By Dan
Agbese
Nov 26 2017
PHOTO: AFP / STRINGER
Borno State : Houses Ravaged by the Boko Haram Attacks.
There is a silent majority
in our rural communities throughout the country. How much reporting are our
news media doing on these communities? How much of their economic and social
problems do we know? Indeed, do we know them?
None of us would be
proud of the answers to these questions. Community reporting is not attractive
to reporters. It lacks glamour. The path to journalistic success and fortune
does not cut through the isolated rural communities. Still, I suggest we bestir
ourselves and take up the challenges of community reporting so we can bring our
rural communities in from the cold. It would be good for the health of national
development.
The focus of community
reporting is to give our rural communities human faces and human voices. The
first rule in community reporting is for the reporter to know the community he
wishes to report on. We have two broadly distinct communities - urban and
rural. As the name implies, the urban communities live in our towns and cities
and the rural communities live in the rural areas.
Communities, urban or
rural, are not amorphous entities. They are, to borrow from biology, living
social organisms. There are 774 local government areas in this country. Each of
these local government areas contains a number of districts and clans. And all
of them, without my saying so, contain people - farmers, teachers, traders,
primary school pupils, secondary school students, fishermen, etc.
Demographic experts estimate
that 80 per cent of our estimated population of 150 million live in these rural
communities. We are talking of 120,000,000 people here. That is almost the
population of the rest of the countries in the West African sub-region
combined. Reporting on such a large number of communities and people is no easy
task. But it is not impossible once we know what to do and how to approach the
task.
The first step is a paradigm
shift in our attitude towards the rural communities. They are not
isolated groups and we must stop treating them as such.
Our second step is to
remember them all the time and not only when there is a crisis - an outbreak of
a killer disease or an election, for instance.
Our third step is to know
these communities; to listen to them and to care enough about them.
Television journalists from the Nigerian Television
Authority (NTA) interview a man at an event in Lagos July 17, 2014. Nigeria’s
press is traditionally free to write almost anything about anyone - whether
it’s true or not. But reporters fear a government sensitive to criticism is now
cracking down, especially on coverage of the battle against Boko Haram. Picture
taken July 17. REUTERS/Akintunde Akinleye
There is a huge irony in all
this. Most of us here were born in rural communities. We grew up there in our
formative years before we went to school. I dare say that only a few of us have
lived in the communities of our birth since we attained the respectable status
of adulthood. We have lived in urban areas ever since. But some of us here
still have parents and relations living in our rural communities. When we visit
them occasionally, we share their suffering - lack of potable water, lack of
motorable roads and the resultant difficulty in transporting themselves and
their farm produce to the market, lack of modern health facilities and, where
they exist, lack of basic drugs for the treatment of common ailments such as
malaria and typhoid. Nor can we pretend not to know that the ugly face of
grinding poverty is visible in all our rural communities. Is it fair for us to
pretend that our people in the rural communities are unknown masses?
Our rural communities are in
the cold. The media have a duty to bring them out of the cold into the warm
sunshine of modern development. The late Bashorun Moshood Abiola, publisher of
the National Concord titles launched, for the first time in our history,
community newspapers, called Community Concord, targeted at reporting on the
rural communities.
A former reporter for the
Sunday Concord, Olowusago, was inspired by the Community Concord newspapers to
found his own community newspaper, Oriwu Sun, in his own rural community,
Ikorodu, Lagos State. It was a successful newspaper. The success of that paper
in turn inspired the former Chief Public Relations Officer in the Nigeria
Airways, Chief Femi Ogunleye, to found his own community newspaper in his own
community. He is a traditional ruler now. So, don’t expect him to be
editor-in-chief any more.
Those efforts showed that
the isolation of our rural communities had been a source of worry for some of
our compatriots. A nation that condemns 80 per cent of its population to a past
century is a nation of two distinct citizens - the urban citizens with all
modern opportunities and the rural citizens in darkness.
I do not hold the media
responsible for what is happening to and in our rural communities.
The authors of our 1999
constitution inserted a fundamental clause in section 22. That section imposes
on the news media an important constitutional duty of holding the government
accountable to the people. Most of the people to whom the government is
supposed to be accountable live in our rural communities. How does the
government account to the people who are treated as mere masses?
The Daily Trust titles
(daily and weekly) have done an occasional good job in reporting on the
communities within the capital territory, drawing public attention to their
lack of basic social amenities such as potable water, health facilities,
electricity and roads. These communities look up every night and see the
glittering lights of the city only a short distance away. It reminds them of
how truly deprived they are.
We must pay due attention to
the rural communities on the fundamental grounds that their isolation and
neglect are detrimental to the interests of the nation. Coverage of the rural
communities has never been a successful journalistic enterprise in our country.
Newspaper publishers do not have enough funds to spare on the coverage of the
rural communities. Because of poor funding, they cannot afford to keep
reporters in say local government headquarters to keep an eye and report on the
communities.
Commercial interests advise
against circulating newspapers in the rural communities because it is expensive
and wasteful. Newspaper publishers do not consider it good business to spend so
much money taking their newspapers to the rural areas for such poor returns.
But a newspaper operates on the twin imperatives of commercial interest and
public service. Under certain conditions, the public service imperative must
trump the purely commercial imperative. I believe it is possible to find a
creative way around this that balances the commercial interests with the public
good and give our rural communities faces and voices.
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