thought journalism was all about
This was not how I thought about journalism. To my mind, journalists are social advocates and selfless people. The work of a journalist should be unique, fulfilling, and gratifying at the same time.
Finding victims and survivors, witnessing scenes, and sometimes encountering evidence of abuse from interviews with domestic violence victims was enough truth, and it shouldn’t matter how close one is to the subjects or how much help one offers at the time of the reporting.
The reward for me is having someone you never met listen to, and learn from you. It is an amazing and noble profession, when you find yourself moving to places both locally and internationally to meet with different people, getting to know them and their ways of life, and learning to tell their stories to others in a respectful and dignified manner.
Even though, in many instances, access to these subjects isn’t that easy, there are people with unique and difficult stories to tell. The work of journalism allows other people to know them through their stories.
At what point is the media ethics questionable?
But reporting social issues comes with challenges, as does reporting in conflict or war zones. Dealing with the military during the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2014 was, I would say, the deadliest and riskiest experience of my career.
Aside from reporting on the conflict itself, the war came with its own human rights violations -- and women were the most susceptible to these war crimes. These crimes included being made into sex slaves by the insurgents, or being forced to have sex with security personnel and humanitarian workers in exchange for food, money, and access to walk freely outside the fenced government camps for displaced people.
In most of these situations, the Nigerian military endangered the safety of journalists on a regular basis. For my protection, I never disclosed my professional identity as a journalist; I claimed to be a nurse to gain access to communities devastated by Boko Haram and access to official Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. I reported on government officials, security personnel, and humanitarian workers sexually abusing women in exchange for granting them food and money.
If I had revealed my professional identity, I would not have had such access to these sources. I also would have risked arrest, detention, and having my recording equipment confiscated or destroyed. In extreme situations, it could have meant the end of my journalism career.
Then there’s the issue of sexual abuse and objectification by senior government officials. I have had sources grab my breasts or touch me inappropriately when I walked past after I interviewed them. Reporting such an act would have amounted to nothing other than disgracing myself, as was the case for many of the rape victims I wrote about.
I wonder how my own experiences have shaped how I think about ethical dilemmas, especially those relating to access to sources. The real world of reporting on a humanitarian crisis in northeastern Nigeria feels a long way from a New York classroom. Can traditional Western media ethics ever be truly applicable to my relationship to these individuals and their stories?
