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The Minister of
Information and Communication, Dora Akunyili, on Thursday asked
journalists to promote “the courage to publish the truth and perish”
and make it a professional canon.

Mrs. Akunyili said
this as the special guest of honour, at a media stakeholders’ debate
titled “150 years of journalism, how far?”

The debate was organised by the Lagos chapter of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) to commemorate the 2010 Press Week.

As the 2011 general elections approach, Mrs. Akunyili called for “rigorous investigative reports.”

The minister noted
that, after 55 years of the existence of the NUJ, the profession should
bold, fair, and balance in its reports.

“The imperative
need for electoral matters to be reported with a spirit and principle
of dispassionate arbitration cannot be overstated,” she said. “For us
to have the much desired free and fair election, reports on the event
must be thoroughly and rigorously investigated to unearth and publicise
truth and truth only.”

Better pay for journalists

Ray Ekpu, the
event’s chairman, who is also the chairman of Newswatch, described
Nigerian journalism as a giant with feet of clay. Mr. Ekpu said
journalism has gone from being an “unprofitable, frustrating, and
soul-depressing career in the 1930s,” according to the late Obafemi
Awolowo, to being a profession where journalists now “wear nice clothes
and drive exotic cars.”

On the other hand,
Mrs. Akunyili condemned the poor remuneration of journalists, blaming
same for the “unethical journalism in which practitioners, powerless to
effect change within (their organisations), become outwardly oriented
and begin to trade both media space and professional conviction for
money and material.”

She promised to
champion the cause for a separate and enhanced salary structure for
journalists and appealed to “the ownership and management of the
private sector journalism centres to urgently revisit their personnel
policies, especially, as it relates to compensation.”

FOI Bill

Though Mrs.
Akunyili avoided the long-standing call for the passage of the freedom
of Information Bill into law, the Editor of THISDAY Sunday, Yusuph
Olaniyonu, described the failure of the National Assembly to pass the
bill as a lost opportunity.

Mr. Olaniyonu, in
his remark, asked the minister “to use her good office to re-initiate
the FoI Bill as an executive bill given its salience to achieve
objective reporting.”

The guest lecturer,
Ralph Akinfeleye, the head of the University of Lagos mass
communications department, called for the immediate passage of the bill
because more than eighty democracies in the world have passed the FoI
into laws.

“If our leaders are serious about transparency, rule of law, and
accountability, and good governance, this is the time to pass the FoI
bill that has been with them for over a decade,” he said.