NMMA Awards: Nigeria’s Pulitzer prizes?

When Joseph Pulitzer conceived the now famous awards of the same name in 1904, he wanted the original four prizes in journalism to represent, variously, “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year; the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness […]

When Joseph Pulitzer conceived the now famous awards of the same name in 1904, he wanted the original four prizes in journalism to represent, variously, “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year; the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction; and the best example of a reporter’s work during the year, the test being strict accuracy, terseness, the accomplishment of some public good commanding public attention and respect”.  

In other words, Pulitzer believed that good journalism by the individual reporter or media institution must demonstrate three things: professionalism, effective language use and positive impact on society. Since they were first awarded in 1917, these core values of the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, still influence selection criteria for similar prizes around the world, even as the Pulitzers themselves have expanded to 15 categories of journalistic practice.   

So, what can the Pulitzer journalism prizes teach our own Nigeria Media Merit Awards? Plenty, I am sure. First, the Pulitzer Prizes were instituted at a crucial moment in American journalism and democracy. In the late 1880s all the way into the first decades of the 20th century, American news media were known for blatantly publishing rumours, sensationalism, propaganda and outright lies as ‘news’. This practice, and the period in American media history, became known as the age of ‘Yellow Journalism’. Pulitzer himself and his newspapers were master practitioners of the craft, but the prizes he established decidedly aimed to reform it, to instil excellence in journalism, and ultimately to advance American democracy.  

The Nigerian Media Merit Awards (NMMA) were instituted by much the same noble concerns and at a time when Nigerian journalism lay under the authoritarian boots of a military state. At the inauguration of its first Panel of Assessors in December 1991, the late M.K.O Abiola, who would later pay the ultimate price for democracy, noted that “unless and until the press becomes the eyes, the ears and the mouth of the electorate, acting as a watchdog over the conduct of public affairs, particularly at the increasingly crucial local council levels, government shall continue to be run like a company without internal control and without proper audit”.   

Unfortunately, it is anyone’s guess the extent to which the NMMA has helped achieve these founding objectives. True, Nigeria returned to democracy just seven years after the first NMMA prizes were awarded in 1992. The awards have also been sustained since then: the just concluded edition in Lokoja, Kogi State, marked its 29th edition. Also, the concept of promoting excellence in journalism and advancing accountable governance remains valid in today’s Nigeria where bad governance has grown multiple folds, and where journalism faces stiff competition from a more insidious version of yellow journalism that we call social media.  

Surely, the NMMA must count these among its achievements. But unlike the Pulitzers which have evolved robust procedures for entry, evaluation, selection, and award, the NMMA remains trapped in an amateurish and anachronistic system of procedures that calls into question the very integrity of its awards. For any system of awards, like any examination, the procedure is everything. Unfortunately, the Nigeria Media Merit Awards suffer from nearly a dozen procedural defects that individually or collectively make nonsense of the final outcomes. I outline a few.  

First, the NMMAs dishes out 51 awards each year spread across three broad print categories, and one category each for television and radio journalism. Yet, the borders for these categories are so porous that the same reporter can slip through multiple awards in vastly different journalistic specialisms.  

In this year’s edition for example, Innocent Duru, a reporter with The Nation, received seven nominations, and won five of them, in very different categories. He won the Olagunsoye Oyinlola Prize for Culture and Tradition Reporter of the Year; the Buba Marwa Prize for Defence Reporter of the Year; the Union Bank Prize for Banking and Finance Reporter of the Year; the Ernest Sisei Ikoli Prize for Newspaper Reporter of the Year; and the Cecil King Memorial Prize for Print Journalist of the Year.  

For analogy, this is like saying the same footballer is the best defender, the best midfielder, the best striker, and the best goalkeeper for the same team in the same footballing season. If it sounds like nonsense, it is. Journalism, like professional football, and indeed like most other professions, is a specialist business, and it is rare to find a single person with mastery across all fields, certainly not the kind of mastery required to win multiple national awards in different fields during the same year. 

Worse still, no one knows the particular stories for which Duru won his multiple awards across different journalistic specialisms; no one, that is, other than the panel of assessors. The whole point of journalism is openness. So too must be any journalism awards. My congratulations to Duru and The Nation, but if the NMMA wants the integrity of its awards taken seriously, it must, like the Pulitzers, make all winning entries public so that everyone can judge for themselves the standards of journalistic excellence prized by the NMMA.   

This is where the more worrisome institutional defects of the NMMA system of procedures begin to become more apparent. The NMMA lacks a robust set of selection criteria. For example, its 40 awards in the three broad print categories range across all print journalism specialisms, from reporting politics, business, defence, international affairs, to culture, and so on, to broader categories like reporter of the year and newspaper of the year.  

Yet, the NMMA appears to have much the same selection criteria for all the 40 different categories, which in its handbook for this year’s awards reads tersely as “factuality, accuracy, language (conscience [sic], clarity), balance and objectivity, human interest, freshness of ideas, creativity, caption ability (press photograph)”. That’s all. In the annals of criteria for professional journalism awards, this is even less than amateur stuff. Surely, each category must have very specific and detailed set of criteria?  

More than that, the most important criterion of all for most journalism awards—impact on society, such as changes to government policy—is not clearly specified or detailed in the NMMA criteria for selecting entries. Consequently, entry procedures do not include requirement for detailed justification by the entrant, let alone evidence for any such impact a given entry may have made on Nigerian society. So how the NMMA’s priesthood of assessors can tell the impact of one entry against another solely in the entries themselves is difficult to determine.   

Furthermore, even this priesthood of assessors requires further scrutiny. For a ‘national’ entity, NMMA’s panel of assessors does not adequately represent Nigeria’s diversity. Some 26 Nigerians were listed for this year’s awards, for example, about 20 of them presumably from the same part of the country. As in the global debate around the Academy Awards, the diversity of the selection panel to reflect as equally as possible the cultural configurations of society matter for awards of excellence, in journalism as in film.  

Moreover, while the NMMA itself is touted as a “Not For profit National Media Excellence Scheme Established As A Limited by Guarantee Organization with Rights and Privileges”, in this year’s award handbook, yet the awards are administered by “Ideas Communications Ltd”, which, given the name, is presumably a for-profit company. Even more, neither the NMMA nor Ideas Communications Ltd appears to have any independent websites of their own. My extensive searches on the internet yesterday certainly did not reveal a website for either, which, for awards of excellence of any kind in any profession, is a major failure of integrity test in its own right.  

After 30 years in the business of dishing out awards of excellence, one would expect some basic benchmarks of excellence from the NMMA itself, such as an open website with detailed information about itself and its awards. Overall, therefore, the significance of these institutional defects and contradictions of the NMMA, and hence for the integrity of the awards, should be lost to no one. Any serious award of excellence in any profession must itself verifiably demonstrate excellence in its own procedures, but I leave the NMMA and the public to ponder.