By Mayowa Adeniran –
Regulators Monitoring Programme, REMOP, training was organised by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, WSCIJ, to keep an eye on education regulators in the country, the centre Coordinator, Motunrayo Alaka has said
She said this as an opening remark at the just-concluded training held in Lagos.
“This programme is a programme for the regulators and for the media but we are critical about what the regulators are doing and we are looking at what they are doing, telling the media to report what they are doing,” she said.
“Our aim is to promote rapid disclosure of information, transparency and again accountability. We just want to keep an eye on the regulators. For this final stage, we are doing basic education and electricity and we are using the two regulators that we consider major in both sectors. Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) for basic education and Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) for electricity. Eventually, we hope this programme will cover more regulators.”
Mrs Alaka justified the inclusion of regulators in the training because of their overwhelming influence in the sector. She added that the success or otherwise of the sector depends on them.
“But why the regulators? We believe strongly that the success or failure of any sector is in the hands of the regulator. The regulator has the enabling power. Most of them have been created by law and can decide what happens in a particular area.
“So we believe for instance that if we keep having issues with telecommunications it is because the commission that is in charge of that is not working hard enough or they are not looking at what they suppose to look at. We believe that if regulators are on top of their game the sectors will become better. We find that endeavours that are managed by humans always need improvement and we at least want to see the regulators at their best and if they are at their best it will reflect on the sectors that they manage. This is our strategy as an organization and we find it most useful, making sure we always leverage on others and enhance collaboration.”
She said WSCIJ decided to set agenda in the sector because of the reactive nature of their reporting.
This, she said, was evident in the number of news stories churned out without follow ups and investigations to set policy makers on their toes.
“In 2017, we started with media monitoring. Again, we are a learning organization. 12 newspapers have been used for three months for media monitoring, two of them publish online. We just want to know what the media reports on basic education to understand what is available now so that we can design our curriculum in a way that attends to what is not available or help what is available to be at least better.
“This is what we found. Before then, most stories were partly straight news stories. A report of event, a report about what stakeholders say, all of those things people were saying. Stories on basic education were low, compared to others like tertiary or junior secondary education.
Stories for primary and secondary schools were very low, except for when they are involved in common entrance or other major exams; they are very low compared to other stories. We felt that it wasn’t good enough for a part of education that forms the foundation. Pictures were about events, such as inter-house sports or of private organizations donating to schools. Most stories were reactive stories, not proactive.
“The agenda setting of the media was found in our monitoring. We have done monitoring on oil and gas, electricity, education, agriculture, cartooning and we see that the agenda setting of the media is missing. Nigerian media is mostly reactive. We are working hard to see that change. What happens is, the politicians start the drama, they ask us to cover it. We are diligent in covering that. We want to say that infant mortality is big drama and we want the media to make it such that everybody then latches on it, not that a certain politician rules news issues for weeks on end and then the main issues remain behind.
“So here is the evidence: 4,597 straight news stories, 773 photo stories, after that we have adverts. It is interesting to see that after news, the next things we see are adverts a lot of times. 639 are the headlines about education others on education were 19 during that three months period.
“You see tertiary education takes sixty percent of the news, followed by senior secondary school news, and then there is basic primary, then the basic junior secondary, which is the least reported. These findings were from January to March 2017. There were 808 editorials and then editorials about education were 34. This tells us the trend and those trends are critical.
She charged the participants on reporting impacting stories.
“We just don’t want reporting of problems. We want reporting that causes government to want to do something about that issue. We will be following the story and when the school is completed, we will send a journalist there to also report because for reporters we believe that we are not witch hunters. We are not just waiting for government to err and suddenly we start talking about it.
“We are collaborators in progress and so when the government does something wrong and then rights the wrong, we know it is our responsibility to say ‘this was bad, but government made it look good.”
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