MEDIA: Are We Really Who We Are Outside?

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in the comfort of our small beautiful living room. A friend of mine was around with my cousin and I, who just got back from Kenya (Nairobi). She is this brilliant beautiful lady who was invited for a week conference concerning agriculture in Africa. Her first time in Kenya, you can imagine how excited she was; However she didn’t lose the essence of the conference, smart girl!

That afternoon, we got talking about her stay in Kenya. She told me about their currency, which is the ‘Kenyan shilling’ and 1dollars is equivalent to 85 Kenyan shilling; also that she visited the Safari reserves and also how expensive their market is compared to Nigeria.

However, my concern about the whole talk was when she told me about how a Kenya guy engaged her in a conversation asking about Nigeria. The first question he asked after introducing himself is “Is it true Nigerian ladies/women beat their husbands?” My friend was shocked and she had to wonder “Why would this guy ask such a question?” He further said he is usually scared of Nigerian ladies because he heard and read news of Nigerian ladies beat their husbands. My friend couldn’t just imagine such a question from him. Anyways, she tried to correct that mentality that not all ladies and a matter of fact that about 90% ladies do not beat their husband. She asked where he got that miss-identity from. He said “from the T.V”; he also asked that “is it true that most young ladies fall in love with old men because of their money?”  Now, it was getting too much for my friend to get all these questions from a Kenyan. She asked herself “What has the media been portraying?” This now brought me to my question “Are we really who we are outside?”

How do others see us? How do they get to know about us? What measures are we using to describe ourselves? Should we lie about ourselves? However, I think the most important question to ask is “Who are we really?” “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”

Many things have been said concerning Nigeria outside the country and even inside the country and most are of negative attributes. Are these negative talks really true about us as a country? That is a question we need to sincerely answer among ourselves. Where are the good attributes? Who are those to make the public know about the good attributes of our country?

After asking all these questions, my friend said the media is the major stakeholder in this campaign of portraying our identity. Is this true? Well, it’s true! But another question to ask is “What is really our identity?” was the Kenya guy wrong about the questions he asked? Was the T.V wrong about what they portrayed? All these questions depend on how we truly act as individuals.

Check yourself! Whoever we are should be what the media should portray!

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”