Alec Johnson
24 June 2005
interview
Lagos — Nigeria is one of five "next wave'" countries identified by global health experts as likely to experience a crisis from rising rates of HIV infection. A U.S. national intelligence estimate says that without more effective interventions, Nigeria will face a "social and economic impact similar to that in the hardest hit countries in southern and central Africa -- decimating key government and business elites, undermining growth, and discouraging foreign investment."
Already, an estimated four million Nigerians are infected, and some two million children have lost parents to Aids. In response, a variety of organizations and institutions are fighting back, demanding greater access to treatment and launching education and prevention programmes.
Journalists Against Aids (JAAIDS) was formed in 1997 to increase and improve coverage of HIV/Aids in Nigeria by working directly with journalists to better their training and access to information. It has helped with the formation of sister groups in Kenya and Ethiopia. Kingsley Obom-Egbulem, head of research and communications at JAAIDS, told AllAfrica's Alec Johnson about their work to raise the visibility of Aids issues in the Nigerian media. Before joining JAAIDS, Obom-Egbulem reported and wrote extensively for The News magazine, the Financial Standard and Insider Weekly. Excerpts:
Tell us about Journalists Against Aids.
Journalists Against Aids is a media-based NGO. It's run by journalists and basically what we do is advocacy on HIV/Aids. That's a summary of what we do. But if you take that further, we build the capacity of the media and civil society groups working on HIV/Aids on how to influence policy decisions in favor of people living with HIV/Aids. Generally, what we do is to support advocacy efforts from a media perspective and from a civil society perspective.
We were journalists in the newsroom. Some of us were working with newspapers and radio stations. We all didn't start with JAIDS. JAIDS started in 1997 as a concept, and in 2000, it was formally registered as an NGO.
What do you do to help build the capacity of the journalist JAIDS works with?
When we started, there was an obvious information deficiency. We had to inform the journalists. We had to train them on what HIV is all about. Also, there was a need to develop their penchant for advocacy journalism. That is to say, not writing stories just because they want to write stories, but writing stories because they want to influence a particular decision-making process. That was not the conventional journalism. You just report what people would say or perhaps investigate a piece. But this time, [you report] with an intention to achieve an objective which could be politically motivated or socially motivated. So that's where we came in.
This whole process began in 1997 when Fela Anikulapo Kuti died of an Aids-related illness. Fela's death, to some extent, brought the issue of HIV/Aids to a point where people had to decide to accept the reality of Aids or reject it. The media had a critical role to play and to play that role at that point in time, the media was deficient in terms of quality of knowledge and quantity. So that was where the concept of JAAIDS began. Currently we've been able to address that information need and train quite a lot of journalists, editors, correspondents and health reporters within the print and broadcast media.
Have you seen a rise in articles and radio broadcasts addressing Aids?
Yes. There's always room, in whatever you're doing, to do more, but I think it was the late Awolowo who said that the success of a man is not measured by the height he has attained but by the depth that he's coming from. So when you look at the depth of ignorance that we were coming from then you can't but say that we've done so well.
The quantity of space and airtime devoted to HIV/Aids has increased and the quality of coverage has improved. These days, you can really see that coverage is in perspective. It's not just reporting for the sake of reporting, but analyzing an issue from a perspective. [Reporters are] looking at HIV/Aids not just in terms of statistics, in terms of who is getting infected and who's not getting infected, but this time looking at issues: mother-to-child transmission, orphans and vulnerable children, treatment, disclosure, testing. You see stories that are slanted to address some of these basic issues, unlike these other stories that just emphasize pronouncements by government officials and politicians. You still find very good articles that are driven by a penchant for advocacy.
I think we're there. In 2002, we conducted research, a media monitoring of coverage. It was a one-year monitoring of magazines. We had about five magazines and we monitored about eight national dailies and what we did was we monitored daily for one year. At the end of the day, we were able to come out with a report in 2003. That year, over 1500 stories and articles were written. Most of them, if you compare them to years back, definitely you can't find that volume of articles written on HIV/Aids. Some were full-page articles. Some were front-page [or] back page articles. Some were cover stories of magazines. We observed a common trend, that is use of language [that is] disempowering and stigmatizing, but it's because journalists are not aware. That also saw the need for training, because you can't rule out the need for training in addressing some of these shortcomings we're observing in media coverage.
So I think there are improvements. You must have noticed that a student of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism was expelled from school (Editor's note: NIJ expelled journalism student Federick Adeboye over his HIV status in July 2004. It received significant coverage in the Nigerian press. Adeboye was allowed to return to school after the public outcry) You'll be shocked that in all of that we didn't go to any media house to push in the story. We didn't push any story. The press releases we sent out were issues that were born out of some of the meetings we held that we journalists weren't invited to. So we just turned out a few press releases but every article you saw, every broadcast throughout the period that the guy was called back to school, we didn't push. That goes to tell you how informed the journalists are, how empowered they are and the degree of commitment they have as far as the national Aids response is concerned. Of course, that is an output of what we've been doing at JAAIDS.
What do journalists need to sustain the cause?
I think access to information is a very critical part. When I mean access to information, it could also be in terms of exposing journalists to issues, to debates, to context, to sources. At JAAIDS, we hold a monthly media round table. It's one of our projects. It's not one of our funded projects and we've been doing it since 2001. It's our own contribution.
This media round table is like a talk show, but not a show because of the serious issues we discuss there. The round table provides a platform for scientists, for people living with Aids, for researchers, for government officials, for everyone who has a role to play in the national Aids response. We bring the media together. For instance, you may be doing a story but you couldn't get one or two persons that you need to speak with. The media round table is a new way to search for people or information that you need to do that story. So what we do is we build up topics and look at the personalities that can speak on those topics and invite them [and] invite the media. If you're working on a story, that will give you some background information on your story. Also, if you're looking for someone to speak with on that issue, the media round table provides that forum.
The last edition that was held last month was voluntary counseling and testing and it was an eye opener. At the end of the day, the journalists who participated were able to understand what it means to test. When people test positive to HIV, so many things happen and when they test negative too, you need to experience some of these things. In conceiving that topic, we felt that it would be hypocritical for you to write about testing and ask people to test, call people to test in your article, when you haven't gone for a test. It's a plus when your information is experiential. That's how we conceived the media round table for that edition and we all went there and we chose a center close by and after the round table about five guys were bold enough to go for the test. It was awesome. We also got a journalist who had gone for the test four or five times. She came to share her experience. Somebody living with HIV also came to share her experience. You know how she tested and all that. In the end, they were counseled and they saw how this thing was done. So when you're writing about that, you're no longer talking in abstract. You know what you're talking about.
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