• Anayo Ezugwu

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS, PwC Nigeria, a leading professional services firm in the country, on Tuesday, October 3, hosted its annual Capability Enhancement Workshop for journalists. The one-day workshop, which held in Lagos, had in attendance journalists across both traditional and new media platforms.

It featured insightful presentations on various topics by subject matter specialists with the aim of building the capacity of journalists and enhancing their ability to execute their duties effectively while also better positioning themselves to take advantage of future opportunities. The annual workshop which is now in its fourth year with over 200 journalists benefitting from the training is a major component of PwC’s Corporate Responsibility strategy.

It was instituted in recognition of the very important role of the media in society and in particular, the role that the media in Nigeria has and continues to play in informing and educating the public.

In his opening remark at the session, Uyi Akapata, country senior partner, PwC Nigeria, said: “Our support for the media through this workshop and the media excellence award is in line with our purpose which is to build trust in society and solve important problems. It is a demonstration of our strong belief that for the Nigerian people to enjoy good governance, the media must perform its role optimally and professionally and this is reflected in the quality of reporting, in the capacity of individual journalists to carry out research and investigations, in the independence of editorial judgments, and in their ability to use technology as an enabler.”

This year, the workshop was deepened and its scope expanded with an increase in the number of participating journalists especially from the online and new media channels whose impact in the way news is reported in Nigeria has been quite transformational. The presentations at the workshop included a session on “Tracking and Reporting the SDGs” facilitated by Mories Atoki, a senior manager and Sustainability lead at PwC Nigeria.

The session provided an expose what the sustainable development goals are and the various tools to navigate track and report their attainment by Nigeria.  Seun Onigbinde, founder and lead partner at BudgIT, facilitated a session on “Using data to transform the news and provide insights.

His session covered data journalism and feeding from the BudgIT experience, exposed participants to sources of data, cleaning and analyzing data, providing key insights from data and telling stories through visualization.

This year a panel session was introduced to discuss the topic “The future of news- Journalism in the Age of Trump.” On hand to lend their views on the topic were Frank Aigbogun, publisher, BusinessDay; Simon Kolawole, publisher, CableNG and Wole Famurewa, of the CNBC Nigeria. The session explored how technology has been changing journalism, the issue of Fake news and how journalists could prepare for the future.

The final session facilitated by Taiwo Oyedele, PwC’s head of Tax, and Kenneth Erikume, also a tax partner with the firm, focused on the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme, VAIDS, and the role the media could play in making Nigeria a tax paying nation. The capacity enhancement workshop precedes the Award Gala Night for the announcement of winners of this year’s PwC Media Excellence Awards which is scheduled to hold on Friday October 6, 2017 at the Oriental Hotel, Lagos.

– Oct.  4, 2017 @ 12:55 GMT |