Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Agbedo, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam, is a contributing analyst to USAfrica.
There is a bitter irony in the last name of Ruth Maclean, The New York Times correspondent in West Africa who authored the January 18, 2026, controversial report from Onitsha, Nigeria, on the issue of the killing of Christians in parts of the country. Maclean sought to whitewash and make a mockery of the facts. She undertook the work of a terribly biased undertaker rather than that of a fair and objective reporter. For what her report ultimately delivered was not illumination but embalming a carefully staged hit job and burial of incredible complexity — with the South Eastern Nigerian activist, Emeka Umeagbalasi, laid out as the principal cadaver.
In the article, the reader first meets Mr. Emeka Umeagbalasi not as a rights activist or researcher, but as a physical curiosity; a “short man,” one earbud dangling, weaving through sugarcane and wheelbarrows to a tiny stall of screwdrivers and wrenches. Before his ideas are interrogated, his poverty is catalogued. Before his claims are tested, his market stall is measured. The insinuation is subtle but unmistakable. How could truth possibly emerge from such a place? From that moment, the report marches steadily toward its burial site.
Umeagbalasi is accused, in effect, of having midwifed a global delusion, that Christians are being systematically slaughtered in Nigeria, a narrative supposedly powerful enough to animate U.S. Republican lawmakers and even to echo alongside American airstrikes. His data are dismissed as unverifiable, his methods casual, his sources “secondary,” his assumptions crude.
He is allowed to speak, but only so that his words may indict him. He is profiled, but as a warning label, not as a participant in a violent and data-starved national tragedy. Thus, the “screwdriver seller” becomes the screwdriver in the story, the small tool with which a vast diplomatic machine is supposedly dismantled.
Here, the journalism turns unclean.
While Mr. Umeagbalasi was being, symbolically and literally, buried in the pages of The New York Times, reality was busy refusing to cooperate with their reporter’s script.
On January 20, 2026, barely forty-eight hours after Maclean’s literary inquest, USAfricaonline.com reported that “gunmen” had abducted more than 160 worshippers from two churches in northern Nigeria. The report quoted Reverend Joseph Hayab, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria in the North, who said church elders told him that 172 worshippers were seized and only nine escaped. He described attackers arriving in large numbers, blocking the church entrances, and forcing congregants into the surrounding bush.
No Google search was cited.
No screwdriver stall was described.
No ear-bud dangled from his ear.
Yet, the horror was real.
One is tempted, then, to ask: where was Ruth Maclean? Where was The New York Times? Was Reverend Hayab also interviewed between spanners and wheelbarrows? Does he sell pliers after Sunday service? Should his cassock be checked for hidden hardware before his testimony is allowed into the discredited temples of many American and European media?
Or is credibility, like baptismal water, sprinkled selectively?
In Maclean’s universe, the scandal is not that Nigerians are being kidnapped in their churches; the scandal is that a Nigerian dared to count them imperfectly. The American empire, in this telling, does not act from ideology, from domestic culture wars, from evangelical lobbying networks, from strategic calculations, or from the gravitational pull of the arms industry. No. It acts because a man in Onitsha owns a shop that sells screwdrivers. This is not political analysis; it is folklore. Power does not flow upward from market stalls to the White House. It flows downward, from senators seeking re-election, from churches seeking converts, from contractors seeking wars, from think tanks seeking relevance, from lobbyists seeking their next invoice.
And here lies another grave Maclean declined to exhume: the reported $9 million lobbying contract linked to the Tinubu administration, designed to manage Nigeria’s image and counter damaging narratives in Washington. That is not the economy of screwdrivers. It is the economy of influence, polished, expensive, and professionally deceptive. But that story is untidy. It implicates boardrooms. It dirties manicured Western hands. So it is easier to scrub one Nigerian man instead. Thus, Maclean performs an unclean ritual: washing the empire’s fingerprints off the weapon and wiping them onto the shirt of a screwdriver merchant.
None of this is to canonise Emeka Umeagbalasi. If his figures are inflated, his assumptions lazy, his verification weak, he deserves criticism. Advocacy dressed as statistics can inflame fear and distort policy. But criticism is not scapegoating. Nigeria’s killing fields are real. Its kidnapping economy is real. Its church raids are real. Its countless dead are real. Mass suffering does not vanish because a dataset is imperfect. Victims do not pause to ask whether their tragedy satisfies the methodological preferences of a New York newsroom.
If The New York Times wished to practice genuine investigative journalism, it would widen its lens to: Reverend Hayab in the North, to villages emptied by fear in the Middle Belt, to Muslim communities equally ravaged, to the lobbying firms drafting talking points in Washington, to the politicians monetising faith, to the Nigerian state that cannot, or will not, count its dead. Those are the stories that demand investigation.
Instead, readers were offered a small burial in Onitsha, officiated by a correspondent whose surname promises cleanliness but whose work leaves a moral stain that stinks to high heavens. In the end, Emeka Umeagbalasi may be a flawed activist. But he is not the architect of Nigeria’s bloodshed. And, Reverend Joseph Hayab is not a screwdriver merchant, unless Ruth Maclean chooses to invest him with one in her next ‘investigative’ report.
The real scandal is not that Nigerians speak imperfectly about their wounds, but that powerful newspapers listen selectively, ears deliberately tuned not to suffering, but to salacious stories that flatter their empire’s innocence. That is the truly unclean job. And no surname, however hygienic it sounds, can wash it away.
In our Igbo land, we say that the man who refuses to visit the stream should not boast of clean hands. One does not avoid the mud of the riverbank and still claim mastery of the water. Another proverb warns that the chicken that perches on the fence belongs neither to the compound nor to the forest; it pretends neutrality, yet feeds on both sides.
So it is with journalism that baptises itself “objective” while choosing, carefully, which tears deserve ink and which must evaporate in silence.
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