News, Nigeria
SUN NEWS
If only because oil still remains the mainstay of the national economy until the present economic diversification measures yield results, media and public interest in petroleum matters is high and will remain so, perhaps for as long as anyone can imagine.
This probably explains the care taken by the Public Affairs arm of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in the 80s, particularly, to provide and ensure adequate communication by way of regular briefings for journalists on the petroleum beat then.
Various directors of the company’s strategic units were mandatorily required to give background information to designated media representatives, either for immediate use or for reference or background purposes, in due course.
The whole idea was to ensure authoritativeness in reporting and commentaries on the country’s oil affairs through such professional contacts. An added advantage to the wealth of information thus provided, was the opportunity it also afforded both sides to enjoy more cordial relationships and even goodwill, based on mutual respect and understanding.
Some of the people who made all those positive vibrations at the work and social levels possible, are still very much around today and can offer any necessary advice on how that aspect of corporate public relations was creatively managed, if contacted.
Nowadays, the story is pathetically different, if the latest reports are anything to go by. As far as one can recall, no petroleum or Oil Minister in the country had demonstrated so much contempt for media representatives (accredited ones for that matter), as was shown at the National Assembly in Abuja last week.
The headline in the Daily Sun report of Tuesday, October 9,,at page three, summaries this disturbing development:
“Diezani goes gaga……….As Senate probes fuel allocation mess…. Flings away reporters’ recorders, cameras” The Minister of Petroleum Resources, Dr. Mrs. Diezani Alison – Madueke, who had been featuring in a meeting of the Senate’s Petroleum Resources (Downstream) committee on October 8, decided unilaterally to bar reporters from recording the committee’s verbal proceedings.
As was further reported by the newspaper’s Adetutu Folasade – Koyi: “….The meeting….was to proffer solutions to the perennial fuel scarcity across the country and disparity in the price of PMS (petrol).” In the presence of the committee chairman, Senator Magnus Abe, who convened the meeting, three reporters who “had sought to have the Minister on tape during the questions and answer session were prevented from so doing by her security details; they seized their tape recorders and threw them away.”
And although Senator Abe “ordered the Minister’s security details to behave or be arrested”, they still went ahead to block the reporters from recording “the Minister’s response to questions posed to her by the committee on the state of the promised Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of the country’s oil refineries. And despite Senator Abe’s intervention and directive on the placing of recorders, the Minister and her aides remained adamant and, in short, the reporters had to go away.
It is rather strange and disturbing that a woman with such regal airs should have allowed herself to become so combative in a public place, that day. So much so, as to turn the working tools of media representatives into missiles, to be flung around wilfully, in a Senate meeting room.
Even if her aides had wanted to act that way so as to give her pleasure, the Petroleum Resources Minister ought to have influenced restraint on their part, so as to avoid undesirable consequences.
With raging floods; bombing and killer squads threatening the existence of some individuals and communities, it should be clear to all and sundry that functionaries of government (especially goldfishes like Mrs. Alison-Madueke) and their fellow citizens like journalists, need to create more avenues for co-operation and better understanding, rather than hostility and conflicts.
Obviously, it is the duty of the journalists to report the happenings of the day in their areas of coverage or beats, to their media houses, which will then get them published, on a daily or weekly basis, as the nature of each medium of mass communication dictates.
Individually and corporately, media houses invest in the procurement of recording and other devices so as to eliminate a problem which had, over the years, bedeviled relationships between officials and the media – inaccurate reporting and claims by the former that they were “misquoted”. Why should a subjective decision on where and how such equipment must be placed to assure coverage of a meeting in a legislative house be allowed to debar reporters from doing their duties, any day, and any time?
Let it not be forgotten that the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy in the constitution (sections 13 to 24), impose certain non-negotiable duties on the Nigerian Press at Section 22:
“The Press, radio, Television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this chapter and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”
Tampering with the working tools of journalists and dictating how they should do their duties amount to illegal actions, which can earn neither respect nor understanding for government in the discharge of its onerous obligations.
No comments:
Post a Comment