THE President’s curious volte-face on NTA’s newsroom and boardroom operations he recently disrupted shouldn’t be construed as a wet blanket on a serial I began here last week – expediency of overhauling our national broadcaster, the NTA as the authentic ‘Voice of Africa’ and the black race. I was earlier disoriented by the president’s reversal of his earlier appointments of a new Director General and Executive Director, News (EDN) for the public broadcaster.
The president’s radical move touched off the first part of this serial encouraging the president of Nigeria to consolidate on the good job of overhauling the NTA to be the ‘Voice of Africa’. I had in April this year suggested that the pubic information management authorities should merge the NTA with ‘Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria’ (FRCN), ‘Voice of Nigeria’ (VON) and return to the organic structure of ‘Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation’(NBC) as a global broadcasting powerhouse such as the BBC,Al Jazeera, etc.
Recall that I was building on Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina’s constructive suggestion of a powerful African Media House to tell Africa’s authentic stories in line with the McBride’s Commission’s report of 1981 when the president disrupted his reconstruction, recalled the old setup he dismantled in NTA for reasons his office hasn’t explained clearly before he embarked on a 10-day working holidays in Europe this week.
Behold, I won’t be discouraged by the strange about-face after two weeks. I was encouraged by an ancient word, which states that, he who considers the wind will not sow and he who takes heed of the weather too will not harvest. I am therefore fully persuaded that the president who may be desperately playing politics with his own strategy for revolution the nation expects him to carry out through restructuring of all the institutions of governance and democracy will stop politics someday and face reality of nation building.
I believe like our iconic Zik of Africa too that, that condition isn’t permanent. Here is the thing, I too have a dream that the leader of Africa’s most populous country will do the needful when he realises that he can win re-election in 2027 and lose the country, after all, as it has happened to some African countries such as Cameroun.
Let’s return to the brass tacks: The reinstated NTA’s DG and EDN should note that they shouldn’t continue with the drudgery that led the president to remove them in the first place. They should also note that the powers that appointed the Publicity Secretary of the Ruling Party as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of NTA, early this year didn’t mean well for the national security asset, sorry the public broadcaster, NTA.
Doubtless, as I was saying it is high time, Nigeria swallowed pride and vanity of provincial media presence to implement Dr. Akinwumi Adesina’s profound proposal to African leaders and media entrepreneurs in May 2024 on this score. As I wrote here last week, Dr. Adesina who just completed his 10-year tenure as the most consequential President of African Development Bank (AfDB) noted last year: ‘We need to counter negative stereotypes and uplift Africa’s image in the world’. The then president of the African Development Bank Group, had then made a fervent call to end negative stereotyping of the continent in the international media and to champion a more positive portrayal of Africa and its development.
Adesina’s message reinforces Marshall McLuhan’s classic that ‘the medium is the message’, after all. Dr. Adesina, had also then called for a more balanced coverage of Africa in the international media. As he was addressing more than 300 media owners and practitioners from across the continent, he noted that “despite the significant progress within our continent, the prevailing media narrative often focuses on negative stereotypes, overlooking the substantial advancements and resilience Africa demonstrates”.
Giving examples of several positive developments on the continent, he noted that 11 out of the 20 fastest growing economies in the world in 2023 were African. A more positive coverage he said, would be significant in addressing the misconceptions about the continent, which continue to discourage investment and hamper its progress.
Adesina, an organic first class product of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria and excellently modified by the University of Purdue, U.S where he also showed his originality in his doctorate also then called on the Africa Import Export Bank (Afreximbank) and all regional financial institutions to partner with the AfDB to pool resources together to support the emergence of a globally respected African media company that would focus on projecting opportunities on the continent.
He said this robust financing model would help address the misinformation and stereotypes about Africa in the western media. It seems to me that the Adesina’s keynote, at the opening ceremony of the All-Africa Media Leaders’ Summit with the theme: ” Re-engineering African Media in Times of Critical Transformation,” in Nairobi, Kenya, has again been forgotten like many other resolutions at the AU Headquarters in Ethiopia.
It is worth-noting that the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of “THISDAY” and Arise Media Group, Prince Nduka Obaigbena, was one of the Co-chairs of the three-day summit in Kenya. Speaking further, Adesina stressed that the media has a critical role to be fair, objective, inquisitive, investigative and being catalyst for development as well as promoting positive news about Africa’s accomplishments and achievements.
While he acknowledged that the continent has its own share of challenges, Adesina maintained that the continent also has a lot of positive aspects that could be showcased through an Afro-centric media.
He lamented a paradox of development that even African journalists working as Correspondents for foreign-based organisations many times promote stereotypes about the continent. He therefore urged media houses to devote time and resources to build a network of correspondents on ground that could properly report stories rather than relying on western agencies which sometimes were biased. Part of his words: “Lack of financing has been cited by 92 per cent of editors, journalists and media houses as a constraint for covering stories effectively.
There is a strategic business case for financial institutions to put significant resources together to finance a credible African media institution to make it have a global reach. This is because information about the continent must be properly prioritised and disseminated. To attract more foreign direct investments, positive stories and opportunities in Africa need to be more showcased”.
He continued: “I would therefore say that the AfDB, Afreximbank and all regional financial institutions should pool resources together to support the emergence of a globally respected African media company that would focus and project the needs and opportunities in the continent. He also charged that, “Africa must shape its own narrative and not just what the world always thinks about us. We must focus more on what is working in Africa.
He also suggested a short-term measure to set off the incentives for a powerful African media network: “To recognise and profile African journalists, correspondents and media houses that promote Africa with unbiased stories, the AfDB will work with all other Africa agencies and African corporates to establish what will now be known as the Annual African Media Prize.
Also, the AfDB working with partners and African corporates will establish the African Journalists and Correspondents’ Fellowship, to help build and strengthen the capacity of journalists and Correspondents working in Africa”. This remarkable suggestion has not been pursued anywhere in Africa.
He urged media leaders to become marketers of Africa so as to project all the opportunities in the continent, citing a quote from Chinua Achebe which says, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt always glorify the hunter.”
According to the former AfDB boss, for the western world if the information coming out from Africa doesn’t smell, then it doesn’t sell.” Adesina added: “Now, Africans must tell their own stories. Not the stories that others write about us; not the stories of the old colonial narratives; not the stories impregnated with war, famines, conflicts and division; not biased stories – intended or unintended, but stories of us, Africans, written by Africans, about Africa and projected to the world. We must be the ‘vuvuzelas’ of Africa. It is time to change the narrative.”
In his final words: “We live in dynamic times as technology continues to evolve rapidly, the rise of the internet, digital and social media platforms have shifted the focus of audiences from radio, televisions and print publications. Two-thirds of the global population are now on the Internet and social media for real-time news. These transformative changes have deregulated the creation and distribution of news contents. In the quest for market share, too many positive developments in Africa get missing.”
Lamentation has never been a strategy. I believe we should urge our leaders to imbibe the discipline of execution, the spirit of getting big things done for our high profile as the ‘African Giant’. That is why I had thought that the President of Nigeria who doesn’t seem to like the ‘gods of small things’ with the ambitious long-distance great road networks from Lagos to Calabar, Badagry to Sokoto, Lagos-Abuja modern railway project, etc, should take up the gauntlet of transforming Nigeria’s NTA into a network that can fit into what the BBC World has been doing for the British Empire reporting the world according to the British perspectives.
That is what the extra-ordinary ‘Al Jazeera’ owned by Qatar, has been doing for the Middle East and the Arab World. These organs BBC, Aljazeera and South African Broadcasting Corporation, Africa, (SABC, Africa) have been shaping their own narratives for their regions and not just what the world always thinks about them. They focus more on what is working for Great Britain, Middle East/Arab and Southern Africa.
Therefore, let’s make this judgment call to the President of Nigeria to order an amendment of the enabling laws of the NTA, FRCN, VON so that they can be transformed into Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) or African Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that will serve the interest of Africa and the black people of the world. I mean here a restructured public broadcaster that will not be subjected to the whims and caprices of the presidency, the ministry of information and national orientation.
An African Broadcasting Corporation based in Nigeria would have covered Nigeria’s recent diplomatic forays into Brazil better. For instance, the honour done to our only Nobel laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka by the Brazilian leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the Nigeria’s cultural links to Brazil through the Yoruba people of Nigeria, were not contextually reported for the grumbling west to understand why Nigeria, the most populous black nation in the world, is forging a diplomatic and cultural relations with the second most populous black nation on earth.
How many people are aware that there is a community where the people speak Yoruba in Brazil? A public broadcaster, NBC or ABC would have done better than the perfunctory way the frequent presidential visits to Brazil has been covered. When will the president swing into action to serve the gods of big things concerning a big Voice that Africa urgently needs through Nigeria?
- Oloja is former editor of The Guardian newspaper and his column, Inside Stuff, runs on the back page of the newspaper on Sundays. The column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.