Nigeria Content Online

Omoyele Sowore, a fair-complexioned man with a round face, was
having lunch – pounded yam and okra soup – at a packed and noisy African
restaurant in the Bronx District of New York that Monday afternoon when one of
his three mobile telephones rang. As Sowore, 39, a New-York-based blogger,
journalist and activist, munched his meal, he spoke in low tones to the caller
at the other end.

Sowore is the founder and chief reporter of one of sub-Saharan
Africa’s most popular and feared websites. A major story was unfolding in his
native Nigeria that day and the caller, a ‘top confidential source within the
ruling establishment’ (he said at the time) had called to offer him a scoop.

“Are you saying he is being flown abroad tonight? Who are those
accompanying him?” Sowore asked, raising his voice a little above the din. Then
he went quiet for a while as he listened attentively to the informant’s
response, his left hand pressing the phone to his left ear and his right hand
making a rhythmic journey between his plate and his mouth.

The call over, after about ten minutes, a smile sprouted from
the edges of Sowore’s lips. He then cut short his lunch, paid his bill and
hurried to his car, a green Toyota Highlander, parked four blocks away. He
flung open the trunk of the car and pulled out a backpack containing a white,
internet-ready Apple computer. Standing by the front door of the car, his
laptop placed on the driver’s seat, Sowore placed more calls to two other
sources in Abuja.

He then pounded out a news report announcing to the world that
the Nigerian president, Musa Yar’Adua, had fallen terribly ill and was being
rushed to a Saudi hospital. The report went live on Saharareporters.com at
exactly 1p.m. – a full five hours before an official statement from the
presidential villa announcing the trip. Sowore thus became the first to report
the beginning of a journey from which Yar’Adua never returned.

Mr Sowore’s distinctions are legion. In the five years that he
has run his site, he has become Nigeria’s version of Julian Assange, the
controversial Australian internet activist. His blog, SaharaReporters.com, is
also as audacious as Assange’s WikiLeaks, a secret-spilling organization that
publishes sensitive and classified documents that would have been otherwise
unavailable to the public. In fact, Philip Shenon, a former investigative
reporter for The New York Times, and author of “The Commission: The Uncensored
History of the 9/11 Investigation”, in a recent article for the Daily
Beast,referred to SaharaReporters as Africa’s WikiLeaks. But while Assange
scouts the entire world for sensitive and confidential documents, Sowore has
made Nigeria his forte.

Operating from a cubicle in an expansive office he shares with
another media organization in mid-Manhattan, Sowore documents sordid details of
corruption, misgovernance,dishonesty and ineptitude by Nigerian government
officials, institutions,corporations and individuals.

“Our mission is to do as much evidence-based reporting as
possible. We want to make sure that we consistently shame and make life
difficult for the thieves plundering Nigeria and holding down the country’s
progress,” Sowore, who also teaches Modern African History at the City
University of New York and Post Colonial African History at the School of
Visual Arts, New York, said with a snort of disgust one recent Wednesday
afternoon, as he worked on an article accusing Nigeria’s President Goodluck
Jonathan of profligacy.

Although Sowore is based in New York, 5, 269 miles from
Nigeria, he has become the nemesis of many a corrupt and inept official in his
country. He has amassed a long list of trusted sources within Nigeria’s ruling
establishment and its corporate world. And his website, in recent years, has
become one of the most visited and trusted sources of news on the oil-rich West
African nation.

According to Alexa, an organization that tracks site traffic
around the world, SaharaReporters is among the top 10 most visited news sites
in Nigeria. It’s Facebook page also buzzes with activity.

Sowore moves around New York with a roller case containing an
i-Pad, two Apple laptops permanently hooked to the internet, three mobile
phones, a T-Mobile line devoted to text messaging, a Verizon line for voice
calls and another T-Mobile line exclusively for international calls. “I’m like
a doctor. I get a lot of emergency calls, and an average of 30 calls a day from
my sources in Nigeria and other parts of the world,” he said one recent Friday
evening as he drove out of a parking lot in Manhattan.

He also has a backpack containing a canon rebel camera for
still photography, a Panasonic Lumix camcorder, an extra pair of clothing and
some toiletries, in case he is not able to make it back to his New Jersey home
because of a breaking story.With these tools, the blogger has broken a large
number of major stories that have made a huge impact on the country of 150
million people, including bringing down some highly placed government
officials.

“The fear of SaharaReporters is the beginning of wisdom for
corrupt officials in Nigeria and the joke in the country is that politicians,
public office holders, security officials, corporate giants and other well
placed individuals do not go to bed without checking SaharaReporters,” Bukola
Oreofe, a New York-based pro-democracy activist, who has followed the site from
its inception, said. “And when they wake up in the morning, they also rush to
check whether SaharaReporters has published their indiscretions or exposed
their hidden skeletons.”

Site for exposing evil

From presidents to state governors, senators to ministers, and
businessmen to anti-corruption operatives, Sowore’s website has exposed and
disgraced more than a few public officials. He has also pelted successive
administrations with scathing criticisms. It was SaharaReporters which
consistently published the accounts of the corrupt acts of a former Nigerian
Justice Minister, Mike Aondoakaa, until the Barack Obama administration could
tolerate the official no more. His U.S. visa was cancelled and he and his
family were barred from entering the United States. For years, Sowore beamed
his searchlight on James Ibori, a former state governor of Delta State and
steadily assailed the Nigerian government with embarrassing information of his
alleged plunder of state resources. The former governor escaped to Dubai when
the government moved to prosecute him. He was later arrested in Dubai where he
is facing an extradition trial.

Nigeria,OPEC’s sixth largest producer of crude and one of
America’s top suppliers of oil, is Africa’s most populous country and the
world’s most populous black nation. Although it has enormous oil resources,
earning about $25 billion a year according to the Revenue Watch Institute, it
remains among the poorest countries in the world, ranking 158th out of the 182
countries rated in the United Nation’s most recent Human Development Index.

Corruption is rife, with a huge chunk of the country’s revenue
routinely stolen by corrupt administration officials and their collaborators in
the corporate world.Unemployment is skyrocketing. Basic infrastructures are
broken down. And the country’s elections are usually flawed, its leaders often
lacking legitimacy.

“Sowore is angry at a Nigerian nation that has huge potential for success
but has remained largely underdeveloped,” said Shola Oshunkeye, an editor with
Nigeria’s Sun newspapers during a recent visit to New York. “As a result of his
anger, Sowore is usually restless and applies no breaks in pushing to the
public domain any information that could expose the ineptitude,insincerity,
corruption and wheeling-dealing tendencies of the country’s public officials.”