2019 !!STAKEHOLDERS SPEAK ON ACCURACY AND FACT CHECKING ON POLLS BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU..

2019 !!STAKEHOLDERS SPEAK ON ACCURACY AND FACT CHECKING ON POLLS

BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU..

Stakeholders rose from a day seminar powered by Me Drive Initiatives recently at the International Press Centre in Lagos,Nigeria and urged the Nigerian press and beyond to work seriously to ensure accuracy of all their reports as the 2019 General elections are held in Nigeria.

While addressing the audience at the recent gathering in Lagos, Nigeria ,Mrs Fortune Mbamalu of the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC]  said that they were very ready to perform their statutory constitutional duties as expected by the laws of the land.

She assured that there were different type of elections and these were the end of tenure polls ,the bye polls and the re-run polls   but quickly added that in 191 polling constituencies only two were overturned by the courts on account of poor conducts .

She affirmed that as at today in the land there were 91 registered political party and as such warned that  any media that allows itself to be used as a political thug will be made to pay a very stiff penalty.

She advised the press to give equal accessibility to all parties contesting at the polls .

She speaks:"we use a lot of ad hoc personnel from Federal related agencies and the National Youth Service Corps [N.Y.S.C] and they all help us to arrive at a lot of our activities on time as expected by the general public"

She assured all and sundry at the event that only the returning officer from INEC has the statutory rights to announce the results of any elections at the constituency polls.

In a related issue,Mr Allwell Okpi ,The Researcher and Community Manager of Africa Check  while contributing his own quota to the discourse  said that they monitor the media to find out what the people were actually talking about.

He recalled that his agency had recently staged and concluded a set of training for reporters in the Northern part of the nation  with the issue of fact checking being at the core of the workshop .

Okpi noted that fact checking had become very critical in that it helps the reporter to ask critical questions on information in public domain.

He insisted that while wikipaedia was a good resource based platform for information it does not however have the final authority on such information hence users will still need to double checks their facts.

He assured that things that could be fact checked could be in the following areas like  historical data ,comparisons ,statistics and legality.

He pointed out that the issue of methodology was also very important in the tracking  the original source of an information .

He revealed that his agency was very much aware that politicians were now in the habits of using videos and still pictures to deceive Nigerians on social media .

In the same vein,Mr Uzoma Ononye who stood in for Mrs Stella Din -Jacob, Director of the News Department of the TVC Communications ,Lagos,Nigeria,staying safe while reporting is the first thing a reporter should do as otherwise he or she stands the risk of been the report itself.

He assured that since the press plays a critical role in giving out information's it was important that their reports are deemed to be credible by the general public.

He also urged the gathering to make sure that each time  they go out on an assignment like election reporting they have to take their time to do an effective mapping of the location so that there was no mistakes  ..

He urged reporters to properly get themselves accredited for the elections  as this could count against them on the final analysis .

Madam Ejiro Sharon Okotie of the Nigerian Association of the Blind while shedding the light on challenges of persons with disabilities and what reporters should do when reporting elections  noted that inclusion was not a privilege for a selected few  but a right for everyone while paraphrasing a statement from George Gray.

She lamented that a lot of able bodied persons have   habit of looking down on physically challenged persons thus putting limitations on them as a  result.

She insisted that disability was now an evolving concept that is viewed from a human rights perspective