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Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) and GLA have organized a one-day workshop to build the capacity of journalists practicing in Rivers State on effective reportage of the environment.
The training, co-ordinated by The African Citizens’ Initiative for Rights and Development (ACIRD), and held on last week in the state capital, Port Harcourt, brought together journalists across the various media in Port Harcourt, civil society organizations and members of impacted communities in the state.
ERA’s programme manager, Mike Karikpo, said the organization desires “to help journalists update their knowledge on environmental reporting. The reportage on the environment has not been too impressive, and it has meant that ordinary Nigerians have not followed environmental issues as closely as they have done politics and other news reportage. So, we wanted to see how we can help increase the capacity of the journalist to report the environment in a way that is interesting, that gets people to tune in, listen in and take action.”
He said it is important to help build the capacity of journalists because “they are one of the biggest platforms that we can share messages about what is going on, especially concerning the environment. Without the media, it will be difficult to pass on the message on our own.
“I know that there is the social media, but you still need those media, especially the established media that people trust, that people listen to. So, radio, newspaper, television, people listen to these, people trust information from these platforms. And we want them to ensure that apart from all of the news, and you know the issue of fake news around social media, we wanted to ensure that at least we have platforms that can provide incisive, interesting and factual news to communities.”
Karikpo said ERA has been engaged in activities aimed at protecting the environment in the state and region. He said “we’ve worked not just in Rivers State, but all over the Niger Delta. We have been involved in some of the most important environmental issues that you want to think of. We have been involved in campaign on gas flaring. We got a judgment of the Federal High Court of Nigeria that declared gas flaring illegal in Nigeria. We have been involved in helping Nigerians, especially our policy makers, to come to terms with thinking beyond oil.
“So, we have our campaign – ‘Leave Oil in the Soil,’ which is an attempt to push policy makers and Nigerians to think outside the box, and think beyond oil and see how we can, with what we have up here in our heads, deal with our developmental issues and bring ourselves from our level of under-development and poverty to a developed state, in tune with the environment. It has to be in tune with the environment, protecting the environment and people’s livelihoods,” he said.
Klem Ofuokwu, a journalist and also a trainer, who delivered the lecture on ‘Effective Reportage on Environment,’ said “Environment reporting is a very technical area. So we need journalists who would be able to understand those kinds of concepts to be able to communicate to the ordinary people, because you can’t report except you understand what you are reporting.
“It is actually to build the capacity of journalists and CSOs on how to report on environment, to make their report interesting such that they would be able to grab the attention of the audience. That is the essence of this training.
“I feel that the area of environment is very under-reported, and majorly because of some of the factors we listed, that it is not as dramatic as politics or the killings and so on. People don’t actually pay so much attention, reporters don’t actually pay so much attention to environmental issues. Because of some of these reasons, people don’t look at it as something worth reading.
“But we feel that if reporters are able to change the way they write, begin to make their story more interesting, begin to add stories, statistics, add figures and sound bites to their report, that would be good enough to attract the attention of the audience,” Ofuokwu said.
