Right from inception of the world, it’s unarguable that journalists are among professional groups exposed to many dangers in the course of doing their jobs. These dangers are identifiable and ever present in our clime. Ranging from official censorship, online and offline molestations, varying threats, kidnapping to outright murder, working as a journalist is fraught with so many risks in this part of the world. Non-practitioners may see the above itemisation as farfetched yet these impediments are part of the lived experiences of numerous journalists irrespective of status and duties.
Beyond the aforementioned hindrances to journalism practice lies the biggest danger of poverty, a violence of sort which gnaws at the soul of the largest number of journalists. As pervasive as any other malaise, it stalks the media establishments across the country. Yes, it didn’t start today, but it’s manifestly rooted in the poor model of reward system for media professionals despite the invaluable service they provide to the society. With all the conferences and their largely utopian recommendations, none had addressed this issue squarely and practically.
That most journalists in our country are still materially poor despite the renown of Nigerian practitioners as the best in Africa and among the most vibrant in the world conveys a systemic perspective to the poverty question. The obvious painful situation is the yawning gap between the reportorial skills and interpretive brilliance of journalists and deteriorating well-being. Save for rare luck, extreme creativity, or sheer providential manifestation, a journalist who has plied his trade for about 20 or more years currently earns less than a doctor, lawyer, or a pharmacist with the same length of service.
Apparently, the poor remuneration and scanty fringe benefits is an integral part of the media landscape. My experience as a professional journalist of over three decades has reinforced my perception of this distressful order though I knew about it earlier. Back in the first year of the 1990s, a lecturer in Basic News writing and Reporting, Mr. Ayo Bedu, made it clear to my classmates and I at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Ogba-Ikeja, Lagos that journalism is not a high-paying job and whoever wanted to make money should look elsewhere. The utterance of that dampener by a man whom we called Pa Bedu as his age then ranged between the late fifties and the early sixties. His subsequent assurance that journalism could popularise either an enterprising reporter or a very good writer popular and enlarge his contacts base did not stop few amongst us from discontinuing with the programme after the first semester.
Those of us that stayed back at NIJ to complete the course did so because of individual aspiration to become journalists, unfazed by those factors which had encumbered the material fulfilment of the first and second generation of pen pushers. As young boys who were mostly in our early twenties, we were fired by idealist fervour, the type that seizes a group of persons bent on accomplishing a task that’s dear to their hearts. We never ever cared whether material harvests would come our way or not provided we secure jobs as reporters on graduation.
My personal experience in the real world for over thirty years combined with acquisition of wisdom imbued by the immutable ageing process has had a profound impact on my perception and appreciation of the difficulties journalists encounter as hardworking, honest and patriotic citizens of a country with an economy almost perpetually in the doldrums. On a comparative analysis, our colleagues are relatively within the vulnerable groups most affected by the crippling economic hardship in the country. For many in the large clan of journalists, the quest for fulfilment within the ambit of the Maslow seems elusive.
The privation we encounter as journalists permeate both private and public sectors such that a negligible number of persons are insulated from privation. Our guys are just lacking basic things they ought to have if things were normal. An ironical phenomenon stares us in the face: the harder you work as a conscientious journalist, the more you are prone to walk the impoverished path.
Understandably, the Nigerian media has suffered some semblance of brain drain accentuated by the current drift of journalists to the political arena. As of today, a large number of journalists are much more enamoured with appointment as media aides than holding top positions in media establishments. Some won’t mind to carry bags for politicians as long as it would guarantee handsome wage and mouth watery allowances! Of course, few years of being privileged as a civil commissioner for information or holding any other juicy position might translate into a recompense for the locust years.
This perennial issue can still be addressed even in bits, despite its perennial impact on journalism and its practitioners. The first step is for the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) to hold an all-encompassing meeting and thereafter prepare a salary template for media workers and lobby for its passage by the National Assembly. If medics, lawyers and other professional groups agitated and got special salary scales, it won’t be out of place to have same for journalists who enjoy constitution recognition as the Fourth Estate of the Realm. Tackling Poverty among journalists is an imperative at this point in time.
