Ezekwesili raises alarm over decline of independent media, calls for action

By Kunle Sanni –

Former Education Minister Oby Ezekwesili has warned that the decline of independent media is eroding democratic accountability and weakening economic development worldwide.

In a post on X on Sunday, Ezekwesili said the collapse of trusted news outlets is creating a vacuum filled by less credible sources, making it easier for governments to evade scrutiny.

“Regrettably, independent media is fast becoming extinct — and that’s no news to us Nigerians and other Africans,” she wrote. “We daily experience less trusted sources of media information, thereby worsening the evasion of transparency and accountability by governments.”

Ezekwesili, a member of the high-level panel on public interest media under the Forum on Information and Democracy, described the media credibility crisis as a “deepening malignancy” that must be addressed urgently. She argued that reliable information is as essential to development as health and education.

Her comments come as she joined 10 other leading global economists — including Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoğlu — in an open letter released last week during the UN General Assembly in New York. The letter urged governments to prioritise investment in public interest media, warning that economies cannot function without independent and verifiable information.

“Public interest journalism provides a vital supply of such information: it exposes corruption, fraud, and market manipulation, brings stability to financial markets, checks misinformation, and empowers economic actors to make informed investments,” the statement read.

The experts cautioned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is amplifying disinformation, leaving societies increasingly vulnerable to manipulation. To safeguard democracy and growth, they called for governments to develop new models to protect free and independent media and adopt policies to build resilient information systems in the digital age.

“Without decisive action, our information ecosystems will continue to deteriorate rapidly, weakening the benefits of the AI revolution and threatening both global prosperity and social welfare,” the panel warned.