INVESTIGATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING TRAINING – Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo, Executive Director of ERA/FoEN, Warri, 18-19 October 2016
Introduction
It is my pleasure to warmly welcome you all this investigative environmental reporting training funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. The decision to hold this training in Warri is because of its success in honing the skills of Nigerian journalists in a just-concluded project with the same ministry.
The training itself is premised on the need for our journalists to go beyond merely reporting the state of the environment to being able to identify, pursue and exhaustively report the mammoth environmental challenges plaguing the nation.
We must note the Nigerian environment is in a parlous state. From the north, to the middle belt down to the southern states, there are environmental issues that are not exhaustively treated. Issues that make headlines most times are off key.
Let us examine for instance some of the challenges peculiar to the different regions that need some critical focus:
- Desertification in Northern Nigeria which is increasing at the rate of more than half a kilometer every year with grave impacts on 35 million Nigerians deriving their livelihoods from pastoring and fishing. In 2001 Nigeria launched the National Action Programme on Desertification. This is 13 years after. Have journalists asked questions and written enough on this issue?
- The Lake Chad which covered an area put at 25,000 square kilometres in 1963 but has shrunk to under 1,500 square kilometres at present and still shrinking. Experts say the lake may become dry land within the next 15- 20 years. How many journalists have visited the area and put pictures to the issue?
- In 2005 the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released data showing that Nigeria had the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Have we bothered to ask questions and identify areas in Nigeria that suffer the most forest loss? What is instigating deforestation?
- Gulley erosion Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu States in eastern Nigeria that have swallowed whole communities
- The case of the Niger Delta where oil pollution has left toxic footprints on community lands, rivers, streams and the attendant impacts on livelihoods is well known. The ecocide in Ogoniland which has become the emblem of pollution has not been adequately captured and the reality not exhaustively presented to the Nigerian people. Here in Warri, oil ravages are evident in Jesse, Iwherekan and other communities that suffer oil spills and gas flares.
- ERA/FoEN has proposed a National Basic Income Scheme (NaBIS) for the unemployed to unlock potentials buried away for lack of access to opportunities created by the environmental crisis listed above and mis-governance. Think of what a social security of a monthly stipend would offer to teeming unemployed in this time of recession and oil slump.
Your participating in this training is as a result of story ideas submitted which the experts coaching you in this training will x-ray and make suggestions to make them of a higher quality when finally published.
Without going into too much detail, we anticipate that after three days of intensive coaching your skills to address the aforementioned issues and more will have been sharpened and you will be challenged to go out there to dig out environmental challenges that are hidden.
Once again, ERA/FoEN welcomes you
