A COUNTRY WITHOUT HEROES IS DOOMED
Lanre Idowu
(28th DAME Address)
It gives a good feeling to see you all this evening gathered for a good cause.
We are gathered here to pay deserved tribute to an important institution in nation-building, the media. We are here to honour and celebrate our colleagues in the media, who make it their business to monitor, report, analyse, and comment on happenings in our society for the good health of us all.
We are here to appreciate those who go to great lengths to serve as our ears, eyes and mouths in line with their professional and constitutional duties as well as personal and organisational convictions to represent the best interests of our society. And I think we deserve to warmly applaud ourselves.
At a higher level, we are here because we love our country and we want the best for her; better than what we are currently witnessing because we know we have the collective capacity to do better.
Yet we may well not have been here tonight. DAME, as we know, is holding its 28th presentation later than usual. Like many sectors in Nigeria, the media industry is facing its own fair share of the challenges of survival. DAME is also experiencing its own challenges. As you know DAME is an incorporated trusteeship that relies on sponsorships, donations and income from training to do what it has been doing in the last 28 years. This year was particularly challenging as the patrons were themselves going through a rough patch, so the funding has dwindled.
We have had to dig deep to ensure that the tradition remains unbroken. After God, we are grateful to those partners who have kept the dream alive. In particular, we appreciate UNICEF, Nestle, Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Lagos State Government, the family trusts of the Idowus and the Onalajas.
DAME operates on a quintuple model involving the DAME as administrators, sponsors and donors as financiers, judges as credibility enhancers who assess the entries, the participants, who trust the integrity of the exercise without whose entries there can be no award and you, the audience, distinguished members of civil society on whose behalf the whole scheme rests. And that scheme is to enhance professionalism, boost responsibility, reward talent and enterprise for the overall benefit of society that the media is an important partner whose judgment we can trust and respect.
Tonight, we will meet the winners. We will hear from them their verdicts on the state of our country, the issues, the dreams and the nightmares that we need to address if we want the Nigeria we can truly be proud of. We will hear of such concerns as the erosion of values in the land, manifest in poor governance, and the elevation of cronyism to statecraft. We will hear of privileging of access to corridors of power to appropriate the commonwealth for private gains, the fixation with the short term, and the romance with the whimsical and chaotic that stunt growth and development.
You will also hear the patriotic offerings of what needs to be done to arrive at the society of our dreams where opportunity abounds for talent and enterprise to thrive. You will appreciate the extent our journalists go to serve as change-agents. Our union is not working as our diversity is being poorly managed. There is discontent in the land because of conflicting value systems. We are witnessing again massive brain drain as many of our youths are migrating out of frustration in search of better opportunities. We need to address the mixed signals between exhortations to do the ethical and the lopsided punishment for those who breach the public trust. There is also a lot of rascality in the media that needs to be addressed. We should at least be faithful to the facts of the issues we report whilst ensuring that our commentaries are informed.
DAME urges all to never shy away from addressing and advancing what will help the cause of a Greater Nigeria. We implore you not to sit on the fence when the frontiers of free expression are being narrowed, when what binds us is being severed by poor policies and dangerous pronouncements.
We thank you for being here and we give glory to Almighty God that we are able to sustain this annual tradition of recognizing our media heroes. A country without heroes is doomed. May today’s example encourage better output from our keepers of public conscience and morality!
We congratulate all nominees, in particular the winners and urge the runners-up to work harder. We welcome our sponsors, judges, and you, good people, to the 28th presentation of the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence. Yes, we have saved the best for the last.
*Address of Welcome by Mr. Lanre Idowu, supervising trustee of DAME, December 29, 2019.