Journalists tasked on decentralised, local governance reportage

Media personnel have been urged to focus more on their immediate environment to enhance accountability, good governance and development of grassroots.

This was according to the General Manager, Herald Newspapers, Mr. Yomi Adeboye on Wednesday, during a media engagement and training for journalists in Ilorin, stressing that local governance reportage would engender good leadership.

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“We must begin to hold our local elected representatives accountable,” he noted.

Mr. Yomi Adeboye

Taking his time to enumerate the function of Local Governments, the veteran journalist opined that journalists can help to highlight needs assessment of the people by reporting on communities that are lagging behind.

He further said, “Local Governments also serve some administrative purposes by representing us at the council and involve in determining our needs. This is necessary to avoid projects duplication as well as projects that won’t meet people’s need, which have become the norm in Nigerian governance. They will just appropriate fund and execute projects without asking what are the needs of the people”

Speaking on accountability, he noted that it is the obligation of elected officers to answer for the execution of their assigned responsibilities, explanation on the spending of public money.

He therefore urged that journalists must keep politicians on the edge by demanding disclosure of facts and figures, even if they don’t want to.

“You don’t even know how much revenue they get, or the size of allocation they receive from Abuja, needless of what they do with the fund. Accountability can be liken to the idea of stewardship and being held answerable and liable for actions and inactions.

“As journalists, these are some of the things we need to take very seriously. We are to help the society to take these people into account, which has the possibility of affecting peoples’ decision during voting,” Adeboye urged.

Also addressing the participants on fact-checking as a tool for investigative journalism, Mrs. Zainab Sanni, the founder of News Verifier Africa, highlighted ways to identify fake news.

She added that journalists must be well equipped to spot motives of information which sometimes could be misinformation, disinformation or mal-information.

Mrs. Sanni noted that videos, voices and images could be doctored for selfish reasons but journalists must be tech savvy and be accustomed to modern tools to detect such deceit and expose it.

“Media personnel must be able to identify original content by knowing its source, if its new or where and when it was first used on the internet, captions and other meta data that are generic to the images or other media files,” she noted.

The media engagement was part of the series of training for journalists to enhance good governance, organised by Albakar FM, with the support of McArthur Foundation, and Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism.