Jacob's Opinion

Professor Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob of the School of Arts & Science has advocated a more communitarian role for journalists in Nigeria to help counter violent extremism in the country.

Professor Jacob was speaking recently in Abuja, on ‘New Perspectives in War and Peace Reporting’ at a Media Roundtable on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) organised by the Office of t...

Few heartwarming stories come from Nigeria’s northeast region. In the last two years, the Boko Haram insurgency, poverty, Islamist fundamentalism and youth disenfranchisement have dominated news from the three states that make up the region. I was therefore overwhelmed last week when I ran into an inspiring story of women empowerment at the sidelines of the

I recently asked my first year media students at the American University of Nigeria to stay off social  media (including Whatsapp, Facebook, Tw...

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau

The Englishman, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) later renowned as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in David Lean’s classic was one of the most bizarre guerrilla entrepreneurs during the First World War. Lawrence joined Arab Sheiks rebelling against Turkey, then an ally of Germany. With support from the British, Lawrence organised Sheiks and their followe...

China Central Television (CCTV) is making some bold in-roads into Africa. It has recently announced several technical vacancies in its east African operations. It is interesting that while the UK government is cutting back spending on BBC World Service, China is expand...

While the international community continues to dither over Somalia, Islamic fundamentalists have taken over control of the country’s information space and other key strategic assets. This article discusses the precarious media environment in Somalia and revisits discourses on Information Intervention, conceptualised by Jamie Metzl in 1997. It examines the nature of UN’s ‘Information Intervention’ in Somalia and argues that the international community can do more by dra...

This is a dynamic mapping of the crises in Libya compiled from tweets from trusted accounts on Twitter. Due to the difficulty faced by international journalists in their coverage of the Libyan crises, regular tweets from trusted sources on ground are invaluable. The open source protests in North Africa has been markedly leveraged by the open source r...

While the EU, the UN and the US are wondering what to do with Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is digging in. He's taken back the key town of Zawiyah and pushing relentlessly to take back the oil town Ras Lanuf. The EU in its meeting on Friday in Brussels seemed to be unable to reach a common position on the imposition of no-fly zone in Libya. If Gaddafi is determined to use violence against Libyans, there is nothing much a no-fly zone can do to stop him. A no-fly zone as a stand-al...

The situation in Somalia is becoming more troubling. Al-Qaeda linked Islamist groups Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam have intensified their operations against independent Somali media institutions. They recently seized two radio stations and will now use them to broadcast their ...

Rape is not uncommon in times of war. During the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia for instance, tens of thousands of women were raped in an organised and systematic manner. In the Rwandan genocide of 1994 several thousands of women were also raped. There are cases also in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Vietnam, Biafra and in several other conflicts where rape was used for the purpose of humiliating, shaming, degrading and even terrifying the enemy society. Indeed rape in warf...