Okey Ikechukwu
29 September 2008
opinion
Lagos — Remember the plane crash in Sudan three months ago? The Cable News Network (CNN) had a report on it. The world was served the event as breaking news. Drama and fanfare were not missing either. The bating reporting style was unmistakable. Follow-up reports came on the heels and also to the hilt. For all of 37 minutes the CNN correspondent kept flipping about on the ever-changing details.
The pictures on television alternated between the airport scene, a blurred image of the crash site, the face of the correspondent and conflicting statistics on the actual number of passengers on board. Then the exchange with an 'Aviation Expert' began. The gentleman in question was a retired airplane pilot. He was living his quiet life in Atlanta, Georgia, when CNN called. He was asked to tell the viewing public the cause of the crash. He did: It could have been due to a mechanical problem with the aircraft, poor visibility that made the pilot to overshoot the runway, or the inclement weather and high winds prevailing at the time, etc. etc. Uncharitable observers may say that this expert opinion, which could have come from anyone speculating on causes of air disasters, should not have been inflicted on viewers. But that is not our concern here.
There was nearly one hour of uninterrupted commentary on this most unfortunate event. The reason: CNN decided, in its editorial judgment that that was the most important event to be kept in the public domain that time. Nothing more! If the media house had chosen to show us a one hour documentary on the dietary preferences of marmosets, the large tooth of Egyptian crocodiles, or the shortest tree in Burkina Faso, surely that would have been the news and we would still have been talking about those.
And that raises the question of what makes anyone to consider an event important and news worthy. People who are beholden to international media and other cross-cultural influences often have their choice of social issues, civic and human rights, etc., determined by those they listen to. The Obama/McCain contest, for instance, would ordinarily be another local political event taking place in far away America if it had not been thrust on the world via visual, print and other media. The campaign train is made up of Americans and hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the globe. American Presidential Election issues are part of the debate in offices and beer parlours in Nigeria today because the country is important to the trajectory of global events, but more because the media globalised it. Let popular media run repeated and prolonged reports on bad weather in Calabar, badly dressed masquerades in Minna, or a strange tall man at the Argungu Fishing Festival and these would become subjects of arguments and counter arguments in many places. They would even spark off research and attract some traffic of curious persons. It all comes down to who is saying what; and on what platform.
It was the norm, years ago, to listen to the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) and CNN before forming opinions, or expressing same, on global issues. Not anymore. Aljazeera is here. The reports are good, very good. The correspondents are among the best. Stations with similar global target audience are running and panting in genuine competition with Aljazeera. Then the cultural issues! The dressing is different for most of their staff. Many things about their brand define a people, a culture and way of life different from what obtains in Western Europe. Diction, professional reporting, good graphics and a leaning towards a different set of social and cultural values are all so evident. This is not an ode to the Middle East, but a poignant point about what people can do with communication - when they bring their own perspectives and values to bear on issues and when they talk about themselves.
If the Princes of the Middle East are putting up engineering feats in their home soil, creating tourist havens and moving money out of the American system, it is because they have suddenly realised that they can replicate the technological achievements of the West by knowledge, planning well and investing deliberately for that purpose. They are now telling their own stories because they have a mouthpiece under their control. The dress code of the average Muslim from the Middle East is no longer a bogey image seen once in a while in Western media. It is part of an accepted global reality because communication, effective communication and modern visual media, have forced the world to see and associate that dress code with knowledge, breeding and other human virtues thought to be anathema in such climes. There are challenges, of course. But then, there are challenges everywhere. Many societies and nations have realised that it helps if they raise and address their own challenges themselves, while listening to what others think about them.
Before someone exclaims that we should quickly set up shop and overrun the world like CNN, let us pay attention to the small and simple things first. Where do our journalists who wish to fill professional knowledge gaps go? The Fulbright Scholarship and similar platforms all over the world are offered by other nations. This is good for the development of the profession. It is also ideal for global exposure, because we need not be insular in the name of 'doing our own thing'. The most technologically advanced of nations still feel the need for exchange przogrammes and cross fertilisation of ideas. They send their best and their worst to all nooks and crannies of the earth for inner, professional growth, national human resource development and knowledge. On our part, there are things we need to note about the character and flavour of matters arising from our limited facilities on the home front.
Almost everything works to make the information manager and journalist efficient in the developed Western nations. The fledgling scribbler who migrates from Nigeria on the goodwill of development partners is first totally overwhelmed by the unimagined efficiencies of the system out there. The work tools are contemporary and updated by the hour. The internet is not something he looks for. It is there with him. He does not have to speak in tongues, or cast out two and a half demons, before his telephone would work. He looks around and finds that the reports of most of your colleagues are ready as an event is ending. The system works in such a way that there is no one need pledge a piece of land which your great grandfather left for your uncle of doubtful whereabouts in order to obtain a laptop on credit. The laptop is simply available. So the visitor is staggered. Admiration turns to consternation. Everything works, really works! But his life and his job in Nigeria would be much easier, more civilised and even fun if 'they' could just 'empower' him in the office when he gets back home.
Other aspects of the foreign society also work: Social security, political processes, etc. He becomes subconsciously impatient with his country. His mindset is already attuned to rejecting all that is bad and focusing on the ideal and where the rest of the world is today. He misses the political economy of the dictates of globalised capital and the political undercurrents blowing from these very same countries to his own. So he comes back after the programme without enough insight into national security issues and the Grand National Consensus that undergirds the media content and communication goals of the developed countries.
This throws our mind back to a one-time Minister of Information, Chief Chukwuemeka Chikelu, who felt that our self-presentation as a nation could be bolstered if, among other well thought out measures, Nigeria set up modern, one-stop information centres like the United States Information Service (USIS) and the British Council office. He also tried to intervene at the level of public capacity building by a plan to create an International Institute for Communication Studies (IICS) out of the National Institute for Public Information (NIPI) in Kaduna. He celebrated the fact that he had such an institute under his watch, but shuddered when he did a diagnostic review of the establishment and made very shocking discoveries. The syllabus was put together around 1974 and had not been revised since. It had a staff strength of 97, out of which 2 (two) were academic staff. For the period under review NIPI had a total of 4 (FOUR) students, each of whom paid =N=25,000 (twenty five thousand Naira, only) for a three month programme. The fees covered feeding, boarding and laundry services. The Institute had no telephone contact with the outside world. The academic staff each had a bachelor's degree and the NIPI certificate. But the NIPI certificate was not recognised, even within the parent Ministry running the institution. Meanwhile the organization ran a monthly salary bill of about N1.7 million. Let us not go on.
Chikelu then quickly set up a Visitation Panel headed by a former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, to chart a new course for NIPI. A new syllabus, affiliations with reputable global establishments and the employment of competent and relevant personnel were to do the magic. That was how the IISC idea came up. Friedrich Ebert Foundation was on hand to partner the Minister and quickly equipped a newly constructed IT facility with computers and support services. Modalities for creating the appropriate legal framework for the school and plans to use part of the Ministry dormant facilities in Lagos were also in the works. But we are digressing.
The world of today is talking information security. It is discussing it from the perspective of groups maintaining their fundament and 'surviving' in the thinking, outlook and actions of others. People always wait to hear what America has to say about what anyone says about it. This is because America 'lives' in consciousness as a distinct entity about whom you cannot just say or think what you like and believe same to be true. The creed in information security is: "If you don't say here I am nobody will say there you are". The corollary to that creed is: "Others become your brand marketers when you say or do nothing to stamp your ontological credentials on reality." As an aside, but related to some of the issues here, Segun Adeniyi did the right thing when he quickly owned up to the error in the recent oath of secrecy saga. With that intervention, the Presidency is in control of its own story. It does not make the President, or his aides, bad. All it has done is humanise the existential reality and offer the public the commendable example of showing when not to sit on the high horse. Implacable critics will still have their say, but so will everyone else. Information security should be of more than passing interest to us in Nigeria today.
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