Nigeria is not all gloom. However, anyone who reads newspapers, watches television or follows social media could be forgiven for thinking that it is a country permanently sinking beneath the weight of violence, insecurity, religious division, kidnappings, corruption and institutional failure.
There are, undeniably, heart-rending stories of communities wiped out by violence, citizens abducted for extortionate ransoms, criminal attacks on public institutions, and the daily anxieties of people trying to live normal lives in abnormal circumstances. These realities must neither be denied nor softened. Journalism that conceals suffering is not patriotic; it is dishonest.
But Nigeria is also a country of enterprise, resilience, cultural influence, scientific and technological promise, institutional experimentation and ordinary citizens building lives in circumstances that might defeat many others elsewhere. However, the existence of these realities does not guarantee that they will be reported well, told consistently or made visible beyond the country’s borders. Spin-doctors and image launderers within and outside the country have not managed to string a compelling, complete story.
A new army of narrators is parading in cyberspace. This horde is ultra-critical, angry and bitter about Nigeria, not just the government. They make the nation’s failures more alarming and more memorable than the quiet achievements of communities and individuals. They give the nation’s crises new wings to command more negative attention than its progress.
The result is an incomplete national narrative: a portrait of Nigeria based on one-sided information, but not enough from the other side of the same coin. Every country has bad stories. And journalists should expose crime, bad governance and human suffering. They must. However, why is Nigeria so often represented through a narrow selection of its ugliest realities?
Nigeria has no shortage of official communicators. Unfortunately, much of their work appears “defensive” rather than communicative. It often consists of attacking critics, dismissing adverse reports as opposition propaganda, or treating negative coverage as something to be defeated.
The approach is both inadequate and strategically misguided. Nigeria’s image does not improve simply by insisting that Nigeria has been unfairly portrayed. The first obligation of strategic communication is to truthfully explain national reality, not blind defence of every official action.
Defensive posturing often confirms the suspicion that government is unwilling to confront uncomfortable facts; it does not repair reputational damage. Credible national communication begins with an acknowledgement of what is wrong: the scale of the problem, measures being taken and evidence of progress. Anything less is public relations in its most brittle form.
All told, the responsibility for telling Nigeria’s story cannot rest with government alone. Indeed, government officials cannot be trusted to tell the full story if their only task is to defend those in power. Nigerian journalists, researchers, civil-society organisations, writers and filmmakers, historians and all, have a part to play. They must investigate abuse, expose failure and record injustice/s. But they must also balance by documenting institutions that work, communities that adapt, innovators who create solutions, and citizens whose daily achievements complicate the familiar tale of national decline.
Nigeria is vast and diverse. Africa’s most populous nation needs more than crisis reporting. It needs a durable body of new narratives that explains the country to Nigerians and the world; positive and difficult-to-find stories because they lack spectacle or the immediacy of disaster.
When negative associations are repeatedly reinforced, they can become the default lens through which a country is understood. Psychologists call this a negative schema: a mental framework through which people organise and interpret information. It is when a challenge ceases to be seen as one specific problem and assumes the principal framework through which all Nigerian realities are judged.
A negative schema is more enduring than a negative opinion. An opinion may change when fresh evidence appears. A schema shapes the new evidence, how people see and interpret it, and what they remember afterwards. Once a schema is established, every success is treated as exceptional, and the deeper assumption that the nation is fundamentally dysfunctional becomes difficult to alter.
It is how reputational inertia develops. Earlier failures remain active in collective memory long after circumstances have changed. The old narrative becomes self-reinforcing; new negative events confirm and/or reinforce it, while positive developments are treated as temporary, marginal or unrepresentative.
The danger also affects national self-image. As public conversation increasingly becomes a competition over who can offer the most devastating account of Nigeria’s failures, citizens may begin to internalise a diminished understanding of their own country. As expectations fall, cynicism transfigures and becomes sophistication. Evidence of possibility is dismissed as naïveté. A nation attempting to change its reality is then trapped by the negative narrative through which that reality continues to be interpreted.
Telling the full Nigerian story is beyond a cosmetic public-relations exercise; more than a sanitised image or an official counter-story. A fuller story restores national confidence and pride, strengthens informed citizenship and ensures that Nigeria is not permanently defined by its worst chapters. It demands more honest communication and a greater willingness to hold contradictory realities together.
Nigeria needs communicators who can defend the country without denying its problems; journalists who can expose failure without reducing the country to it; and researchers who can document Nigerian realities with rigour and proportion. Truth is not the enemy of national interest. But neither is national interest served by denial or an incomplete truth.
The question is not simply who will tell Nigeria’s story. It is whether those with the responsibility, resources and imagination will be allowed to do so or rise above the politics of defence and denunciation and tell the whole truth.
Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant, Teacher and Chairman, Board of Businessday Newspaper
