Segun Showunmi, a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has vehemently denounced Arise News and one of its lead anchors, Rufai Oseni, urging regulatory bodies to intervene following a contentious on-air dispute with the Minister of Works, David Umahi, earlier on Tuesday, October 7, 2025.
Showunmi’s public statement, shared on social media, accused the media house and the anchor of routinely substituting professional journalistic standards with politically charged aggression and deliberate provocation.
Showunmi declared that the practice of “broadcasters becoming the story” must cease, arguing that the anchor’s recurring lack of decorum, which he attributed to “madness,” is incompatible with a licensed national platform.
He emphasized that the behavior, which might be tolerated on a personal digital forum, is unacceptable on a widely viewed television broadcast.
The activist asserted that Arise TV and Oseni have overstepped professional boundaries by positioning themselves as “self-appointed prosecutors, judges, and enemies of the state” under the guise of news reporting, conflating the act of “questioning power and attacking the very idea of order.”
Sowunmi wrote, “@ARISEtv and its anchor, @ruffydfire, have crossed too many lines. They can not continue to constitute themselves into self-appointed prosecutors, judges, and enemies of the state under the guise of journalism. There is a difference between questioning power and attacking the very idea of order.”
The urgency of Showunmi’s call was clearly fueled by the viral confrontation between Oseni and Minister Umahi during the morning’s news program.
The argument flared as Oseni pursued critical inquiries into the financing and technical feasibility of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway.
The tension reached a peak when the journalist accused the Minister of personally appealing to President Bola Tinubu to complain about his questions.
Mmahi fiercely refuted the claim, asserting that Oseni was “too small” to warrant such attention from him to the President.
During the exchange, Umahi repeatedly commanded the journalist to “keep quiet,” disputing Oseni’s competency to evaluate the complex engineering project and asserting his own experience as a self-styled “professor in this field.”
Showunmi capitalized on this very public incident to demand external oversight.
He directly challenged the supervising Ministry of Information to cease being a “bystander” while invited guests are subjected to what he labeled as “insult, rudeness, partisan aggression, and empty intellectual showmanship.”
He also distinguished freedom of expression from license to abuse, stating that media oversight is not political repression but rather “the defence of sanity and national interest.”
He stressed that the media’s true role is to enlighten and inform, not to inflame and incite.
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