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We have to demilitarise our minds—Iroh
(New Age Online)

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Eddie Iroh needs no elaborate introduction. Coming from a rich literary background which spanned one of the most widely read books in Nigeria and beyond -Without a Silver Spoon. He was part of the academia that midwived the first real quality newspaper in Nigeri - The Guardian.
A man of immense style and presence of mind, he is currently the president of URTNA, Africa’s radio and TV body and of course, the director-general of the Federal Radio Corportion of Nigeria to which he has literally given a breath of life since he got to the helm.
True. Like hybrid rabbits, FM stations have multiplied across state capitals of Nigeria in a manner many still cannot fathom, giving network reach its true meaning. Interviewing Eddie Iroh is a rather delightful as his answers come crisp and sharp and if you will, spiced, remarking a mind seemingly always in flight. He spoke with Steve Osuji. Excerpts.

Since you came here as Director General, FRCN, so much has happened, but one thing that keeps baffling people is why do we need so many radio stations in the country?
John Kennedy said, “Some people look at space and its mystery and they say why and he looked at it and said why not? Mali, one of Africa’s poorest nations has 59 radio stations. Ivory Coast has 78 of which 76 are operational. South Africa has even more.
Now it isnot a competition. It is the service that radio provides. These people are down to community broadcasting. We are not even doing community broadcasting. We say grassroots broadcasting because the FM stations in the 36 states will provide an alternative to community broadcasting. But if we are to do community broadcasting, we are looking at 774 radio stations as per each local government. We are advocating for that, but one station per state. Africa’s largest nation, population wise. Africa’s most promising nation. Radio is power. Radio is enlightenment. Radio is education. Radio is life. Just think of the things you can do with broadcasting. You are shaving in the morning, you are absorbing information.
You are eating breakfast; you are absorbing information. You are lacing your shoes, you are even having a shower. This is for a developing nation. A constant and relentless means and medium of mobilising the people.
The thing is that we do not even use radio as effectively as we should. When I took over this job, one of my colleagues, the executive director in Kaduna at the time I was visiting Kaduna and we were driving past the Durbar ground, he said: Director General, I can put two million people in this ground with one broadcast.” That is the power of mobilisation. We are not using that. Nigeria is a populous nation and in terms of land mass, I met with a man who is from Mubi on the boarder with Cameroon and he told me, “I do not get Radio Nigeria and the Nigerian Television Authority,” so we have not even covered the whole of Nigeria.

I was travelling from Makurdi, through Okene recently and two of the FM station I listened to while in the car were broadcasting in English. Why do we have to broadcast mainly in foreign languages?
It depends on what time of the day. There is no way you can broadcast entirely in local languages unless you have a dedicated language service like we have the Hausa service in Kaduna. But largely in most of these stations, we broadcast in the indigenous language of the catchment areas. Take Lagos, in an unusual situation Radio Nigeria has three FM stations in Lagos dedicated to specific objectives, specific categories, specific population cultures. Lagos is metropolitan, it is heterogeneous. You can not serve Lagos with one channel. There are more people in Lagos than in most African nations.
How then can we ask why so many FM stations. I do not think there are so many as people put it.

But can we afford this project?
Radio is less capital intensive than other media. It is somehow capital intensive at the initial stage, but operationally if radio is used to its full benefit both by the listeners and the operators, yes we can afford it.
We can sustain our operational expenditure through advertising. But you see Nigeria needs to re-educate itself to the value and the use of radio. I see a great deal of campaigns going on by manufacturers and service providers that do not even use radio. They are losing. Nobody in the UK launches a campaign today without radio being of prime consideration.
In the United States and the rest of the western world, radio is the medium that reaches the part that others do not.

Back to content, what kind of content have you envisioned to be able to reach different segments like the man in the village who is a farmer. How would you be able to touch such people?
We just ended our management meeting and this was about moving forward, looking into the future. I said to my colleagues, the government can provide us resources for technologies, for facilities, for technical re-generation, but only us can provide the intellectual and creative challenge. It is only us that can meet that challenge in the area of content for us to match what government has done.
It is actually a function of laying out the philosophy and finding the right people to practicalise it. There is no dispute about the understanding of the various executives in charge of our national stations and the general managers in charge of the FM stations that this is to serve the public within that area. It is to serve the community within that area. They do not need any education because it is a part of the ethos of FRCN to target specific groups.
Already we broadcast in 12 main Nigerian languages at the national stations level. The FM stations we have bring it to a far larger number because within each state, there are a number of language groups and each language group is addressed.

Coming back to resource and the ability to sustain it now and much later when you are out of here, how do you want to sustain this?
I look to the future when this things will become a partnership, not just the Federal Government carrying the burden of running the radio or any medium, but a partnership between the community, private sector and to some extent, government.
Government should continue to maintain a strategic interest in a medium as critical to public opinion as radio. They must have, if you like, the silver bullet in terms of what goes in and out without necessarily being selfish. There must be a restraining factor and if government were to say hands off, knowing our history, considering our history and radio and military role, then that would be dangerous.
So there would be a continued element of government involvement. The community, private sector through commercials and advertising in economy that is bound to grow, will provide sufficient resources and when there is a shortfall, the silver bullet of government interest will then provide a shortfall.
So I see that, at least for the foreseeable future. It is quite possible that in the far distant with democratic maturity. We may privatise the whole thing, but I would not advocate that for another one or two decades.

There are so many private radio stations which supposedly from what we can see, are pulling their weights. Is it possible to make these ones pull their weights, to live on their own over time?
There is an advantage that FRCN has which no private sector can compete with. It is our network and the ability to draw from the enormous resources, professional, intellectual, artistic, creative resources of FRCN that keeps us a step ahead.
In fact, the question is would the private sector survive in the face of this onslaught of enormous resources. When I came in, there were complaints about many of our people having left for the private sector. Prince Atoyebi said to me, “D-G, they took the boys, but they did not take the minds.” A citadel of broadcasting industry is here in FRCN. Maintaining the tradition is our responsibility.”
We came to see in comparative terms the role that the BBC had played in nurturing the growth of radio and television broadcasting. It has not in any way diminished the BBC. That is the way we see ourselves.
Another worry, a lot of people have expressed is radio stations all over the country, reminded them the overwhelming presence of a government organ. Everywhere you turn you hear and see government’s presence.
Yes, why should government’s voice not be heard? Even if government did not own radio and television why should we not hear the voice of the central authority in a nation? Without government there is anarchy. Would we rather listen to the voice of anarchy or the voice of government.? The programmes of government or those who advocate disunity and dismemberment of the Federal Republic? We have a social responsibility. Our motto is Unite the people and uplift the nation.”
That is our job. Our job is to unite Nigerians. Government’s objective is to unite Nigerians. There is no conflict between what we are doing and what government is doing. When we hear what the government is doing, are they negative things? Sometimes, we exclude government from their entitlements to Nigerian citizenship. We serve the Nigerian people of which government is its critical part, but we do not serve government with the exclusion of the Nigerian people.
When there is a conflict between government and the people?.
At that instance, we are in the middle. We are the medium of moderation. You cannot mediate except from the middle. We are not on the side of the government. I say this and sometimes some newspapers misrepresent it. We are funded by the government on behalf of the Nigerian people. Government does not fund us for its own sake alone, for its exclusive use.
This (Obasanjo’s) government recognises the need for a credible radio Nigeria in a democracy and has worked hard to ensure that.
Knowing your background, (literary bent, The Guardian days) and one wonders whether there are moments where there are conflicts in mediating between the people and the government.

Have you had conflicts in this regard especially at the critical moments of national discourse?
We have faced a lot of that. One of the things I always made clear to government, I do not know whether other people understand that, is that a credible Radio Nigeria is important for government as well as for Nigerians.
I made it clear that the first beneficiaries of a credible Radio Nigeria is the government. If we are seen to lack credibility, even legitimate message of government, can be treated with suspicion and contempt.
We have been lucky and we have been exceptionally fortunate that this government has not tried to breathe down our neck, because they recognise it is not conducive to a successful democracy. Not just because we are Radio Nigeria, but as a medium of public information. We are part of the Fourth Estate of the realm. The only profession given a specific constitutional role is the media. If we are owned by government and prevented from playing that role, then we lose the essence of our being. We have not had that problem. But should that conflict arise, we should have no difficulty in resolving it as long as we are sitting right in the middle of a national discourse.

Did you ever had anything like audience research?
Yes, we have commissioned a company that provided us with a research that we were not satisfied with. We were not satisfied with the methodology. So that shows that we are philosophically committed to the practice of audience measurement.
However, I must tell you that it is less than scientific in Nigeria. It is influenced by so many factors that I do not want to mention here. It is also influenced by the attitude of the people. We have to demilitarise the minds of the Nigerian people just as we have demilitarised the FRCN.
It is easy for people to say “Radio Nigeria, no be de one wey Babangida and Abacha de use? They may not stop saying this but things have changed.
More worrying for me is that the Nigerian elite are not radio-friendly. Only when there is an important announcement that they tune in to radio. Whereas in the western world, the elite are radio people. Elite tune to Radio to brief themselves before getting involved in public affairs of the day, and radio is a principal medium for intellectually-based argument and discourse, because it does not have the attraction of visual. So concentration becomes important and for you to concentrate about what I am saying, I have to make sense. So we are trying to make sense to the Nigerian listeners.

You raised a point about some people not having tuned in, which I know is correct. What are you doing to drag people into your network in terms of market aggressiveness?
It is not for me to say to anybody in public office or in private life, that briefing yourself is essential. If I wake up in the morning and I have not heard Radio Nigeria’s network news at seven O’clock. I felt I have deprived myself. It is the only thing I have to do while I prepare for work. Radio is what you can listen to while driving a car.
Radio targets road users with special information, special programmes. A taxi driver in London is as knowledgeable as a member of House of Parliament, because he is forever channel hopping, listening to programmes, listening to news and he is able to discuss world affairs. Radio is a tool that anybody who denies himself of it denies himself of relevance.

I will return to the question of training content, quality, welfare of workers. Most private investors tend to focus for now on the machines and machinery and the physical input and human input?
I have said time without number that the priority of this management when we came into office was specifically our human resource. First because we had suffered immense deprivation under the military. Second, we recognise the fundamental fact that if you treat the workers right, they would treat the corporation right, and that has been the primary focus of our policy.
We have done that three times in terms of promotion. We had carried out massive promotion three times in five years. I do not know whether that can happen in public of private sectors.
We have introduced a huge range of welfare packages including car, motorcycle loans, car repair loans. Those are things that we could not do for many decades because of military degradation of our system and institutions.
I should have mentioned about content that there is a training course going on now involving nearly a thousand participants from within and outside the FRCN, in the areas of production, script writing, announcing, presentation all the full spectrum of our activities are covered in our training. We even introduced computer appreciation to reflect the IT based area.
Content is something we cannot go to government to pay for in appropriation bill or budget. That is why we tell the government that “you have given us the tool, we would provide the other component of our needs which is creating content.
Creativity is at the heart of what we should be doing. Without it, we begin to sound ordinary.
Do you have such exchange training programmes with any foreign radio stations?
We are a member of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA). We benefit from their offers of scholarships and fellowships and other forms of training. We have had one or two of our people return and one or two more going. We also have similar arrangements with Dutschewelle, the German external service, Egypt. We are part of that just as members of Commonwealth Broadcasting and members of other broadcasting organisation including URTNA of which I am currently the president.
We do not exchange programmes per se, though we have a working agreement with Romania and we are signing another one with Algeria. If we have programmes that are relevant, yes we can exchange them. The most important partnership we have today is with the BBC World Service which is working closely with us to introduce a change programme. Change which means for the better, because they tried it under their director-general, it worked well. So we want to see to what extent we can adapt that to our own needs. That has been working well so far. The director-general of NTA, Dr. Tony Iredia and I, have participated with the BBC on two occasions in the UK and in Nigeria to work out a change programme.
Their consultants also have been here to do a series of workshops to change our work attitude for the better, to make us do things better than before. To that extent, we have understanding and cooperation with the BBC.

Talking about editorials and content, I have listened to your sponsored commentaries recently. Fine, they are attributed but ordinarily, such things. one would not expect Radio Nigeria to air?
Yes. Some of those things you are referring to are sponsored. We are also looking for finance. So we indicate the sponsors of such items. What they say there, we do not want to say it, but that they are sponsored by so and so”. It is just like somebody taking a page in a newspaper and writing his opinion on an issue. I may not believe what he is saying but I will advertise it for him. Also, if a church comes up to say they want to advertise their new-found miracle, I would advertise it for them, even though I may not believe he can perform miracles. These are specifically sponsored programmes that do not, in any way reflect our opinion.

Even the sponsored programmes, are there limits, or whatever you have, you air?
Yes, there are limits. To air everything that is brought to us would be anarchy, a free for all.

For example, if a governor comes in and say he has turned his state to paradise?
You come to us and say: “I have turned my state into a paradise. We would say that that is what you have said, but you have subjects who know the difference of what is actually on the ground. You can tell a blind person that the soup is black or white, but you can’t tell him there is salt when there is none.
That is the point I am making.
When you want to mislead the people, through special features or paid advertorials in newspaper, when you make claims that are untenable, it would in the final analysis rebound on you.
The fact that we are the medium has very little role to play in this. It is not Radio Nigeria saying, “We said”, it is not an eye witness report.

How would you want to leave Radio Nigeria? How would you want to be remembered?
I would love to leave it of my volition. In this country, if you leave in other circumstances, even the good you have done are forgotten and it would be sad after you had sweated blood to uplift an institution that was moribund before you came there. I want to leave looking back to say I have set Radio Nigeria on the path of irreversible progress, a relentless pursuit of excellence.
I have said to my colleagues that there is no end to the pursuit of excellence. What I am doing is to empower the workforce, not just the management. I said to them that the future of FRCN is the future of Nigeria. The future of FRCN and Nigeria is therefore in our hands.
If we have a workforce that responds to that challenge, Radio Nigeria will no longer fall into the past errors of dilapidation, degradation of its values, and degradation of its ethics.
I would like to think that when I have left here, nobody can come to Radio Nigeria and manipulate it the way the military did. That it must be able to stand up to any government in our country as our democracy grows, to say this is not in accord with democratic process. I would like to see a Director General who can stand up to his minister or to the government of the day and say this is not in the interest of either the government or the Nigerian people.”
I cannot do it now because I want to prove a point. But the institution grows and it becomes stronger. Nobody can shake BBC now, but it did not start like that. I try to cultivate a tradition of strength, of independence in this institution.

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