Renowned critic, writer and journalist Molara Wood took to X (formally Twitter) on March 29, 2026, to complain about a now-deleted article published on March 17, 2022, in the Nigerian Tribune, titled “The gaze that sees you: A review of Silva Ndifon’s ‘Gaze’ series.” The review of Ndifon’s photographic series centered around children. The problem? The article was attributed to Wood, although she neither wrote the article nor knew the artist before. Wood tagged the publication’s X handle multiple times, requesting its removal, and the Nigerian Tribune complied about two hours after.
The following day, she disclosed another similar case of byline fraud. This involved another now-deleted review dated three years earlier, concerning fine arts photographer Adanu Emmanuel Okoko’s Holding as Heritage photo-series. Like the previous article, this one included clunky AI-attributable sentences and a complete disregard for her identity.
Wood further commented that due to her posts, an anonymous major figure of Nigerian journalism discovered that byline fraud had been committed against him by an outlet he once edited, with none other than Ndifon implicated.
After Wood’s posts, more revelations surfaced. Saharan Style founder and fashion journalist Chinazam Ikechi-Uko quoted a March 11, 2026, inquiry about Leadership News, then about Vanguard and Independent, uploading multiple stories with her byline that she had not written, bearing the same telltale signs of AI assisted writing. Another culture writer, Emmanuel Esomnofu, provided screenshots of similar byline offenses by the Nigerian Tribune. In conversation with Culture Custodian, culture journalist Abioye Samson Damilare revealed transgressions by two major dailies.
Ndifon has nine other reviews of his work publicly available: one in The Sun about the “Girl Gaze” series; two in Vanguard and The Guardian about his “Kindred Mirrors” collection; two in The Nation and The Guardian on his “Chromatic Childhoods” photo-series; three (one in The Nation, two in The Guardian) on his “Sonic Lights and Shadow” visual suite: and one in The Southern African Times on his cover shoot for Seyi Vibez’s “Loseyi Professor” album. For Emmanuel Okoko, there are three reviews: one for the four-photograph “Between the Pitch and the Page” series in Vanguard; and “The Mask of Petals” series in The Guardian and The Tribune (the latter, now deleted but still appearing in Google Searches with Molara Wood’s byline).
Revisiting these reviews of both artists’ work, several patterns emerge. For a start, outside of these articles, there’s minimal online presence of their works. In Emmanuel Okoko’s case, this presence is almost non-existent. Ndifon has a few traceable references: a March 29, 2025, Instagram post about the April 6 Sonic Lights and Shadows Exhibition. Behance pages for his Chromatic Childhood series, and a behind-the-scenes clip for the Loseyi Professor shoot on his TikTok page, @nobodyshotit, along with other footage of celebrities like Wizkid, UK rapper Dave, Ice Prince, and Shallipopi, he claims as his own.
A blank-slate scenario for art coverage outside the major dailies is a rarity, even for the most isolated artists. At worst, one should find links to these works on personal social media pages—assuming, of course, that such a heightened state of exclusion is possible. That only reporters from these houses were able to spotlight their art, and no one else dared to think about it, calls the veracity of the coverage into question.
However, let’s even assume this was the scenario, given the few exceptions in Ndifon’s features. Reportage timing should then align across editorial boards. Instead, there are glaring mismatches. The Vanguard and The Guardian articles on Ndifon’s Kindred Mirrors bear the same title and content but were published 3 years apart (January 4, 2024, and March 4, 2021, respectively). Similarly, reviews of his Chromatic Childhoods photo-series in The Nation and The Guardian are both about ‘Joy and Dreams’ but appeared on August 17, 2023 and March 19, 2022, respectively—never mind that Behance documentation occurred much later, in September 2024. These discrepancies in publication dates cannot be dismissed as newsrooms revisiting stories at different times. After all, the guilty outlets publish music or film reviews, and readers would be remiss to find any so widely spaced apart yet similar. The dates should tally if genuine. They don’t.
Most importantly, there’s no accompanying divergence of thought. As any half-decent entertainment journalist will opine, even when singular briefs are submitted to different media houses, reporters incorporate personal stylistic imprints; their criticism showcases variation in the joint task of justifying bias. The search engine optimisation (SEO) rat race isn’t so novel that editors at these outlets would willingly tank their rankings just to achieve collegial agreement. Mind you, that’s without accounting for the initial complaint that led us here, falsification of bylines.
Respected journalist and cultural archivist Jahman Anikulapo’s 40-year career in the arts scene spans many accomplishments. He held editorial stints at The Guardian, The Guardian on Sunday, and The Guardian Life between 1993 and 2013. He served as Programme Chair of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), which convenes the Lagos Books and Arts Festival; and as Director of iRep International Documentary Film Festival. He’s a 2024 UNESCO Defender of Cultural Rights Awardee. But if one had only seen two of his supposedly written reviews of Ndifon and Emmanuel Okoko’s work, with the same ‘Acts’ structure and a preponderance of LLM-isms, one would be hard-pressed to believe his pedigree (Culture Custodian reached out for a comment, there was no response from Mr Anikulapo as of press time). This fraud can also harm budding talented journalists with lengthy careers ahead of them, leading them to lose credibility in the eyes of prospective employers and readers.
Why would a newspaper predating Nigeria’s independence stoop to such levels of unethical journalism? Why place integrity, a key virtue for this profession, at stake? The Journalist’s/Press Prayer, attributed to St. Francis de Sales, calls for rejecting the half-truth that deceives, and urges us to use ‘power’ with honesty, respect, and integrity. At what point did we consider these values so negligible that we ignore decency towards fellow journalists?
These questions capture the decline in the standards of mainstream journalistic practice. Narrowing it down to the recent byline fraud, the prevailing hypothesis scapegoats the UK’s Global Talent Visa and foreign-funded fellowships and grants seekers. Poet-academic and Winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literature, Romeo Oriogun, proposed that some seeking the aforementioned opportunities were opting for paid newspaper coverage. Others echoed responses on X denote this practice as endemic to certain quarters.
The UK Global Talent Visa has seen a significant surge in applications from Nigerians in recent years, surging by about 2,225% (12 to 279) between 2019 and 2024. This visa grants leaders or potential leaders in academia or research (science, engineering, medicine and humanities), arts and culture, digital technology, and, as of March 2026, design, the opportunity to live and work in the UK for up to 5 years at a time. Some individuals eventually receive indefinite leave to settle in the UK after 3 or 5 years, depending on the fulfilment of certain conditions. Applicants must either be winners of specific prestigious prizes or be endorsed by an approving endorsing body in their field. For most Nigerians, endorsement is the preferred option.
Among other criteria, the endorsement application requires 10 pieces of physical evidence of applicant’s work and recognition of their talent or promise. Just 10. Typically, applicants ensure said documentation is not only top of the range but also in high figures. Between 2019 and 2025 alone, over 729 Nigerians submitted applications in the Global Talent Visa arts and culture category. Think about that magnitude and our propensity to game the system—particularly for those with undeserving portfolios. Also note that Nigeria’s 59% endorsement rate is the second lowest of all countries in the world. Endorsements do not guarantee a visa, and the competition with other nationals makes it even harder.
Ingredients for desperation swirling in a cauldron of hacks and shoddy subterfuge. Creatives utilising all they can to appear in a publication or ten. The problem isn’t applicants seeking coverage of their past work. As long as their art exists, with a substantial impact to that effect, seeking documentation is rational and applaudable. If this can be achieved without distorting the truth about applicants’ careers, even better. Like every other sector, the media operates as a business. Journalists aren’t paid in bylines. So a transactional relationship that abides by the ethics of the profession isn’t at all worrying.
What is worrying is the forfeiture of due process. Slapping reputable bylines onto bottom-shelf work is equivalent to fashioning ugly pieces of art to recognise other creators in a museum, and then attaching the names of prestigious artists to the artwork label. It’s a legal, ethical, and cultural compromise with far-reaching implications for our creative ecosystem. Perhaps editors at these national dailies haven’t considered that this is impersonation and, by extension, defamation of character. They don’t use just any names. They ensure the journalists impersonated are practitioners of high repute. They repeat the process for an abundance of stories, some of which are so well hidden as to require expert Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigation. They protect their own authors from any potential fallouts from falsification—some of these works do not exist anywhere outside of the faux thousand-word articles. They sacrifice colleagues in new media as lambs in visa and funding quests. And they go on with their days.
‘They’ aren’t abstract entities in the same way many Nigerians have come to see the Government. In fact, they are the ones who keep the government in check; who watch from towers in the Fourth Estate. But when the watchers are willing to harm other watchers, there is a problem, and no amount of article erasure will hide the shame.
It’s not about pitting traditional media against new media. It’s about recognising the dangers of unchecked pay-to-play journalism, taking accountability for the injustices, erecting barriers against any corner-cutting measures, and ultimately, preserving the significance of the work of culture journalists. Documenting the zeitgeist and the pulse of culture is serious work. Reviews, critical commentary, profiles, and feature stories are serious work. Any further attempt to distort the value of these processes is a threat to the practice as a whole. The fact that these older publications pay minimal regard to the finer aspects of culture journalism doesn’t mean others agree. And it certainly should be a warning bell to the creatives themselves, about how they’re viewed and to what extent their contributions are accorded respect. If landmark Nigerian publications do not consider one’s work noteworthy enough to produce original critical responses, despite sufficient pay, then it follows that the Western gaze takes root.
Accomplished culture journalists can log off the internet knowing the full scope of their portfolio, returning to articles with their bylines in publications they’ve never worked for, written by generative artificial intelligence (AI) they don’t use, and backdated just far enough that they might never find out.
Ring the bells. Culture journalists are being replaced—by themselves.
