Satellite Times online newspaper has inducted five mid-level private sector practitioners into newsroom freelance reporting at a two-day media capacity-building workshop titled ‘How to read company documents’ held under the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development, Inclusivity and Accountability project of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ).
Emmanuel Mayah, Executive Director of International Centre for Development Reporting (ICDR) and publisher of Satellite Times, said the need for journalists to beam its searchlight on the private sector prompted the induction of the investigative journalists.
Mayah who attributed over eighty percent of corruption cases in Nigeria to the private sector, said there was a need for a renewed awareness. He referenced a 2019 Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) report that showed six trillion naira loss to tax avoidance, highlighting the urgent need for collaboration to expose the actors involved in fiscal policy sabotage through rent-seeking, trade malpractices, tax credit fraud and sundry elaborate schemes.
“The idea is to transition journalists from reporting corruption in the public sector to investigating corruption in the private sector, an opaque ecosystem with a higher index of corruption and commercial malpractices than in the government circle. We hope to transition whistleblowers from being mere bell ringers to becoming special reporters, who in the course of their daily work in their different sub-sectors in the corporate world would begin to see and hear things with the eyes and ears of a journalist.”
The workshop doubled as an immersion programme for the non-journalists while serving as mentorship for existing journalists. Company documents from the shipping sector, banking, insurance, the money market, commodity trading companies, aviation and seaport terminal operations were sampled and analysed.
Francis Ikechukwu Obiajuru, Maritime trade expert, was on hand to explain how shipping documents are cloned and made available links to trade databases across the world. Also, Peter Kwayindagami, a former banker, exposed how commercial banks help corporate clients carry out financial crimes and trade malpractices.
The MacArthur Foundation-funded Collaborative Media Engagement for Development, Inclusivity and Accountability project seeks to strengthen media independence and presence at state and local government levels and in the private sector to improve public awareness and the ecosystem for transparency, accountability and good governance.
