Selective Outrage: Are we guilty of ignoring human suffering?

Photo credit: Mazi Nwonwu

Years ago, a Dana aircraft travelling from Abuja to Lagos ploughed into a two-storey building in the Iju area of Lagos killing everyone on board and some others on the ground. News of the crash soon spread as social media went abuzz. In the ensuing weeks, the fatal incident hogged the headlines on blogs and websites, while many dedicated status updates to mourn the departed, especially those on board the plane.

As is common with Nigerians, some constituted informal committees to measure how certain people mourned: Did he/she cry enough; or show enough concern by taking one week off work? Was the government’s three-day mourning period too short? Did the officials who lost bosses or subordinates in the crash mourn for a respectable enough period?

Questions were asked and people were called out.

Grieving family members of the deceased became topics on websites, where their love (or lack thereof) for the deceased relative(s) was questioned. In all, Nigerians, – mostly elites –, voiced their collective pain until it became fashionable to be identified with your sorrow.

While this was going on, mostly forgotten, or pushed to the sidelines, were the victims of a devastating bomb blast in the north of the country on the same day. These people were not mourned on social media; no national day of mourning was called to mark their demise; no profiles were created for them on Facebook and very few blogs marked their passing.

Social media – despite its penchant for crying more than the bereaved – tends to remain strangely silent for many of the people killed by bomb blasts, or in frequent road accidents. This is true for the victims of Boko Haram’s cowardly bomb blasts as it is for the many dead in Baga, Bama and victims of other atrocities that afflict the lower class.

It is truly worrisome that the only other time Nigerian social media shuddered in collective anger and anguish was when news broke of four young men visited with a brutal but common enough form of mob justice by some residents of the Aluu community in Rivers State. The noise was massive and blogs, as with the Dana plane crash, screamed the names of the victims. All you needed to do was type ‘Aluu 4′ into the Google search bar and every existing detail about these victims of man’s inhumanity to man was available. The unfortunate quartet were university undergraduates of middle-class parentage.

A few days before the Aluu 4 incident, unknown persons who remain subjects of speculation and beer parlour gossip had summarily executed an estimated forty-six students of the Federal Polytechnic in Mubi, Adamawa State and neighbouring schools. That tragedy was met with less outrage.

The ‘why’ has been debated, but I think it is quite simple: unlike the killings in Aluu, there was no video footage recording man’s hatred for man in Mubi. There were no pictures to show baby-faced boys in their prime begging for their lives as their compatriots drove their souls from their young bodies. There was nothing, only conflicting accounts of persons killed and those responsible.

Perhaps without the visual catalysts to identify the victims and the brutality of the act, social media did not erupt; the urban professionals and social media-savvy students at the forefront of both the Dana crash and Aluu incidents were largely silent.

It would have been apt here to talk about double standards and the claim that people down south do not pay much heed to what occurs in the north, but since this is far from the truth, I will not go that route. The truth is not even anywhere near as complex as many may think and allude to. The truth is that in the age of social media, with news happening at an ever-increasing speed, visual and audio stimuli determine what people take seriously enough to share.

For the Dana Air crash, the images and back-stories of those who died were immediately available and many of the deceased (onboard) had profiles that most people familiar with social media could relate with. For the Aluu 4, being university undergraduates and also active social media users with friends who easily provided background data was a big catalyst to the social media blitz that followed.

Many of us show lukewarm interest in tragedies that impact the common man. While I can stress other examples that, taken within a context would seemingly exonerate many of us from blame, it is largely true that we are failing a large section of Nigeria by not doing enough to highlight their plight.

It might not seem so, but the truth is that class and location play essential roles in who we chose to mourn or mourn with. It is as an old Igbo proverb says: “The corpse of a stranger is like firewood by the roadside.”

As such, someone needs to make victims of every tragedy less of a stranger, to seek out and bring their backstories to light. Someone needs to highlight the plight of those who do not have the means or the skills to tell their own stories via social media.

It is important that Nigerian media do more to tell these untold stories so that we do not become too selective in the lives we mourn.

The piece was first published by telegraphng.com