The great success of fake news is in referring to tainted sources, newspapers that are actively inventing the stories in question to support their political positions as evidence. That is what I have been fighting against. In 2016, we published the result of a two year research we had been conducting - Rural Banditry and Conflicts in Northern Nigeria (CDD) based on fieldwork. There is no one that has done research on the question that believes in your one-sided conspiracy theories. I have not heard any of you refer to the thousands of herdsmen killed in Taraba, Zamfara because you believe their lives do not matter. I have not heard Moses explain why the Benue Livestock Guards were staffed by known cultists and killers with a long established track record who massacred and sent out of the State all survivors of a community. Clearly, you are motivated by the desire to drive Nigeria towards full scale civil war and you get very agitated when you are caught out as you spread your fake news. You are supposed to be scholars, go and do your research.. When I say Vanguard and Punch are publishing fake photos from East Africa sourced from the internet and the evidence of the sources of the photos pointed out to them but they persist in using them, its because they know of the gullible community that would believe them and push their people to more killing. Finally, I have never said that there are no killings by herdsmen, I have been consistent in saying the killings are on both sides but only one side is reported and stigmatised and you are certainly guilty as charged. As to your claims about my politics, I have been engaged in advocacy long enough not to be distracted by political labelling and invective. Its interesting that you believe you cannot make your arguments without insulting me. As the invective is so important for your arguments, please go ahead.Professor Jibrin IbrahimSenior FellowCentre for Democracy and Development, AbujaFollow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17On 21 July 2018 at 21:23, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:And, one more thing, Oga Falola. I observe that you've been pushing Jibrin to divulge his corrective evidence or facts, to recognize that where there is clear state failure, various explanatory paradigms thrive to explain tragedies, and to let us in on the true motivation of his "fake news" denialism. I don't recall him answering you or taking your questions and probings into account in his subsequent essays. If anything, your prodding and pushing seem to have made him even more rigid in his linear, one-dimensional commitment to "fake news" escapism.It is truly sad to see a respected intellectual persist in this path of anti-intellectualism, parochial advocacy, and pro-regime suppression of truth.--On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:"So, Jibrin may be seeing "truth" as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true."Oga,And that is precisely the long and short of Jibrin's project. Whatever evidence or fact intrudes in or disturbs his propaganda is dismissed with the Trumpia discourse of fake news denialism. For him everything that implicates the armed herdsmen is fake--even tragic visuals of mass burials and dead bodies. Perhaps he would say the Benue and Plateau State governments filled graves with empty coffins or human-like dolls! Such detachment from realm of facts and objective reality!And yes, the danger you underscored is real, which is that, with people like Jibrin doing a Trumpian dismissal of all the killings as fake news, the government will be led to believe that its escapism and diversionary obsession with fake news and media portrayals is legitimate and gaining resonance. The cognate of that is continued governmental inaction and intensifying herdsmen killings. In fact, as of this moment, Jibrin is arguably the Buhari government's favorite public intellectual, always slyly diminishing the government's failures and unwillingness to deal decisively with the menace while blaming victims and citizens for constructing self-comforting narratives from available informational resources and the circumstances realities that make such narratives plausible.On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 2:18 PM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:Moses:
If Jibrin has established a paradigm that enables him to do a pro-Fulani analysis, his response to you is predictable: fake news!
Thus, is it possible, with due respect, to let us move him in a new direction:
- Where does Jibrin get his own facts from so that we, too, can head in that direction. Facts are not magic. So, we need his help.
- What information does the security apparati, spending millions of naira, collect and how can you and I access them?
- Where dead bodies are seen—and several have been seen—like those of innocent Catholic priests, is this fake news? Are the dead bodies computer generated?
- Is Jibrin aware that his recent intellectual thrust enables the government to routinely characterize that which is true to that which is fake? Here lies the danger of Jibrin's intervention, and we need to warn him.
- Nigeria is an anthropological observable zone---even fictions on Nigeria, as those by literary writers—are actually true!!! If you use a good language to present what you see in many cases, it actually becomes fiction! So, Jibrin may be seeing "truth" as fiction, and our challenge is actually not to excavate evidence as you have done, as good as this is, but to understand what Jibrin wants to achieve. I originally read Jibrin as saying that there are two sides to a coin but now it is that one side is fake and the other is true.
- TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://groups.google.com/group
/USAAfricaDialogue
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com > on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Saturday, July 21, 2018 at 12:33 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Combatting Fake News
Jibrin,
You made me go to the vast internet archive to dig up these pieces of evidence of Miyetti's Allah's confessions to "retaliatory" mass murder, threatening attacks, and even describing in gruesome, boastful terms the murderous exploits of its armed militia in different parts of the country. And this is a just a result of quick google searches, not painstaking research, which would yield a lot more evidence. And no, I have not included the recent contested Plateau rationalization, your sole example in your fake in your bogus fake news campaign—never mind that it has since been established that the said Miyetti official did indeed make those statements to the Tribune reporter, who, along with his paper, has stood by his story regarding the interview he conducted with the official. So here we go:
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tor
i-42555276
(This story is about the January 2018 herdsmen massacre in Benue. The excerpt from a BBC pidgin story below quotes Garus Gololo, leader of Benue State branch of MACBAN justifying the murder as revenge for theft of 1000 cattle. Other local papers carried the story but I've chosen BBC because I assume that it is less likely to incur your faux outrage against fake news)
"Di oga for Myetti Allah cattle breeders association for Benue State, Garus Gololo, tell BBC News Pidgin tori person Dooshima Abu, say di wahala start as some people attack Fulani herdsmen wey dey carry their cow comot from Benue State.
Gololo say, "as we dey relocate go Taraba State through Nassarawa State, for border town of Nengere, thief come collect 1000 cows from us, so we sef fight dem back."
(This is an al-Jazeera story about the Agatu massacre. The excerpt below quotes a Fulani leader as justifying the massacre as retaliation for theft of cows.)
"Mohammed Husseini, a Fulani leader, explained that in Agatu, young men were stealing the Fulani's cows and that cattle theft is a crime that frequently goes unpunished.
Husseini is the head of one of the state chapters of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. He claims that the constant thieving of Fulanis' cows puts the Fulani people at risk, and that they deserve to protect themselves."
https://www.dailytrust.com.ng
/news/general/-115-grazing-res erves-in-nigeria-taken-over/14 5808.html
(This is a link to a DailyTrust story on the Agatu massacre. DailyTrust, a paper owned by a Fulani man, would not qualify as fake news in your book. In the excerpt below, a Fulani head told reporters that the massacre was revenge for the theft of 800 Fulani cows and the killing of a Fulani herdsmen leader. By the way, he granted this interview at a public forum organized by the Benue State commissioner of police. In order words, he confessed to mass murder in the presence of the police commissioner and walked away a free man).
"Speaking in an interview in Makurdi, a Fulani traditional head, Ardo Boderi Adamu, traced the genesis of the clashes between his people and the Agatu natives to the brutal murder of one of their leaders by suspected Agatu youths, as well as the killing of their 800 cows.
"We (Fulani) have lived together with Agatu people for 60 years in Agatu LGA without any problem until sometime in 2012, when our chief (Ardo) was killed in his house and our over 800 cows were tampered with by Agatu youths. They came to our Ardo's house and killed him.
"That was how the problem started and the problem escalated as Agatu youths continued to kill our people. They have equally refused every intervention from government quarters to allow us to come back to live with them. We want to come back and live in Agatu. That is the only place I know and where I have lived all my life," he said.
According to Boderi, the crisis was further aggravated by the Agatu youths who abandoned their farming and fishing occupation to keep vigilance along the River Benue border with Loko in Nasarawa State to prevent herders and their cattle from crossing into their fertile land to graze on greener pasture.
He alleged that several efforts, even until early this year, to enable the herders move into Agatu freely were resisted by the youths at the riverbank, consequent upon which their cows were often rustled and their children killed in the process.
Boderi who until the crisis was the Ardo Fulani in Agatu, said in such situations herders were left with no choice but to enforce their rights to move freely as guaranteed by the Nigerian constitution."
http://sunnewsonline.com/we-ll
-resist-anti-grazing-law-in-be nue-miyetti-allah-leaders/
(This is a story in which Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, one of the many factions of MACBAN, vowed to resist the Benue anti-open grazing law and for good measure threatened that for peace to reign, the government must repeal the law)
http://dailypost.ng/2017/03/27
/expect-bloody-reprisal-herdsm en-give-kwara-govt-ultimatum-k illings/
(This is a story reported widely across multiple platforms in which the Kwara State chairman of Miyetti is quoted as threatening vengeful violence on certain communities if their demands were not met by the police and the state government. He also chillingly reveals in the press release that Miyetti's Fulani armed herdsmen have been killing in different parts of the country. I invite you to read below his bone-chilling, blood cuddling confession of Fulani herdsmen mass murder.)
"Fulanis from across the country and neighbouring countries gathered here last week and they requested for my permission to go and retaliate but I insisted that they should sheath their swords. From there, they started pointing accusing fingers at me that government was paying money to me, that is why I don't want them to retaliate despite incessant attacks on Fulanis.
"Then, we want this one to be the last because Fulanis of these days have changed. See what is happening in Nasarawa, Zamfara, Jos and other states.
"If you see what our Fulanis did in Imo, and if you are Muslims honestly, you will cry. And if somebody said it was Fulanis that did that, you will not believe it."
By the way, I've not even included the statement of Prof. Umar Labbo of Kano's Northwest University, who said the entire Benue-Plateau area belongs to the Fulani by right of Jihadi conquest and that Fulani herdsmen have a historical right to take possession of it. This man was not even invited for questioning by the country's security agencies let alone held accountable for legitimizing the narrative of jihadi expansionist conquest and inflaming the herdsmen conflict.
Nor was any of the named and quoted officials in the stories above arrested and prosecuted for their confessions to mass murders and threats to inflict same on communities. So the circumstantial case in favor of Buhari's pro-herdsmen complicity and indifference to the herdsmen killings in the Middle Belt is clear. Once again, quit blaming those who see a pattern on the part of the government and its appointees of sparing, siding with, and encouraging the herdsmen with a mix of exculpatory statements, inaction, defensive statements, state-sanctioned Miyetti terrorist impunity, and an unwillingness to hold armed herdsmen and their backers accountable. It is this climate of injustice and open pro-herdsmen bias that causes conspiracy theories to proliferate. That and the ongoing killings are the problem, not "fake news."
What is tragic is that this government believes that the massacres are not the problem but rather how citizens and the media portray them. That is hardly shocking, given that this is a government that cares more about its image than about solving problems, about citizens highlighting a problem and blaming the government than about solving said problem. What is shocking is that Jibrin, a scholar who should be more circumspect and skeptical of the government's escapist obsession with "fake new," is trying to outdo the government in changing the subject from the killings themselves to how citizens and the media report, explain, analyze, and label the conflict. Scholars used to have core moral commitments anchored on the defense of human life and liberties above all else. That used to take precedence over idle, diversionary, abstract, and peripheral concerns, such as Lai Mohammed and Jibrin's contrived campaign against fake news. Today, I guess the opposite is the case, with abstract masturbatory intellection about the menace of "fake news" supplanting the moral imperatives of public intellectual interventions.
On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 4:25 PM, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:
You know very well that the attribution of those stories to Miyetti is false
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim
Senior Fellow
Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja
Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17
On 20 July 2018 at 17:00, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Jibrin,
How would Miyetti Allah's self declared culpability in massacres in the Middle Belt relate to your thesis that the accounts of massacres by Fulani herders is fake news?
thanks
toyin
On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 at 15:37, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:
Combating Fake News and the Emotive Pathway to Self-Destruction
Jibrin Ibrahim, Friday Column, Daily Trust, 20thJuly 2018
Over the weekend, I participated in facilitating a workshop by CITAD and its indefatigable executive director Y. Z. Ya'u for young people on understanding and responding to fake news and hate speech, which have become some of the most serious problems of our time. In 2016, Oxford dictionaries have picked post-truth as the word of the year after Trump won the American elections in spite of the fact that 70% of what he said during the campaign was false or misleading and the voters knew that. In the post-truth world, objective facts have been shown to be less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to personal belief and emotion. If you are able to strike the right emotional pitch with people, they will disregard any fact that challenges their belief and as the saying now goes, will seek out the "alternative facts" that comfort their belief.
A whole new science has been developed on how to use "alternative facts" to produce desired political outcome and its practitioners have been very busy. Cambridge Analytica, thedata analytics company had over the years designed the weaponization of political campaign information to "destroy" political enemies by portraying their political positions as evil using stirring negative emotions. We now know that a Goodluck Jonathan campaign backer recruited them in 2015 to fabricate and spread negative stories about the then opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari. As the Observer newspaper revealed, they produced video content that was: "Dark. Scary. And very uncertain - Sharia for all" era was coming they screamed. They emphasized the question: "What would Nigeria look like if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?" They provided the answer in a graphic, violent one minute 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria's troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack with scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. If Buhari wins, the film warned: all women would be forced to wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced immediately Buhari comes into power.
Today, the social media are inundated with images of allegedly "Fulani herdsmen" carrying sophisticated weapons, which they use to kill innocent farmers in the Middle Belt and seize their ancestral land. In a fascinating session on the Middle Belt facilitated by Dr. Yima Sen and Chom Bagu, they addressed the fact that the purveyors of these images have been told repeatedly that they are fake and most of them are not even from Nigeria but what do facts matter when people have over time been made to believe they are true. With every community conflict, the same fake pictures of mutilated bodies are circulated as evidence of the killings and people believe them while it's so easy to check when and in what countries those images first appeared. The strategy of weaponizing political campaigns is to use the fact that conflicts are occurring and people are being killed to construct a narrative of one-sided killings and raising the barometer of hate by accompanying the narrative with pictures that enhance the level of hate. I know that some Nigerian newspapers who have been shown with evidence that the pictures they are showing are fake but they persist in continuing to use them because they know it achieves the objective of multiplying hatred against the political leader they want to send out of office. Our problems are many and serious, but they are being deliberately being made worse by agents of discord.
During the workshop, simple internet tools were used to show that many such images are fake and their origins could easily be traced and some of the participants were quite shocked at how they have been consistently misled over time. The lack of balance in media reporting was also discussed extensively because fake news is not just about truth versus lies but also about whether the entire truth is being told. When herders kill farmers and farmers kill herders and only one side of the story is reported by the media, then people feel justified in the judgment that's it's not a conflict, its simply genocide. It was in this context that the workshop focused attention of how fake news is instrumentalised to increase conflict and the killings rather that the desired goal of seeking peace and engaging in conflict resolution. As the 2019 election approaches, many players are simply interested in spilling more blood to facilitate their access to power.
The social media, Dapo Olorunyomi of Premium Times told the workshop, has become the largest newsroom in Nigeria. Facebook alone has 25 million users in Nigeria, each acting as a journalist who makes and distributes media content. With no notion of the veracity or falsehood of content that they are spreading, they are able to impact greatly on the emotions of those that they communicate with. Facebook algorithms aggregate people who share the same views, emotions and fears and the same fake news and false images are circulated among people who have made up their minds and are continuously being comforted that their ignorance is the truth and woe unto anyone that seeks to question the evidence they have "seen with their own eyes".
The outcome of this process is the near collapse of trust and the massive circulation of conspiracy theories. Facts are recounted, the Jihad of 1804 tried to conquer what we now call the Middle Belt and failed. Surely, the only reason Buhari would have sought power was to complete the objective of his forefathers. Self-help then becomes self-fulfilling prophesy. To stop the Jihad, herders are killed and their cattle stolen. When they retaliate, it becomes evidence that the objective of the Jihad is being pursued with vigour. When Muslim farmers are killed in Zamfara State, there is a rational explanation, its banditry and criminality. When Christian farmers are killed in Benue, its Jihad and religious war. No one wants to know if criminality and banditry has spread into Benue as well. As for the herders, no one remembers their history, that in the past five hundred years, these headers have never tried to settle on a specific piece of land.
Fake news does not exist in a vacuum, it thrives in a gullible environment where people have been trained to accept emotive single narratives. Of course, the lack of effective response to growing insecurity by government and its security agencies provides the empirical basis for conspiracy theories. If government is not stopping the killings, then it means they want the killings to continue and grow. They may be even the ones funding it. Few people are ready to consider the alternative explanation of simple incompetence of President Buhari and his security team. The President knows fully well that the security team he has appointed are not performing and he has stubbornly retained them. He therefore has direct responsibility for the growing belief in the conspiracy theories. The Government tells Nigerians on a daily basis that they will end the insecurity facing the country but we are not told how and when so citizens are compelled to explore alternative sources of information and explanation.
The reality on the ground today is that the combination of fake news, hate speech and poor governance have deepened the polarisation of Nigeria along ethnic, religious and regional lines. The crisis of pastoralism has been re-written as communal and religious war. Reassurance from government is necessary to dispel fears within certain communities that the Buhari "Deep State" is targeting them. Government policy must be clear that no livestock production models would be imposed on any community. Competent leadership must be sought to improve the security situation in the country. Above all, all of us Nigerians must seek to be less gullible. The spirit and the skills of the verification of what we hear and see must improve if we are to get out of the trap of mutual self-destruction. It will take time to rebuild trust but let's begin by fact-checking what we are told so that the fear that the other has plans to destroy us can begin to recede. Let's start resisting profiling the other as the incarnation of evil that we must destroy by pre-emtive moves. The task of combatting fake news and hate speech is every body's responsibility.
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim
Senior Fellow
Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja
Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17
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