Community reporting
There is a silent majority in our rural communities throughout the country. How much reporting are our news media doing on these communities? How much of their economic and social problems do we know? Indeed, do we know them?
None of us would be proud of the answers to these questions. Community reporting is not attractive to reporters. It lacks glamour. The path to journalistic success and fortune does not cut through the isolated rural communities. Still, I suggest we bestir ourselves and take up the challenges of community reporting so we can bring our rural communities in from the cold. It would be good for the health of national development.
The focus of community reporting is to give our rural communities human faces and human voices. The first rule in community reporting is for the reporter to know the community he wishes to report on. We have two broadly distinct communities - urban and rural. As the name implies, the urban communities live in our towns and cities and the rural communities live in the rural areas.
Communities, urban or rural, are not amorphous entities. They are, to borrow from biology, living social organisms. There are 774 local government areas in this country. Each of these local government areas contains a number of districts and clans. And all of them, without my saying so, contain people - farmers, teachers, traders, primary school pupils, secondary school students, fishermen, etc.
Demographic experts estimate that 80 per cent of our estimated population of 150 million live in these rural communities. We are talking of 120,000,000 people here. That is almost the population of the rest of the countries in the West African sub-region combined. Reporting on such a large number of communities and people is no easy task. But it is not impossible once we know what to do and how to approach the task.
The first step is a paradigm shift in our attitude towards the rural communities. They are not isolated groups and we must stop treating them as such.
Our second step is to remember them all the time and not only when there is a crisis - an outbreak of a killer disease or an election, for instance.
Our third step is to know these communities; to listen to them and to care enough about them.
There is a huge irony in all this. Most of us here were born in rural communities. We grew up there in our formative years before we went to school. I dare say that only a few of us have lived in the communities of our birth since we attained the respectable status of adulthood. We have lived in urban areas ever since. But some of us here still have parents and relations living in our rural communities. When we visit them occasionally, we share their suffering - lack of potable water, lack of motorable roads and the resultant difficulty in transporting themselves and their farm produce to the market, lack of modern health facilities and, where they exist, lack of basic drugs for the treatment of common ailments such as malaria and typhoid. Nor can we pretend not to know that the ugly face of grinding poverty is visible in all our rural communities. Is it fair for us to pretend that our people in the rural communities are unknown masses?
Our rural communities are in the cold. The media have a duty to bring them out of the cold into the warm sunshine of modern development. The late Bashorun Moshood Abiola, publisher of the National Concord titles launched, for the first time in our history, community newspapers, called Community Concord, targeted at reporting on the rural communities.
A former reporter for the Sunday Concord, Olowusago, was inspired by the Community Concord newspapers to found his own community newspaper, Oriwu Sun, in his own rural community, Ikorodu, Lagos State. It was a successful newspaper. The success of that paper in turn inspired the former Chief Public Relations Officer in the Nigeria Airways, Chief Femi Ogunleye, to found his own community newspaper in his own community. He is a traditional ruler now. So, don’t expect him to be editor-in-chief any more.
Those efforts showed that the isolation of our rural communities had been a source of worry for some of our compatriots. A nation that condemns 80 per cent of its population to a past century is a nation of two distinct citizens - the urban citizens with all modern opportunities and the rural citizens in darkness.
I do not hold the media responsible for what is happening to and in our rural communities.
The authors of our 1999 constitution inserted a fundamental clause in section 22. That section imposes on the news media an important constitutional duty of holding the government accountable to the people. Most of the people to whom the government is supposed to be accountable live in our rural communities. How does the government account to the people who are treated as mere masses?
The Daily Trust titles (daily and weekly) have done an occasional good job in reporting on the communities within the capital territory, drawing public attention to their lack of basic social amenities such as potable water, health facilities, electricity and roads. These communities look up every night and see the glittering lights of the city only a short distance away. It reminds them of how truly deprived they are.
We must pay due attention to the rural communities on the fundamental grounds that their isolation and neglect are detrimental to the interests of the nation. Coverage of the rural communities has never been a successful journalistic enterprise in our country. Newspaper publishers do not have enough funds to spare on the coverage of the rural communities. Because of poor funding, they cannot afford to keep reporters in say local government headquarters to keep an eye and report on the communities.
Commercial interests advise against circulating newspapers in the rural communities because it is expensive and wasteful. Newspaper publishers do not consider it good business to spend so much money taking their newspapers to the rural areas for such poor returns. But a newspaper operates on the twin imperatives of commercial interest and public service. Under certain conditions, the public service imperative must trump the purely commercial imperative. I believe it is possible to find a creative way around this that balances the commercial interests with the public good and give our rural communities faces and voices.