There was a year I was travelling from Abuja, and shortly after approaching Abaji, a tragic incident unfolded before my eyes. A man was trapped beneath a trailer after a crash. It was a moment that demanded urgency, empathy, and collective action.
Instead, people began positioning their cameras.
No one asked first, “How can we help?”
The instinct was not rescue, it was recording. Angles were adjusted. Phones were raised. Tragedy became content.
This is what I describe as the culture of vultures.
A culture where the first response is not to save a life, but to trend online. Where human suffering is reduced to raw material for social media engagement. Where everyone wants to be the first “community reporter,” even if it means standing idle while life slips away.
This same disturbing culture surfaced again in the recent incident involving Anthony Joshua. At a moment when his condition required immediate emergency care, what confronted him was not compassion but cameras. Instead of clearing space or seeking help, people crowded around him, eager to capture images and videos for online consumption.
Phones went up. Humanity went down.
Even more troubling is how this culture has expanded beyond accident scenes into outright irresponsibility.
A few days ago, someone posted online:
“Breaking: Tinubu is gone.”
A reckless, uncultured statement designed solely to attract attention, trigger panic, and harvest engagement. No facts. No responsibility. Just noise.
When such individuals are arrested, the narrative is quickly twisted into one of power brokers oppressing innocent citizens. Irresponsibility is rebranded as courage. Falsehood is defended as free expression. And in the process, the nation itself is betrayed.
Citizen journalism was never meant to be this.
It was designed to inform, to alert, and to protect society, not to profit from pain, spread falsehoods, or turn emergencies into entertainment. When empathy is removed from journalism, whether citizen-led or professional, it becomes dangerous.
A society that records suffering instead of responding to it is not enlightened.
It is morally broken.
Until we relearn that human life comes before headlines, and help comes before hashtags, the culture of vultures will continue to thrive, feeding on tragedy, one viral moment at a time.
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