Information minister Lai Mohammed instructed the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to penalise Trust TV with a N5 million fine for its factual March 5 documentary titled “Nigeria’s Banditry: The Inside Story” after former BBC journalist Kadaria Ahmed wrote a tendentious, professionally questionable screed questioning a subsequent July 25 BBC Africa Eye documentary titled “The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara.”
In the aftermath of Kadaria Ahmed’s article, Lai Mohammed, who had been fishing for excuses to muzzle the news media whose reporting dramatised the inability or unwillingness of the government to resolve the progressively festering problem of banditry in the North, told State House correspondents on July 28 that the BBC “will not get away with” its insightful documentary which nonetheless embarrassed the government, and that “appropriate sanctions will be meted to both the BBC and the Trust Tv.”
On August 3, the NBC imposed a N5…
