Welcome remarks by Professor Alfred E Opubor, Secretary-General, West African News-media and Development (WANAD) Center, Cotonou , Benin , at the Opening Ceremony of the workshop on “News Agencies and building an inclusive Information Society in Africa ”,18 th April 2006.
President of the Broadcasting and Communications Commission(HAAC) of Benin Republic , Regional Adviser of the Economic Commission for Africa , Representatives of UN Agencies and Diplomatic Missions, distinguished Resource Persons, Workshop Participants, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is my duty, and a great pleasure, as its Secretary-General, to welcome you to the West African Newsmedia and Development (WANAD) Centre, on this occasion. Our institution was founded in 1984 as a UNESCO project to assist the development of news agencies in West Africa . In that role, we helped to build technical, editorial and management capacities and to strengthen the perfomance of national news agencies as central players in the distribution of development news in their countries. We received generous financial support from the Government of Germany, and through UNESCO that provided techical oversight for nearly a decade. In 1995, when the funding and technical partnerships came to a formal end, the stakeholders decided that WANAD should continue to provide its valuable services to the West African media, and the project was transformed into a regional institution, the WANAD Centre.In the decade since then, WANAD's activities have spread to all sub-Saharan African regions, making it a pan-African institution, that has provided training courses for over 1000 journalists and communication officers.
We are very pleased to be involved in this workshop which is a significant initiative to update and further build the capacity of African news agencies. As you know we consider news agencies to be WANAD's ‘natural' constitutency. Our partners in this important landmark venture are GTZ and UNECA. Both organisations have distinguished themselves as leaders in development cooperation on this continent. They bring with them to our joint task, a track-record of commitment, technical expertise and resources that complement WANAD's experience and specialisation. We are honored to be in such distinguished company, and hope that together with GTZ and ECA, we can develop a capacity-building framework that, over the next few years , will enhance the role of news agencies towards building an inclusive Information Society in Africa .
African News agencies were established in the 1960s and 1970s ,the period just after independence, as a matter of necessity. Many countries did not have a system for collecting and distributing news and information other than the national radio, which was centralised in the capital city. How could the vast majority of citizens be reached with information from all over the country? National news agencies were seen as a valid answer. Although they functioned as part of the government information system and transmitted mostly government information, many of them, in so doing, also provided news of development activities from the regions and provinces where they had posted journalists, and helped to increase the volume of local stories on national radio and media. But the standards and achievements varied greatly.Many national news agencies had few staff, little resources, inadequate equipment and produced not much news.Because they depended entirely on goverments, several soon began to decline as governments reduced their subventions.
The inauguration of the Pan-African News Agency, PANA, in 1983, was expected to galvanize the contribution of national news agencies by pooling,exchanging and distributing selected items from the five regions of the continent. PANA was supposed to reduce dependency on the foreign news agencies that dominated international newsflow at that time. All the news agencies represented at this workshop were active in PANA operations in the early days, and generated much valuable news and features, within the guidelines of the PANA Convention and Editorial Guidelines.
Having been involved at the national and regional levels in news agency development in that era, I am well aware of the constraints and limitations as well as the achievements of that particular model. As founding Chairman of the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in 1979, I faced the challenge of creating a credible, government-backed professional news organisation to service a growing media market including private newspapers and magazines in a large multi-cultural federation.To start off NAN, we were able to recruit about 90 journalists from the existing media and we provided them intense training in hard-nosed news agency and development journalism.
We were guided by the principle that the business of a news agency is to provide hard news and solid features.
The then ruling military administration of General Olusegun Obasanjo let us run our affairs with virtually no interference from government, probably because our demonstrated determination to maintain rigorous journalistic standards of reporting and editing, with high professional ethics, earned us respect. We were able to report from several state capitals and some rural areas; and the ‘geography of the news' soon began to change in Nigeria. NAN quickly developed a reputation for accurate and balanced news, even on sensitive government matters. It also provided short but informative features on a wide range of issues.With correspondents reporting from southern Africa, NAN fed its subscribers with news of the unfolding dramatic changes in Rhodesia that was about to become Zimbabwe in 1982, as well as dispatches from correspondents in Belgrade, New Delhi, London, Washington and the United Nations in New York, usually from a Nigerian and Afrocentric perspective.
In 1983, when I was invited to join the team that inaugurated PANA in Dakar, as Adviser on Information and Training, I was able to monitor the stories coming from news agencies from all over the continent.In training courses for reporters and editors, I was involved in shaping the content of the PANA file, especially through assigning our own correspondents and encouraging national agencies to contribute features in areas such as science and technology, business and economy, environment, cooperation and population issues.These wre areas in which the international agencies were not strong at the time, and PANA could make a real difference.
The PANA experience of over twenty years ago was remarkable in several ways: it was able to collect and distribute at least 500 stories a month in African agencies using a telex and modified radio transmission system. PANA journalists and editors had access to very limited sources of information and relied mainly on published material from encyclopaedias, periodicals and bulletins from specialised institutions. Much of the news from the national agencies was fairly routine and ‘consensus' official information about government, political leadership and their travels to African meetings; there was little debate or questioning or alternative voices, except in features on areas like traditional medicine, or the anti-apartheid struggle.Many countries did not think of sending news about their rural areas, or women or youth.In short, PANA news was not exciting and was largely ignored by private media; but many feature articles were picked up in Asia and Latin America, and sometimes, very rarely, by European media.
Yet it is aming to recollect what was accomplished in that distant past, without cell phones, without personal computers, without the internet, and no websites. We had a lot of typewriters in the newsroom, and telex machines, and telephones that often managed to reach some of our partner agencies in Khartoum or Lusaka, and sometines, Lagos! But then, PANA also began to wane, with governments failing to pay their dues.The rest is history; now PANA is commercialised or is it privatised?
Today, we have cell phones, we have computers in newsrooms and we have internet, and websites.Some journalists even have personal computers; and most people have e-mail addresses, and cybercafes are booming.
What does all that mean to our news agencies and how they operate? What difference do the new technologies make to the way national news agencies gather information and distribute it? What is the source of national news? What is reported from the rural communities, and about women, youth and the poor? What are your national news agencies saying about desertification, about the weather, about avian flu, about integration in Africa? What news do you have in your agencies about education reforms, about schooling for girls, about literacy and unemployment? Who is writing dispatches or features on the new information and communication technologies; on cell phones and what they are doing to our societies, on the internet and cybercafes? How can we share such material among Afdrican news agencies, using the new opportunities now available?
There are many social and technological changes taking place around us, in our communities, our countries, our regions, our continent and our world. The new technologies are here; they will continue to be a determining part of our reality. We cannot afford to be silent on indifferent to them. Our people need to understand them, need to domesticate them, need to use them to improve their lives, to support development in communities and to reduce poverty in families. The media have a responsibility to create usable information that will assit people to demystify these information and communication tools, so that they can become useful additions to people's lives.
But the media cannot give what they do not have; they cannot help people understand, if they themselves do not understand. One objective of this workshop is to help the media understand; and having understood, to help it to transmit that understanding in a manner that is understandable to the African public.
Perhaps this calls for a new approach to how news agencies function, to how they present their material and how they relate to other national media. With so many emerging rural and community radio stations, and new television stations and newspapers and magazines, how can new agencies revitalize their operations with ICTs so that they can have added value through using their national network of reporters to send muti-media reports from women, youth and new voices from the rural areas and urban slums, in addition to parliament and State House?
We said earlier that African news agencies were created in the 1960s and 1970s out of necessity, to povide a national information system. They can also be transformed or ‘re-invented' in the early twenty-first century out of necessity ; the neccesity of providing relevant development information for national and regional integration using new information and communication technilogies.
As in the past, so today, WANAD stands ready to work with you to achieve your institutional and professional goals in this exciting new and challenging environment, and with GTZ and ECA as dedicated partners, to enhance the effectiveness of news agencies in building an inclusive Information Society in Africa.
Thank you.