The Media Rights Agenda has criticised the withdrawal of an Arise Television cameraman from a meeting between presidential candidate Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and the Lagos business community (MRA).
The Media Rights Agenda (MRA) criticised the APC Presidential Campaign Council (APC-PCC) for their action, calling it "bizarre, high-handed, and a violation of the rights of the media."
“The APC-PCC’s blatant disregard for the rights of a journalist performing a constitutionally-protected function even at a time when the party is seeking to persuade Nigerians to vote its candidate into the highest office in the land portends grave dangers for the media should that candidate prevail in the elections,” said Mr Ayode Longe, the programme director of MRA, in a statement issued in Lagos.
It was reported on Twitter by Mr Bayo Onanuga, director of Media and Publicity for the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Committee (APC-PCC), that an Arise Television cameraman had been found live streaming a campaign event for Bola Tinubu without permission.
However, Mr Longe called the claim and the APC-PCC’s reasoning for its unconstitutional conduct “ridiculous and baffling,” expressing his displeasure at both.
He said: “What authorisation does the journalist require to perform his professional duty of covering a political campaign event? How can a purely journalistic act by a cameraman from a television station filming a public political campaign event and beaming it live to a public audience be characterised as espionage? Should the cameraman have first made a public announcement that he is covering the event so as not to be accused of doing so clandestinely?”
He continued, “We find this particularly bewildering because Mr. Onanuga, who issued the justification and made the accusation of espionage, spent a significant portion of his career as a professional journalist engaged in what came to be known as guerrilla journalism, for which he and the two media outlets, TheNews and Tempo magazines, where he served as an editor, were widely applauded, including by people like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. It is the worst form of irony that he is now attempting to condemn a journalist engaged in his professional pursuit as having committed a capital offence.”
“We shudder to think what the future holds for journalists and the media community should this attitude and mentality be brought into the highest political office in Nigeria,” Mr Longe said. “If this attitude is indicative of the vision of the party or its presidential candidate on the role of the media in the democratic process.”
He said the media’s role in the electoral process would be compromised if it were denied access to information necessary to perform its watchdog function over government officials, public institutions, and public figures (including political parties and candidates for public office) and to inform the public about those entities’ and individuals’ policies, programmes, and performance while in office and out of it.
Mr Longe argued that anyone unwilling to be subjected to media scrutiny has no business seeking public office and that it is against the code of journalism practice in Nigeria and everywhere else in the world for the institutions or individuals being held accountable to determine the media organisations or journalists who are allowed to hold them responsible.
According to him, journalists have a right to and should be granted unrestricted access to all election-related activities. So, he demanded that “the entire media community, regardless of the political sympathies that individual media professionals may have, rise in unison to condemn the APC-PCC’s undemocratic action.”
Mr Longe has also demanded an apology from the APC-PCC to the cameraman and his media outlet, as well as a public promise that this will never happen again.