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| Alhaji Lai Mohammed |
THE Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, played
host on Wednesday to the leadership of the Pan African News Agency, PANA led by its Interim
Chairman of the Board and the Director-General, Dr. Ibrahim Daggash and Mr. Babacar
Fall respectively during which he berated the media over its concentration on
negative reportage solely aimed at selling their products at all cost without putting
the interest of the continent and society at large into consideration.
The Minister however gave an assurance that Nigeria would become
active stakeholder towards contributing its quota for the progress of the
continental media agency to ensure that all its goals and aspirations are optimally
actualized.
The Director-General of PANA, Mr. Fall, impliedly complained
that the agency had been missing a lot since Nigeria stopped playing its
leadership role on issues concerning it (PANA) and called for resuscitation of
interest adding that re-branding and promoting Africa requires a concerted
efforts of all the stakeholders particularly Nigeria due to its status in the
continent.
”It is not just PANA but all regional institutions that
have been suffering the absence of Nigeria politically, diplomatically and
financially. Nigeria is the pioneer of African unity and PANA itself is a baby
of Nigeria,” Mr. Fall said.
Nevertheless,
he expressed his confidence that the tenure of the Minister would certainly
reposition Nigeria to take its rightful place in advancement of the continent
through information and communication.
Speaking avidly, the minister remarked that Africa needs PANA
even more than before towards positive projection of the continent to the world
at large noting that African can only rebrand itself from inside. He noted that
whereas the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU),
established PANA to project Africa to find its voice in the global information
order, ostensibly, the agency have lost its primary focus leading to loss of voice
in the globe.
He therefore assured that the kind of PANA that Africa
will be proud of would certainly come from a determinedly collective effort of
all the stakeholders, adding that inevitably, the management of PANA must be proactive
and creative towards fashioning out practicable modalities in view of turning
around the agency to be of utmost benefit to the society at large.
”If African stories cannot be told from the African
perspectives by Africans, events on the continent will always be viewed from
the prisms of the Western and other media – and such prisms are often
distorted.
”With PANA unable to fully fulfil its mandate, Africa has
continued to be portrayed as a continent of wars, diseases, deaths, famine,
poverty and bad governance, among others. The spread of democracy, economic
growth that for decades remained among the strongest in the world, and the end
of most of the wars that bedevilled Africa for years are some of the good news
coming out of Africa. But these are rarely reported.
”What we see in the media are mostly negative news that
portrayed the continent as a land of plagues, poverty and hopelessness. This
has fed into the desperation of many of our youths to escape from the continent
at all cost, even at the gravest risks to their lives.
”With the dwindling resources of many African nations, it
may not be feasible to revert to assessed contributions to run the agency.
Therefore, the management must be willing to think out of the box and come up
with innovative ideas for the funding of the agency. I am aware that several
funding initiatives have been mooted in the past, but none seems to have seen
the light of day,” the minister said.
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