Public questions can do the same. This danger is greatest as Nigeria approaches the 2027 general election, when media narratives can calm or inflame tensions, clarify or distort choices and strengthen or erode public trust. Asking whether the country has moved beyond the so-called “Igbo coup” or whether northerners can trust an Igbo candidate risks turning ethnicity into evidence and memory into collective guilt. An Igbo candidate did not plan the 1966 coup merely because they were Igbo. “Why should Nigerians trust someone from your ethnic group?”