Jonathan Elendu a Nigerian blogger at ElenduReports was picked up by the Nigerian secret service at the Lagos airport upon arrival from the United States. He was subsequently released after an eventful week in custody. A second blogger Emeka Asiwe of huhuonline was subsequently picked up upon his arrival in Lagos from the United States. Below is a compendium of comment that other bloggers have made as this events have unfolded.
Why is the SSS hounding bloggers for publishing this photo? Any journalist worth his sort would gladly publish a big scoop like this. About Musa Yar’Adua gleefully holding some Naira notes in another shot, I am confused as to the motive of whoever took the photo. If it was taken by a matured person, the photographer was obviously exploiting the boy’s naivety but why blame bloggers for publishing the photo?
Grandiose Palour quotes the Punchnewspapers, a National newspaper in Nigeria. Uwadi, Naapali, Africa is Not a Country, Aloted, Tales and Tallies, Appfrica, Okey,
Nigerian Hiphop throws in a quote: “The people who believe they are free are the most enslaved”. While Ebekuo reviews the history of harassment of the press in Nigeria (not for the faint hearted).
To simply detain, torture and maltreat another human being is unacceptable, no matter where or why, particularly as that person, in this case, Jonathan Elendu, had not been charged or convicted of any crime.
I think it is sickening and outrageous that anyone who suffers at the macabre hands of the rotten abuse of power in Nigeria should seek immediate medical treatment after release from custody and there are many who do for all sorts of reasons, the least of which is most definitely reprehensible.
In September, six local reporters and media executives were detained and questioned after a television channel reported, after receiving a hoax e-mail, that the president planned to resign.
A number of comments by bloggers and readers have described the arrest as a regression back to those ugly military days but if one scrapes the surface a clear pattern and culture of media repression and torture emerges throughout the post Abacha civilian period. Also that he may have been totured.
Beauty channelled Wole Soyinka (Nigerian’s only Nobel Prize winner:
Viciousness, slander, and disrespect for people’s individual choices and private lives are not criticism. They are poisons that harm the freedom of individuals and social harmony, whether they appear on the Internet or in society.
Waffarian alerts the blog world of a special squad funded by the government of online writers.
It does feel great to know he has been freed. Free in the sense that he is no longer in the custody of the SSS. But that his travel documents remain “arrested” gives a different definition to being Freed. Elendu cannot return to the US to meet his wife and kid who, one can only imagine, must have been imagining the Nigerian brand of torture which their loved one might be going through.
As a citizen, I have the God given right to say all this and as a human being, I can do that also. If you are not going to do anything good with yourselves, at least don’t do anything worse. Let the man go, if he has not said anything true, why are you worried? And if he did do something unconstitutional, there are the appropriate channels to bring him to justice.
