‘BBC Igbo, Yoruba services will tell Nigerians’ stories in their languages’

Peter Okwoche is the Nigeria Editorial Lead for the BBC Igbo and Yoruba services introduced in Nigeria in February. He speaks on the new language services and the drive by the BBC to bring on board Nigerians of all shades in the corporation’s expanding audience base. Excerpts:    What is the driving force for the […]

Peter Okwoche is the Nigeria Editorial Lead for the BBC Igbo and Yoruba services introduced in Nigeria in February. He speaks on the new language services and the drive by the BBC to bring on board Nigerians of all shades in the corporation’s expanding audience base. Excerpts: 

 

What is the driving force for the new Igbo and Yoruba services introduced by the BBC?

One of the most exciting things for me is telling our stories in our language and I think there is something standard about that. There is something original about that and that is what these services are going to be doing. The Igbo service would be telling mostly stories from their region to the rest of Nigeria and the world likewise the Yoruba service. So, it is a time for us to seize our narrative so to speak, it is time for us to tell our stories. 

For a long time, westerners and people from other parts of the world have been coming to Africa to tell our stories and the BBC believes that setting up these two services enhances our possibility to start telling our own narratives.

 

How do you plan to go about these services to have an efficient delivery? 

What we have done so far is to employ very competent journalists for each service. All the journalists for Igbo service are from the Igbo-speaking areas and those from Yoruba speaking areas for the Yoruba service. These are people who know their stories, who know their areas very well, know their region, know their people, know the culture because we are going to be very big on culture, agriculture, politics, economy, technology, entrepreneurship, science and general news from those areas. 

So these people that we have employed know these areas very well and they are the ones who are going to be pushing these stories out to the rest of the world.

The services started in February 19 with really good exclusive stories, explosive stories if you like. The Igbo service started with an exclusive interview with Nnamdi Kanu’s wife, the leader of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). We had an interview with her about the whereabouts of her husband. We also had an interview with Professor Wole Soyinka in Yoruba. One of the very first interviews he gave in Yoruba, I have never heard him doing an interview in Yoruba before and he talked to us about the state of the nation. 

We have had the BBC Hausa service which has been running for 60 years very, very successfully and we are trying to replicate that within Igbo and Yoruba areas.

 

So the successes recorded in the Hausa services have prodded you to start these services?

That is one of the reasons but it is 60 years since the Hausa service came on board. There are other factors as well. Don’t forget that Nigeria has a young growing population. We want to tap into that generation of Nigerians, they deserve to have their voices heard by the rest of the world and because these are the three main languages in Nigeria, we decided to go down these roots.

I will tell you that For BBC World Service in general, Nigeria produces more than 10 per cent of the audience. So Nigeria has a audience for the BBC of some 36million listeners every week. That is huge. That is more than 10 per cent of the whole World Service. So Nigeria is a very important region when it comes to the BBC and we take its people, youth, languages, culture and politics very seriously.

 

What kind of engagement have you done with the people in the Igbo and Yoruba communities?

We haven’t done this in isolation. We have been consulting for nearly two years with traditional rulers and professors among others in the area. Professors who speak Igbo and Yoruba. We have been to Nsukka, Enugu, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Lagos and Oshogbo just engaging the people and gauging the mindset. What is it that they want to hear? We want to talk about women in powerful places, powerful positions, agriculture, finance and business. We want to talk about young children who are doing great stuffs in Yaba, all these young tech entrepreneurs. So these are the stories we want to tell people.

 

These services are coming up in the year preceding the 2019 election, is this deliberate?

For us to have come at a point when Nigeria is preparing for election next year, I can assure you it is a complete coincidence, it wasn’t planned. In 2016, the UK Government gave the BBC a large grant and it said, ‘okay, go and think of what to do with it’ and the BBC decided that it was going to open 12 new language services in Europe, Asia and Africa. Of these 12, six would be in Africa; three in other parts of Africa and three in Nigeria – Pidgin, Yoruba and the Igbo. So it is a big coincidence. When this money was promised to us, it wasn’t election time in Nigeria but we are also happy that we are here in this period when people are going into election.

 

Why is it imperative to focus on the young growing population like you said?

Because the youths are the future, they are the ones who are going to drive Nigeria. Don’t forget that our population is projected by the United Nations to be 350million in 2050 and of that figure, a vast majority of them would be under the age of 35. So those people at some point are going to be the power brokers in this country. So we want to meet them, we want to interact with them and we want to see what is it that makes them tick.