What, an aborted ‘phantom’ coup?

Like life itself, journalism is a cycle of fat and lean seasons. Sometimes, you struggle to get a good story to report, and the newsroom must use all its enterprise to generate good stories. At other times, however, so many big stories pop up all at once that the struggle is no longer about getting […]

Like life itself, journalism is a cycle of fat and lean seasons. Sometimes, you struggle to get a good story to report, and the newsroom must use all its enterprise to generate good stories. At other times, however, so many big stories pop up all at once that the struggle is no longer about getting what to report, but over how to do all or which to emphasise the most. This is true of news journalism as it is of the journalism of commentary that we do on this page.

As a columnist this past week, I wish I had three more columns to talk about the different issues that have surfaced in the wider Nigerian politics, economics, and society over the past several days, from the lecturers’ strike to claims of genocide against Nigeria by US officials, and from disastrous presidential pardons to rumours of an attempted or aborted coup. A lot of journalism is selection and emphasis, but it was still no easy task for me to settle on the latest and perhaps the most politically consequential of the big stories in the news over the past week.  

It is still not clear whether there was an attempt to forcibly remove the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu by a military coup or not. It is also not clear whether there was an attempt at a “phantom coup”. In Nigerian military politics, we might have a successful coup, an attempted or aborted coup, or a phantom coup, which is a journalistic parlance for a fake coup staged by a sitting government purely for political purposes. In Nigeria, all three are extremely serious events, and all three have happened or reportedly happened before. So, which was it?

Sahara Reporters and Premium Times each reported over the weekend that there was a coup attempt. Both papers linked the government’s cancellation of Independence Day celebrations on October 1 to the arrest of 16 military officers as announced by the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) four days later on October 4. The two papers also doubled down on their allegations of a coup attempt with additional information like the names or affiliations of those allegedly involved (Sahara Reporters), and the date of the planned attack and names of current government officials allegedly targeted for “hit” by the alleged plotters (Premium Times).

The uproar from this reporting by the two papers compelled the DHQ to issue a categorical denial, insisting that the arrest of the officers was a routine disciplinary issue with no connection to the cancellation of the celebrations or any coup whatsoever. The presidency, meanwhile, has neither confirmed nor denied the story, at least up to the time of writing this Sunday afternoon. Whether there has been an aborted real coup or an aborted phantom coup, I cannot say. But I can say that regardless what actually happened, both the DHQ and the two newspapers have managed information about this extremely sensitive issue very poorly, and recklessly in the specific case of the newspapers.  

On October 4, 2025, the DHQ issued a public statement announcing the arrest of 16 serving military officers as part of an internal disciplinary process. However, the last paragraph of the DHQ statement also reads: “The Armed Forces will not tolerate behaviour that undermines the integrity of the institution or threatens its constitutional role under democratic authority. The Armed Forces of Nigeria remains fully committed to its constitutional responsibilities and will remain professional at all times.”

Why would the DHQ make a public ritual out of a routine disciplinary action? And why use such a broad and serious language for a routine issue? By its public announcement of an everyday disciplinary action and by linking this specific issue to the broader loyalty of the military to democratic authorities, the DHQ itself opened space for dangerous speculation by anyone with sufficient political motivation and interest. This is at best careless on the part of the DHQ in a country where speculations, innuendoes, rumours and outright falsehoods are the dominant stuff of politics, rather than fact or evidence. 

But the two newspapers have done worse. Nigerian newspapers have historically been sites for rumours of military coups, thereby priming the public towards the real thing when it happens. Depending on who is involved or the political mood of the day, our newspapers have also legitimised some coups by celebrating them as “revolutionary” or “far-sighted” actions, just as they have dismissed other coups as “phantom” events. To date the January 1966 and the Orkar 1990 coups are still framed positively in the press, while those allegedly attempted under Abacha were quickly dismissed as being contrived by the government itself.

In other words, Nigerian political history shows that some people can stage a coup to forcefully overthrow the government, while a sitting government could also fake a phantom coup purely for pursuing certain political ends. Both situations have extreme ramifications. An attempted real coup will seek to derail our democracy which is a treasonable illegality in our current constitutional order that we cannot accept no matter who is involved. A phantom coup, on the other hand, will strengthen the current government’s hands and give it de facto wide powers that could easily be abused. This would also be unacceptable in a political context where the current government has been widely accused of using all means fair and foul to stifle dissent or compromise it. Moreover, a military coup is directly a life and death matter in Nigeria, whether it is successful, aborted or just phantom. Rumours of a coup could also throw the whole country into turmoil, given our fragile fault lines and how these have sometimes been invoked during previous military coups by plotters, the press, and even the Nigerian public.

After 26 years of interrupted democracy, the implication of the foregoing history, for the press, therefore, is that news reporting about an attempted coup in Nigeria—real or not—is extremely sensitive and must be treated with the highest level of journalistic seriousness. Were Sahara Reporters and Premium Times sufficiently professional in their reporting of this issue so far?

For me, they have not. Both papers only cited unnamed “top” military or intelligence sources, and then reproduced copious statements and quotes, but nothing that looks like verifiable evidence, which is a sine qua non for a story of this magnitude to pass the editorial gates.

I don’t know what information was available to the editors of these papers, but I know that if a source tells you that there has been an attempted military coup in Nigeria, you must demand more than just a statement from them, no matter how highly placed they are. You must demand some documentary evidence, or some audio or video recordings, or some similar evidence. On top of that, you must verify or confirm that it happened from at least two additional sources. You don’t have to name your sources or present the evidence in the story, but you must have this evidence with you as a reporter or editor, and state clearly in the story that you have it. Our usual “the source said” is grossly insufficient for such an extremely sensitive story.

Unfortunately, neither paper provided anything more than “the source said” in their reports. None of the stories also named even just the number of sources they spoke to, which is an additional layer of the integrity of a story where sources are unnamed. Therefore, beyond what actually happened, the case raises the important question of media accountability in Nigeria. If the media must hold the government accountable, they too must be held accountable, or as is the practice, hold themselves strictly accountable. You can’t just tell a fragile country that there was a military coup attempt with only “they say”, “they say”.