'Lewdpapers' Or Newspapers?

By Banji Ojewale

It troubles one to observe that Nigeria’s clean weekday newspapers metamorphose into lewdpapers at weekends. Saturday and Sunday when you look forward to domestic company with child-friendly weeklies, you are trapped in an oppressive nightmare, wrestling with nudepapers. They flaunt naked images of female bodies not healthy for impressionable young minds. But these expressive photos also harm the larger society with destructive far-reaching consequences: they devalue the dignity of our womenfolk; they offer false and ungodly standards about intimacy between man and woman; they trigger an unending chain of loose moral conduct among the youths and the adults.

We appear to have become quite tolerant of this creepy soft and hard pornography on the sacred pages of our newspapers. It used to be a coy feature in the gossip outlets and fashion magazines in the local media. Later, our submission to the decadent values of the capitalism of the Western world took us to an adventurous and bolder threshold that led to the publication of wholesale underground cover to cover magazines trading in sex.