‘Nigeria will include Media and Literacy Information into curriculum soon’ – Dr. Sunday Baba, NOA Rep

 

Dr. Sunday Baba, the representative of the Honourable Minister of Information and National Orientation Agency (NOA), Nigeria, Dr. Sunday Baba has said the Nigeria will soon introduce the Media and Information Literacy (MIL) into her curriculum any moment from now as efforts are in top gear.

Dr. Sunday said this during the UNESCO Global Media and Information Literacy Week (MILWeek) in Amman, Jordan while responding to question directed to him about what Nigeria is doing about including the Media and Information Literacy into the school’s curriculum during a High Ministerial Panel at the conference.

He said, “We may not really have a formal policy on MIL as we speak, but a lot has been happening in Nigeria at the moment specially building initiatives towards achieving the MIL.”

Speaking further on the concerted efforts put together by his country towards including the MIL into the curriculum, Dr. Sunday said, “You will recall that in 2022, we held a Global Media Week in Nigeria and a lot of things came out of this after this programme.”

“We have been able to build a lot of initiatives using schools and the universities most especially. For instance, we had a symposium where we invited eight universities and they brought their students and we started teaching them on what is called, “Media and Information Literacy” and how this would be propagated all over Nigeria.

Speaking further on the MIL initiative, which advocacy started about two years ago, he said, “we are not doing this through teaching alone. We are using the community radio where everyone is given a voice to speak.”

On how to achieve this. He said, “we will invite market women, farmers, religious leaders, different communities to share ideas and speak out in order to build our democratic ethos so that it can stand very well.”

On how to solidify this and garner support for this programme, Dr. Sunday said, “We have initiated the MILAND that is the Media Literacy Supportive Institute. We have collaborated with media organizations to support this initiative.

In recent times, we have started building media vanguards in schools all over Nigeria where the ethics and ideals of media and information literacy are taught.

At this conference, the Vice-Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)and er team are here with us. The National Open University of Nigeria would be saddled with the responsibility of fighting fake news and hate speech among peddlers especially young people who are always on the social media to post unverified news. 

Our team, the NOUN will be doing fact-checking on what is posted online so that Nigeria are not misinformed. This is to ensure that what is not true shouldn’t be posted. Another thing we want to do is to equip content-creators and those who are posting on social media with skills so that they ar well-equipped to do their job and are custodians of the right information and how to build a transparent democracy using the social media.

We are doing this because Nigerians use every opportunity to gather people like students, workers, lecturers, the educated and the illiterates together. So, we want to see how we can use he power of media education and orientation in this regard.

In terms of the MIL, we have done a lot of work and have put in a lot of efforts to make this work for our country Nigeria and it would be achieved very soon.