Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Mainstreaming Child Rights Issues

Individual effort may move us forward but joint effort towards our goal will take us far. Those who advocate on media about issues relating to children need to come together. A decision to do at least one story/programme/interview etc on children or against child rights abuse will go a long way to mainstream these issues. See Nigeria Children Council. Together we can stop the abuse against the girl child, together we can promote quality media for children, together we can keep children on Nigeria's top agenda.

According to Olabisi Adesina, a former staff of Metro FM Nigeria and child rights advocate, "The issue about having a least a story, interview etc on children has been talked about years ago when we attended UNICEF workshops. These are issues that have always been raised. If only media professionals see the importance of children issues in the media we will not be going in circles and repeating ourselves. We should not be begging to have the voices or issues of children published or broadcast. We need to make a positive impact instead of celebrating the greedy leaders and politicians."

That's a valid point. Don’t even remind me! All those workshops that ended up being paper workshops; all those workshops after which we had to go and fight our ogas to do something for children. I can’t recollect how many productions I had to do with my money…

I was at TVC recently to discuss the possibility of having a defined children belt which fortunately is on their agenda. But dear friends, the PM I met was neither ready to enter into partnership nor programme production. Interestingly the PM saw the need for human interaction and agreed it is very important for children to have quality and cultural media but guess how the discussion ended, “That’s just my opinion, if we can’t get anyone to buy airtime, we’ll just slot in cartoons.” Honestly what you’ll get across the media is not different. Just tune in between 4 and 7 to any channel and see what has become of our so called Children Belt.

Cartoons are funny, usually fast paced, well produced with rich colour mix. Our children would stay glued to them even when they cannot make out the grammar or identify with the splendid locations. I grew up watching a number of them myself but back then we had the benefit of locally produced programmes that satisfied our yearnings for local content. Cartoon would have been okay if culturally produced or relevant to the need of our children for quality local media. Unfortunately, foreign cartoons have become a neo-colonisation and westernisation tool. Plus research has found some of these animations, which were previously seen as safe for children, to be very violent with high level of sexual connotations; some are even pornographic!

Creating media for children have become highly commercial and until we carry the placard to compel stakeholders to do something, we’d just have to make do with our drop in the ocean effort. Perhaps we should consider a 1000 March on Media for Children during ICDB next year. Let’s even start with NBC. From my thesis research, I discovered they have a BIG plan in the NBC Code but that’s all it is, a plan! So so mouth, no action. If NBC can compel television and radio stations (for a start) to have no less than 2 hours of local programming for children per day, then we’d be off to some start. Having a PBS would be more like it but that may take another decade if the attitude of our leaders and politicians is anything to go by.

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