NUJ Has No Mandate to Police Journalism in Nigeria, and Secrets Reporters Will Never Join It

We have read your press statement of 10 November 2026, and we reply without mincing words.

First, nobody gave the Nigeria Union of Journalists a mandate to police journalism in Nigeria. The NUJ is a trade union, a voluntary association of employees. It is not a regulator, not a licensing authority, not a standards body and not a court. No law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and certainly not the Constitution, empowers the NUJ to set the rules, ethics or standards of journalism for anyone, to accredit media organisations, or to summon publishers to identify themselves before its secretariat. Absence from your membership register is not an offence known to Nigerian law, and your "records of recognised media organisations" are a membership list, nothing more.

Section 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 guarantees every Nigerian the freedom of expression, including the freedom to own, establish and operate any medium for the dissemination of information, ideas and opinions. Section 22 obliges the press to hold government accountable to the people. Neither section mentions the NUJ, and neither makes the practice of journalism conditional on the blessing of a union. We therefore do not require your recognition to publish, and we will not be applying for it.

Second, your statement is built on fog. It announces complaints from unnamed members of the public, unnamed public officials and unnamed journalists, alleges blackmail and extortion without naming one story, one victim, one date or one shred of evidence, and then hides behind the word "alleged". A statement that verifies nothing while preaching verification is itself a confession. It also attacks a Facebook platform styling itself "Secret Reporter". Let this be stated without ambiguity: Secrets Reporters is not a Facebook-based platform. Facebook is one window through which our work is distributed, nothing more. Secrets Reporters is a registered media organisation that has practised investigative journalism for over a decade, publishing on its own masthead at www.secretsreporter.com, and its publisher is a matter of public record. If your quarrel is with an anonymous Facebook page, have the courage to say exactly that, and stop smearing by insinuation.

And since your statement presumes to grade the professional standing of others, we issue a dare to the man who signed it. Tita Onyebuchi Nze, Assistant National Secretary, we dare you to produce any credible publication of yours, any single one, that has caused a policy change in this country, the way our publications have done again and again. Our stories stand in the open, on the record, with documents attached, and their consequences are a matter of public history. Produce yours, or withdraw to the silence from which this statement should never have emerged.

And let the record be corrected on who we are. Secrets Reporters is not a Nigerian medium. It is an international medium that reports on Nigeria and Africa to the world, read across continents, and next year it pivots into a different global brand. Our horizon was never your chapel register, and our standing does not rise or fall by anything issued from your secretariat.

Third, your own statement destroys itself. In it, the NUJ concedes that it has "no institutional or professional jurisdiction" over the platform. That is the only accurate sentence in the entire document. Having conceded that you have no jurisdiction, the sermons that follow are noise, and your call on our people to "come forward" and disclose themselves to the Union is rejected. We account to our readers, and where the law requires it, to the courts. We do not account to a union secretariat.

Fourth, on ethics, let the record be plain. Secrets Reporters will not take lectures on ethics from the brown-envelope school of Nigerian journalism. We do not practise cash-and-carry journalism. We do not practise PR journalism dressed up as news. No brown envelope buys a story on our platform, and no brown envelope kills one. Our stories stand on documents, and we publish the documents for every reader to judge. If the NUJ wishes to clean up Nigerian journalism, it can begin by naming the chapels where envelopes change hands before headlines are written, instead of issuing statements against media houses that refuse to play that game.

Fifth, since the NUJ has raised the question of professional standing, let its own record answer. This is a profession, speaking through its union, that has failed to protect its own. Again and again, Nigerian journalists have been arrested, detained, beaten and hounded for doing the work Section 22 of the Constitution assigns them, and the union that now preaches responsibility has too often been missing, muted or late. Worse than failing to protect its own, it has sacrificed its own, abandoning inconvenient journalists to the anger of the powerful whenever solidarity became expensive, and reserving its loudest voice for statements like this one, aimed not at the oppressors of journalists but at journalists themselves. A union that cannot shield its members from the state has no business lecturing independent media on accountability.

Understand this clearly: we will never have a reason to join the Nigeria Union of Journalists. Not today, not under compulsion of statements like this, not ever. There is nothing in your register that we need, nothing in your recognition that we seek, and nothing in your protection that experience suggests we could rely on if it were ever tested.

So let the real journalists be. Leave alone the journalists who actually understand what Section 22 means, who know that holding government accountable to the people is a constitutional duty and not a favour begged from the powerful, and go about your normal business. Go on your normal visits to the politicians, the businessmen and the others whose favour your circuit runs on. Continue the normal charade of awards you hand to them, year after year, while the journalists who do the dangerous work are disowned in press statements. That is the NUJ's chosen trade, and everyone in this country can see it for what it is. It is not ours.

You advised members of the public who feel aggrieved to seek redress through law enforcement agencies and other statutory authorities. That advice is sound, and it applies to everyone, including this organisation, which reserves all its rights in law in respect of the defamatory insinuations contained in your statement.

Secrets Reporters will continue to practise journalism without the permission of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, because no such permission is required.

Secrets Reporters

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

www.secretsreporter.com

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