Nigeria's horror in Paris's shadow

How did the attacks in France so thoroughly bury the atrocities in Nigeria?

One explanation is the difficulty of covering dangerous, remote parts of the world, such as Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State, where Boko Haram holds sway over much of the territory. A similar dynamic exists in Syria, where a civil war has claimed nearly 200,000 lives since erupting in 2011, and where relatively few journalists are there to witness it. In addition, it’s likely that the Paris attack’s focus on a publication touched a nerve with members of the media worldwide.

But it’s not that the media doesn’t cover Nigeria, or that Westerners don’t care about Africans. After all, when Boko Haram fighters kidnapped nearly 200 girls from a school in Chibok in April of last year, a public campaign to bring them back attracted widespread publicity, with even First Lady Michelle Obama contributing a photograph. Two years before that, a video from the now-defunct NGO Invisible Children that highlighted Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord who leads the Lord’s Resistance Army, was viewed over 100 million times in its first six days. These campaigns, whatever their shortcomings, did at least show that people in the West aren’t totally indifferent to African suffering.

The main difference between France and Nigeria isn’t that the public and the media care about one and not the other. It is, rather, that one country has an effective government and the other does not.