CHAPTER ONE                                                                                                                               INTRODUCTION

The drive for doing this thesis came shortly after the sectarian violence of September 7,

2001 in the central Nigerian city of Jos. This researcher had been working as a journalist with

Daily/Weekly Trust newspapers and was visiting home (Jos) for the weekend of 7-8 September. During the violence the researcher observed with utmost shock as people that had lived for several decades as brothers and sisters irrespective of tribe and religion ferociously attacked each other. In one gory case a young Christian woman was cornered and savagely attacked by a group of young Muslim men. The researcher realised there was an urgent need to intervene and save the woman’s life in spite of the clear risk. Although he successfully prevented the killing of the woman the mob, angered by his intervention, turned their weapons on him and his life was only spared after a man who had watched from the distance raced to the scene begging the youths not to take the researcher’s life. The man, who turned out to be the researcher’s cousin, was a popular sportsman and well respected in the community and that, perhaps, was the quality that appealed to the reasoning of the mob.

Subsequent happenings during and after the crisis also contributed towards fuelling the desire to critically probe into the conflict in order to understand the real factors that have caused (and often fuel) it. For example, the then Governor of Plateau State Chief

Joshua Dariye had, despite several allegations of incompetence on the part of his government in handling the violence, blamed the media for all that happened. Dariye specifically accused Daily/Weekly Trust of waging a jihad against his government to mark 200 years of Sheikh Usman Danfodio’s jihad in Northern Nigeria. Generally, there were attempts on both sides to shift the blame to the media, which the researcher found difficult to understand.

Thus, as a journalist with about 10 years of practice experience the researcher felt conducting a study of this quality was a possible means of critically evaluating and understanding the deeper meanings in the whole problem and how best it could be tackled with the media playing a huge role in the entire process. However, the researcher had to deal with his own biases in order to be able to effectively do the study: first, the researcher is a Muslim from Northern Nigeria, where often the conflicts erupt; second, as a researcher that has worked with one of the newspapers that is studied in the thesis there is a connection with the paper that needs to be cautiously handled; and, third the fact that at some point the researcher solicited assistance from former colleagues in Nigeria during the study might be been seen as having some effect on the study itself. Thus, the researcher decided from the outset to take a critical distance from all the links mentioned, including those perceived. The choice of phenomenology as a theoretical framework made this quite effective as often the choice of themes and theories was dictated by the subjective phenomenology of the researched. In effect, the researcher attempted to understand the phenomenon through the experiences of the researched and interpreted it in their own voices as illustrated by quotations in Chapters Five and Six.

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