Photo by John Chiahemen
By John Chiahemen
There seemed no better place than Lagos, Nigeria, to draw the curtain on this year’s series of Thomson Reuters Foundation workshops for Anglophone African journalists sponsored by the Investment Climate Facility for Africa (ICF).
Nigeria offers a goldmine of factors and real-life situations for the “Introduction to business and financial reporting” workshops for many reasons. First there is the sheer number of print and broadcast media organizations in the country of about 150 million people.
To get a good feel of news around the country, a foreign correspondent would usually scan through up to a dozen titles on any given day. There are up to 100 TV and radio stations scattered across the country’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja.
The rapid growth of the press over the past 25 years or so has come at a price. Many media owners say they are struggling to find and retain talent or to offer adequate training for better reporting of the increasing complexities of the Nigerian economy and politics for both foreign and domestic investors in Africa’s biggest oil producer.
“An uninformed journalist is more dangerous than a weapon of mass destruction,” was the stark manner guest speaker Bismarck Rewane put it to 12 workshop participants, all of them Nigerian except for one from Ghana and another from Cameroon.
Rewane, a respected analyst and head of Lagos-based Financial Derivatives Co Ltd, was effectively echoing the view of the ICF, which in sponsoring the series of workshops, saw a direct co-relation between the quality of business and financial reporting in Africa and investor confidence.
No sector of the Nigerian economy has needed as much reporting expertise as banking and finance. The banking sector has grown by over 60 percent in the past three years alone, according to another guest speaker, Jibril Aku of Ecobank. His bank is one of a new breed of Nigerian financial institutions spreading their wings across the rest of the continent and beyond.
While there has been strong appetite for foreign investment in Nigerian banks, the sector has not been spared by the global financial crisis. The extent its losses and how they are likely to impact on the wider Nigerian economy is one of the issues begging for expert and informed reporting. Other issues include Nigeria’s sharply reduced earnings from its mainstay crude oil exports due to unrest in the main producing areas of the Niger Delta, the country’s chronic energy shortages and crumbling infrastructure, all of which have combined with a poor governance record to deliver a devastating blow to business.
Participants, in both their formal and informal feedback, were almost unanimous in judging the workshop as highly useful in helping them add value to their reporting. “It is the best I have had in recent times. It was concise and straight to the issues,” said Emeka Anuforo of Lagos daily, The Guardian. Much of the praise was for the high-intensity hands-on exercises, the stimulating contribution of guest speakers reminiscent of the quality of lecturers at the Nairobi and Lusaka workshops, and the value of the field trip as a basis for feature writing. The visit to Honeywell Flour Mills at Tin Can Island Port, close to the workshop venue in Apapa, was an eye-opening look at how industry can survive despite the hostile environment resulting from decades of under-investment in the country’s basic infrastructure.
A novelty at the Lagos workshop was a media panel on the final day, but the participants shrank to two after heavy rains disrupted traffic and normal life in the teeming city. Still the two panelists – Reuters Bureau Chief Nick Tattersall and his FT counterpart Matt Green – were great value and took part in a vigorous Q&A with the workshop participants. The 12 participants showed high commitment, many braving rain and up to three hours in the city’s infamous traffic gridlock to get to Apapa punctually. For the first time in the workshop series the gender balance was 50-50.
Most were from newspapers, two were from TV and none from commercial radio, a booming sector elsewhere in Africa but surprisingly weak in Nigeria – at least at the top end of the market. Two additional workshops in the series are for Francophone journalists and another is for the Portuguese-speaking counterparts. Twenty top performers from the workshops will be selected to attend an advanced course in London, Paris or Lisbon.