ABSTRACT
On March 4, 1984, the Nigerian Television Authority’s Benin City station screened “A Squandering of Riches,” a documentary film co-produced by NTA and the BBC. It examined the political and economic crisis which had recently led to the military overthrow of the Second Republic. The film’s narrator was Onyeka Onwenu, a pop singer whose song videos were frequently broadcast on Nigerian television. Onwenu’s program was indeed a rare phenomenon in Nigerian television broadcasting. The chapter discusses the issue of personalization with friends and informants, including media gatekeepers and prominent local people. The contemporary left critique of mass culture is much concerned with personal issues as trivialization and the conversion of the political into the personal. The perspective raises a question about the apparent ease with which American television programmes cross cultural and linguistic frontiers. The chapter attempts an unabashedly speculative explanation for the relative absence of personalized journalism from Nigerian print media during the early part of the 1980s.
