‘We want to force all media owners to pay their journalists’

The National Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Comrade Shu’aibu Usman Leman, who has worked with many presidents and other principal officers of the union since 2002, says the union has worked to perfect its insurance policy and its desire is for every member to be part of it. You have been the […]

The National Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Comrade Shu’aibu Usman Leman, who has worked with many presidents and other principal officers of the union since 2002, says the union has worked to perfect its insurance policy and its desire is for every member to be part of it.

You have been the NUJ national secretary for about 14 years, how would you describe the experience?
Journalism, as the world itself, has been changing rapidly. Every so often, we have fresh issues and new challenges. Some things are not getting better. Issues of welfare and security for journalists are getting worse. But it’s been worthwhile. Much has been done to advance the cause of journalists, despite constraints.

Poor pay or no pay at all has been a persisting problem for many journalists. You have worked with many NUJ presidents, including two that served maximum two-term tenure of six years each and promised change. Why has the NUJ been unable to achieve the desired change?
We’ve faced constraints with getting media owners to place our members on favourable working conditions, mostly because no law punishes media owners who don’t do so. On our own we have applied measures, including picketing offending media houses, but even that comes with its challenges and we don’t get to apply it frequently. One of the challenges is asking the same NUJ members not being paid to mobilise for the picketing of their organisation. Mobilising for picketing any office takes a lot of effort and money. Media owners are capitalising on such challenges to make journalists work in conditions that are unfavourable. But it’s a fight we must win. We’ve proposed a bill that makes it mandatory for employers of journalists to pay well and provide the right conditions of service.

The bill, as you explained somewhere, was drafted when Smart Adeyemi was NUJ president between 1999 and 2006. Why has it not been passed  into law at the National Assembly?
The idea came with Smart Adeyemi. We presented the first bill during his time, where we made proposals that no media organisation should be set up without due consideration for the welfare of journalists. We proposed that they must set aside certain sums as security for the salary of journalists. We are revisiting that bill. That is what the present administration (with Waheed Odusile as NUJ president) is working on. It failed at the National Assembly before mainly because media owners and people who feel for them believed that their business is their business and they should have the freedom to run it their own way. We believe that such thinking contributed to the problem the bill faced. Publishers say their business is their business but the welfare of journalists is our business, so we won’t give up. We will adopt new, fair approaches to get the bill through.

As the NUJ is fighting for good pay and conditions of service, you find journalists everywhere who will go to publishers to say, ‘I need a job and all I’m asking is your note that I represent you.’ So, you find correspondents recruited on such terms, with no salary attached. How will you get journalists to stop such desperation?
We continue to impress it on our members that they cannot keep working in media houses that don’t consider their salaries as priority. You can’t offer yourself as cheaply as you have described and still complain of poor conditions of service. You called for it and make some media house owners feel comfortable with however they treat journalists. So, for the good of all, we feel justified to legislate against how journalists mortgage their welfare on the explanation that they need a job. It doesn’t help the profession because when you take up a job without salary, you will wallow in brown envelope journalism, demanding money from people before you do your job. The bill we are pushing will address journalists who don’t work by the book.

Lots of people don’t understand the nature of your office. Is there time limit for you?
The office of the national secretary is administrative. It is a permanent job attained not by election but appointment. So, for disengagement, its civil service rule that applies, when I reach maximum years of service or when I reach age of retirement. The office of the national secretary is given a continuous leadership because trade union reform recognizes that the national secretariat needs an appointive, permanent head for stable administrative work which helps for smooth on transition from one elected national exco to the next, among other things. Before now when labour law made the national secretary elective, the president could be in Lagos while the national secretary is in Maiduguri and the secretariat suffers because there is nobody to run it. So, the labour law was amended to make the position of the national secretary appointive, so that you can have a permanent officer to run and make the secretariat effective.

What would you say have been things the NUJ has done since you became the administrative head and policy driver of the union?
Safety and protection of journalists has been one of the areas in which we have done the most work since I’ve been here. We came up with an insurance policy. We did not achieve much when it was conceived during the time of Smart Adeyemi, but when Mohammed Garba came, he improved on it. Now we have an insurance scheme in place for which journalists are expected to individually pay N6,750 as annual premium, so that in case of death, the beneficiary of the insurance cover is entitled to N1.5 million. Death will come when it will come and that money becomes something to ease the pain of the bereaved children and family. We have an upgraded version for those who can afford it. It is a N17 million cover for which the policy buyer contributes a N3.5 million annual premium and be entitled to the N17 million full coverage in the event of death. When we develop the insurance scheme to a certain extent, we will encourage media owners also to take up insurance policies for journalists in their employment. No journalist can be over-insured. It is better to have multiple insurance covers for a journalist than to have one.

Most journalists still have no life insurance cover. Why is it that many NUJ members are yet to embrace the scheme?
We have people saying that religion does not allow them to take up life insurance. They say only God can insure you.  I don’t want to dabble into religion, but its part of the issue. Nonetheless, we are going to keep advising members to get insured because it is vital.

Do you have statistics of NUJ members on the insurance coverage?
Not exactly; we take members as they enrol for the scheme. Apart from a few states where state governments have intervened by paying in bulk the insurance premiums of citizens who are our members, the only other organization that paid in bulk for members, last year, was AIT. The AIT took up insurance cover for all the journalists in its employment. We want to encourage individual media organisations to take insurance policies for their workers, not necessarily the NUJ model. They can decide on any insurance model and use the insurance company of their choice. Our desire is to see our members covered by credible insurance policies. That’s why we say multiple insurance covers for journalists are our ultimate wish.

How does an individual journalist wanting the policy go about getting it?
You just come to the secretariat and fill a form, pay the N6,750 premium into the insurance scheme account and we give you a certificate (of insurance coverage) for 12 months. If anything happens within the coverage year, the beneficiary gets N1.5 million. You can obtain your form here at the NUJ national secretariat or state NUJ centres mostly in state capitals.

Have you been having cases of claims being honoured?
Yes, journalists have been benefitting across the states, I mean families of deceased journalists on the coverage have been receiving claims due to their deceased relations who were on the coverage.