Prof Tonnie Iredia is a former Director General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and Chancellor of the newly licensed University of Communication, Benin City.

In this interview, he speaks on his experience in the media and the establishment of the Tonnie Iredia University of Communication, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU writes

As a former Director General of the NTA, paint a brief picture of how the media was then and how it is now, what is missing, what has been added and what more needs to be added?

I think a lot of people keep saying that the media is no longer doing well or there has been a decline and so on and so forth. It’s not exactly so. There are many things that are happening now that didn’t happen in my time.

So, in terms of human capacity development, maybe the media has not done too well this time. But in terms of facilities, of course, the media is better now. I remember in my days as a young reporter; we had a camera in the studio.

And in the morning, we have to knock it three times before it can work. So, if you look at the situation today where you don’t have to do any of those. You don’t have to travel when you go and cover an event to bring the story back physically. You just upload your story and it goes on.

So, it’s almost instantaneous. So, there’s everything about breaking news, everything about promptness and all of that. When you compare that era with this era, certainly this is a better era. But when it comes to how the human beings work, certainly there’s a decline. What has happened is that the media of today has adjusted to the pace of society

What do you mean by adjusting to the pace of society?

Everybody is hustling in the society today. So, when you are hustling, you’re not going to have enough time for professionalism. You’re not going to have enough time to settle down to say, what actually is the real meat of this story? What I’m saying is that the media has declined, but you will be doing a lot of damage if you think it is just the media.

There’s also the issue of the society. The trends and what others are doing. Otherwise, the media will be left be hind because as people keep saying, we all go to the same market. So, if everybody is hustling to make ends meet, and you are professionalizing, how do you make ends meet.

Does it seem like politics has taken the airwaves, digital space, print, and subjugated, as it were, the issues of governance and delivering dividends of democracy to the people?

It’s not as if it appears. It’s exactly so. And it’s been on for quite a while. And some of us have been raising the alarm that, look, in governance, there is a period for electioneering. After that, there’s a period for elections that is, casting ballots. After that, there’s institutionalization of government.

After that, there’s governance. In today’s Nigeria, all the first three I mentioned are still there. But they all go beyond their era into governance. So, rather than focusing on governance, we’re always talking about the next election that may be three or years away. The focus that should be on governance is taken away.

There is a period for electioneering… After that, there’s institutionalization of government and governance. In today’s Nigeria, all first three are still there

And the politicians are busy looking for how they can get the next election. So, they are playing their own game because they want to survive. Now, this is where the issue comes in. It is the journalists whose duty it is to pull them back and say, no, sorry, this is not a period for electioneering. This is a period of governance. So, we want to see projects.

We want to see what you are doing. We want to tell the public what you are doing. We don’t want to tell the public what your ambition is. We have passed that stage. Now, the journalist is not able to do that as of today for so many reasons. One, the decline that I’ve mentioned, two, the kind of robust politicking that we have now taken. The politicians are the ones who make decisions.

They are the ones who determine and set the agenda. And yet, everyone says the agenda-setting role belongs to the media. But in Nigeria, it has gone to the politicians and that is where I think the media must sit back again and introspect and tell themselves, are we failing in our duty?

Is somebody usurping our role? Are we merged with some other people? If so, is the media going to be eclipsed very shortly? When you go to a press conference, you don’t allow the politicians to change the trends in society. You are the journalist. You determine the news angle. So, many things happen. This is what you say you are going to start with. That is the news angle.

The politician cannot write your report for you. If they do, as many of them are doing now, it’s either you are lazy or you are compromised. So, if the journalist is the owner of the news angle, then the news angle should reflect the interest of society, not necessarily what the man who wants the press conference to be called is doing.

How has the issue of government control, ownership structure, and financial independence provided fire for this trend that you’re talking about?

Well, I think we need to be fair. See, if somebody sets up a medium, he has a goal. I predict it in the tune. He has a goal. So, you cannot really change that goal. But you can determine what segment of what you are doing is to be allocated to that goal.

Why do you say that the political class is more problematic than the military and does this make the work of the media more challenging?

I don’t know whether they are more problematic, but I know that they are both problematic. I know that during the military era, the rigidity of the military system was such that they would want to impose it on you that this is what they want done. The politicians also have their own goals.

They want it done. But my point is this. If we may be practical a little bit. At the beginning of this administration, the country faced the election of new presiding officers for the National Assembly, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House and their deputies.

Those selections of those officers were supposed to be an internal affair. Why did the media allow the politicians to turn it into a public affair? Nothing else was happening in the country anymore. Everything was on the selection of leaders of the National Assembly, which is a purely private matter.

It’s like a group setting up who should be their leader. And then, it now looked as if the President of the Senate was elected by all of us. We didn’t elect the President of the Senate. We are not voters. We won’t be allowed to vote when the Senate President will be chosen. So, it’s an internal matter. And therefore, the media should have sought to internalize that issue when the politicians were externalizing it.

When they were carrying paid adverts, all sorts of things about the elections of Senate President and Speaker, we should have let them realize that the Senate President and the Speaker of the House are just first among equals, picked by you yourself.

It doesn’t have anything to do with us. But we allowed it. So, rather than government being made to tell us what they are doing, we were seeing the election of Senate President, the election of Speaker as the issue of the day. How does that interest you and I?

It seems like most of the media have carried that and seen it as what to do. And one wants to outdo the other. So, it’s like if you don’t take that on your front page, on your television, that you’re missing out…

Well, yes, it may look so because the media is still engaged in some unnecessary competition. As far as I’m concerned, the age of competition has passed because in those days when news was once a day, you would be struggling to lead because everybody’s waiting for that time. But now news is every hour, in some cases half hourly.

So, when you are struggling to lead, there are people who are not even watching you at that time. So, what are all the struggles you have made? They don’t hear it until another person has said it, at the time they want to watch, which is how the usage of media is also important.

You were invited only once to the media chat by President Olusegun Obasanjo. Why?

Maybe, we all have different reasons for why. It would be better for you to ask those who invite people. But when I was invited, I did advise that I didn’t want to be on it. For two reasons, one, my programme is Point Blank, and I believe in programme identification. I don’t believe in jumping from one programme to the other, as many of our younger people do today.

You see them reading the news, the next time they are doing MC somewhere, the next time they are doing interview somewhere. But in my own time and my person, I didn’t believe in that. So, I believe that whenever I appear on air, and I say, good evening, people should be expecting Point Blank, not media chat, not any other thing. So, I said I didn’t want it.

Secondly, I knew that the questions I would ask would not be good. So, it is better to just stay off. And I said to them, I said, look, I come from a place where proverbs are what we use to say things. In my place, they say, instead of calling the person who will not answer you, just call the person who is not at home. Because the person that will not answer you, even if you are calling him in your presence, he won’t answer. But the one who is not at home will not hear.

So, you can console yourself that it was because he was not at home. So, I did advise, but they didn’t hear. They said I should come. The President said I should come. I said, okay, so I came there. And I asked a simple question. And President Obasanjo just said everything he wanted to say, and everybody was shouting and quarrelling.

What was the question, people would like to hear?

I wanted to know whether the rumour that Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar were fighting using African magic was true. And the president said, well, I don’t know about it. You should go and ask Atiku.

They brought seven cows and killed them and said I would die after seven days. I didn’t die. The handlers of the president didn’t want this. But the president said it. So, I just asked my question. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t invited again.

A military governor once told you your questions were nasty and he would detain you and nothing would happen. And then on live television, another military officer threatened to shoot you. How was the experience like?

I don’t know why you are reminding me of all of these things. Well, I’ve forgotten about them. You see, when maybe I was very young and enthusiastic and exuberant, so none of these things really bothered me. But mine was just to ask questions. And it wasn’t only the military, even politicians.

There are many of them who came onto my programme. I remembered my encounter with Nnamdi Azikiwe, he said he wouldn’t ask her anymore. He stood up and was going to leave. And it was a live programme. So, your capacity to manage your guests comes into play. You have to find different ways of making the programme go on.

Once somebody goes to make a report, he will certainly react. But when he hears my side of the story, all the threats about firing me will go down

When your guest is very agitated, you tell him that you may be agitated, but this is the only opportunity you have to say your side of the story so that the public will stop holding things against you. Then the person calms down and says, yes, okay, if that’s the case, well, what happened was this. But as for those threatening, people just threatened.

There are many of them. I thank my God for working with President Obasanjo because he was quite different from the picture that was painted before I met him.

There was somebody who went to the president to say I must be removed from office because of the questions I asked. And the President said, what happened? He said, oh, I was very rude and I was abusing the party and so on and so forth. The {resident didn’t know that this transpired in a programme. He thought I met him somewhere and I was hard on him or something.

So, the President asked for me and he was asking me, why are you doing this to people who you know will agitate for your removal and all of that? He said, what is your response? What is your problem with such and such a man? So, I told him that, no, he came to my program and I asked him a question.

The President said, he came to your programme? I said, yes. You mean it? I said yes. And he took his phone and called the man and said you came here to report somebody to me. Is it true that you went to his programmme? The man said, yes. He said, you went to that program? He said, yes. Have you ever seen me on that program?

Obasanjo fired you five times or threatened to fire you five times, did he ever did that?

No, he didn’t. Once somebody goes to make a report, he will certainly react. But when he hears my side of the story, all the threats about firing me will go down. But what I remember, and I like to always remember about the president, is that the fifth time he told me, I should remind him that he will never sack me.

The NIPR congratulated the federal government for what it called sector-based university, a follow-up of the granting of license for Tonnie Iredia University of Communications. What is the idea behind establishing such?

Over the years, I have come to find that there are many things that are wrong with our society that people are not making any effort to change. Having been in the field, having worked in the media, and later going to the academics, I had both sides of the terrain.

And I knew what the problem was. I knew, for example, that the training of journalists in Nigeria was not sufficient. I knew we were just producing university graduates.

We needed to produce experts, people who know everything about a particular subject area that they are interested in. If you want to be a broadcaster, you should acquire a degree in broadcasting.

You should not be reading bogus things like mass communication and all the other things that you don’t really need. Yes, you can have elective courses. But the focus should be on that which you went for.

And at the end of the day, you’ll be so grounded in that subject that nobody can push you here and there. So, that is probably one of the reasons why the media is not able to stand the politicians because the media are not experts.

You see, we don’t have a situation where a body of knowledge is put on the ground. Like, for example, if you sack a journalist, the next journalist, will he do what the last one did? If the answer is no, something is wrong.

Look, if you sack a medical doctor, the next one you take is going to do what that former person did because that is the way it ought to be done. So, because we don’t have that systematized education that makes every journalist take a particular perspective of an issue from point of view of professionalism, you can afford to sack a journalist.

And the next person will begin to do what you want, rather than what ought to be done. Now, I am saying that if we are able to produce experts that will change. The people will begin to respect journalists and media professionals who tell you this is the best way to do this.

You talk about professionalism, what specific ways will this deepen professionalism, enhance excellence in work environment, and boost productivity?

The training is too peripheral. You see, it ought to be detailed. For example, we have a course in mass communication called Media Law and Ethics, which I taught for a long time. In my university, we’re not going to have Media Law and Ethics.

We’ll have Media Law, different from Media Ethics, so that the journalists come from that school they will know the laws that guard and govern the media. They will also know the ethical values of the media, the things they cannot do and the things they can do, not necessarily because there’s sanction, but because that’s the ethical value of the profession.

So, people are not wellgrounded in those things, so they come around and do a lot of things that they ought not to do because they don’t have sufficient knowledge and so it’s not just about expertise. It’s also about familiarization with the subject matter that you are coming to tell us that this is where you are, the subject matter. Look, for example, many governors have asked me, what do you think?

I’m trying to recruit social person for my television or for my radio station. What is your advice? I tell him, I said, if you recruit a friend or a relation, rather than an expert that station is going to be talking to only you because the station will not be good and people will not watch.