Babajide Okeowo
Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Malam Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, has challenged The Nigerian Xpress to beam its searchlight more on the socio-economic challenge facing Nigerians, which is not featuring in the campaigns of those aspiring to rule the people.
Kawu gave the charge while delivering the keynote address, ‘2019: The Media and the Challenge of Free and Fair Elections’ during the public presentation of The Nigerian Xpress, in Lagos, at the weekend.
Painting a grim picture of the incredible demographic challenge, Kawu lamented that the issues facing the country are more serious than the periodic choices that come with the nation’s electoral cycle.
Said he, “I think the issues that face us as media practitioners are more serious than the periodic choices that come with the nation’s electoral cycle.
“Our country is dealing with an incredible demographic challenge. When I checked the UN population tracking system, WORLDOMETER this morning, Nigeria’s population is 198,145,655.
“The median age is 17.9 years; and life expectancy is 47.6 years; while 51% of the population now lives in the urban centers (99,967,871 people).
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“We all know how dysfunctional these urban centers have become today. A very frightening scenario is that Northern Nigeria, along with the Niger Republic, has the highest fertility rate in the world today of 7.3!
“So, more and more children are being born who would not have the opportunity to go to school; would probably live on the streets, and become radicalized.
“These issues are far more serious than the obsession with the electoral cycle but I am not sure that they actually feed into the campaigns of the politicians and parties, nor the coverage of the media.
“We must, of course, be very concerned about the challenges of free and fair elections.”
He stressed that the plight of Nigerians is not the focus of politicians who are aspiring to rule the nation and urged The Nigerian Xpress to pick up the gauntlet.
“I watched the vice presidential debate organised by the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria (BON), the other day.
“With due respect to my colleagues, I felt disappointed with what was a very pedantic effort.
“The entire event operated within the narrow confines of the dominant paradigms of ruling class issues, without a rigorous interrogation of the serious challenges that face us as a country.
“The different candidates stayed within the orthodoxies of a so-called ‘private-sector-led development’ that has yielded nothing but massive corruption; the transfer of national resources into the hands of a few people; the unending bailouts for the rich by AMCON and mass poverty of millions, etc.
“If the media stays within the same ideological paradigms, how can they be trusted to seriously assist the enlightenment of the citizens to aid the rational choice that is assumed to be the basis of democratic electoral challenge?
“If the media stays within the same ideological paradigms, how can they be trusted to seriously assist the enlightenment of the citizens to aid the rational choice that is assumed to be the basis of democratic electoral challenge?” he asked.
The NBC boss also charged Managing Director/Editor-in-chief of The Nigerian Xpress, Mr. Steve Nwosu, to take up the challenge of publishing a newspaper, which makes the plight of Nigerians the focus of reportage.
Kawu continued, “My challenge to Steve Nwosu is a simple one: please think back to the Nigeria that you were born into, and the Bacita community where you grew up.
“Do you think it was right that the Nigerian ruling class made choices that killed your old home and the industry built there? And were those choices not responsible for the systematic de-industrialisation that killed so many other locations like Bacita?
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“If so, can The Nigerian Xpress newspaper be a space that systematically helps to challenge the dominant orthodoxies that reign in economic thought and political action in Nigeria today and which has become the ‘religion’ of public policy since 1985? I hope your newspaper would do so.”
Kawu decried the massive de-industrialization of Nigeria which was informed by the wrong choices made by the ruling class in Nigeria which, in turn, he contended, could be responsible for the ethno-religious crisis witnessed in parts of the country.
“Steve Nwosu grew up in Kwara State. The era of Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) saw the development of vast estates of various hues around Nigeria.
“In the small town of Bacita, in the Edu Local Government Area of Kwara State, the Nigeria Sugar Company drew thousands of working people to work, from various parts of Nigeria.
“That was the attraction that took his folks from Eastern Nigeria and it was within that cosmopolitan, pan-Nigerian environment, that he grew and began to forge his consciousness.
“It was the same period in our national history, which grew Kaduna into the heart of the largest textile industry in West Africa, so Kakuri grew into a multi-ethnic hub; just as Aba in the East; as Ikeja; Ojota in Lagos; Sharada and Bompai in Kano, and several such expressions of national development in Nigeria.
“We began to create a national industrial proletariat, which the trade union movement could organise.
“But the choices that the Nigerian ruling class began to make from the middle of the 1980s, first with the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP); the accession to WTO agreements and the almost-religious devotion to neo-liberal policies from 1999, have systematically led to the de-industrialisation of our country.
“The old industrial estates all died, including Steve Nwosu’s Bacita! And as the relentless march of identity has caught up with us, emboldening ethno-religious entrepreneurs, even the industrial estates, have systematically been bought up by the new-fangled Pentecostal religious movements.
“The Reverend Father George Ehusani, of the Catholic Church, did a study of the ethnoreligious conflicts in Northern Nigeria, between 1999 and 2007. His finding was that most of the crises took place between 12 noon and 6 pm.
“Those were the hours that people would have been at work, in the old industrial estates,” he added.
The NBC Director-General, nevertheless, urged the media to adequately play its role, which is critical to the advancement and sustainability of democracy since citizens must be well informed to play their part in strengthening democracy.
“The Nigerian Media Code of General Election Coverage stipulates that whenever the election is around the corner, media has the social responsibility of enabling voters to make informed choices by providing information that increases their knowledge to freely and knowledgeably choose their representatives in the electoral processes.
“Hence, the need for the media to dissuade the electorate from the criminal practice of vote buying that is engulfing our electoral system,” Kawu concluded.