IPC Trains 40 Journalists on Accountability in Campaign Promises
By Shindong Bala
Media professionals and Development partners are chatting out ways to providing legislation towards ensuring safety of journalists against threats and other challenges relating to the profession especially in the areas of investigative Journalism.
The Executive Director, International Press Center Mr. Lanre Arogundade disclosed this at a Two Day Zonal training organized by The International Press Centre for Forty Journalists held in Kaduna.
He said the emergence of legislation for safety of journalists will give the media professionals confidence of holding government accountable to their campaign promises towards delivering effective governance in the country.
Mr Lanre Arogundade called on journalists to developed attitudes of fact checking every story including discipline of verification and making use of multiple sources to back up their stories for the purpose of fair reportage, credibility and factuality.
The IPC Executive Director maintained that the capacity building workshop was to implement the objectives of European Union’s support to democratic governance in Nigeria which wants the media to be fair credible and factual in reporting electoral processes and election which in turns contribute to strengthening of democracy in Nigeria.
“We are also interested in post-election reporting particularly in relation to campaign promises, the reason being that citizens tend to be apathetic towards elections because they tell you that previous promises were not fulfilled and that is why we want to use Freedom of Information act to follow up on campaign promises and also use fact checking tools to counter disinformation, it is part of our responsibility to ensure that citizens are not misled”
Mr. Arogundade maintained that Journalists should be able to demand for evidence when politicians made claims on fulfilling campaign promises noting that there are tools that can be used to verify those claims even if the claims are deleted from social media handles.
Also Speaking, the Executive Director, Media Rights Agenda Mr. Edetaen Ojo lamented the low level usage of the Freedom of Information act by Journalists to get enough, reliable and official information for reporting purposes.
“The freedom of Information act is a piece of legislation that members of the public including journalists can use to request for information from public institutions and certain Non governmental organizations, Unfortunately we have not had high level of usage of the law by journalists to ask for information”
Mr. Adetaen Ojo stated that they have on several occasions gone to court where the act was enforced against defaulting government and some private organizations.
“There have been instances where we go to court to enforce our rights to information to put pressure on the system. There are a number of steps and mechanisms that can be followed up to address that situation; we have done quite a number of cases on wrongful denial. We got judgment against central bank last year.
We also got judgments against Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Federal Ministry of Finance the old Federal Ministry of Youth and Sport, so on and so forth.
There are dozens of individuals both private and public cases that were litigated and successfully executed in our favor”
The workshop was part of the activities under Component 4 of the European Union Support to Democratic Governance in Nigeria project, of which IPC is the lead implementing partner.
The overall objective was to strengthen the media for fair, accurate, ethical and inclusive reporting of the electoral processes and elections and in particular seeks to combat information disorder/fake news in democratic governance reporting using fact-checking and FOI tools.
