A don’s stance on unmuting muted voices

For someone whose formative life revolved around the F’s of farm-work, food, fight and fun, and who watched television through other people’s windows, the last thing anybody expected him to be was a professor. This encapsulated Ayobami Ojebode’s rustic childhood. However, his naive innocence gradually waned as he became ‘educated’ all the way to the ranks of a professor in the Department of Communication and Language Arts of the University of Ibadan.

On September 5, in the Lakeside Lecture Theatre of the university, Ojobode acquainted the town and gown with his almost twenty years of teaching and research endeavours in the area of applied communication. Garbed in his professorial apparel, he delivered—almost with a swagger—his inaugural lecture titled ‘In Search of Muted Voice for the Mirage Named Development’, which was the third from his department and the 466th in the university’s inaugural lecture series.

The preamble of the approximately one-hour lecture drove home his message: “I also wonder about the many subtle ways by which voices are muted. An unfriendly look, a shrug, or even silence sometimes serves to mute voices,” he said.

Ojebode’s attraction to applied communication was its focus on the problems of the society and how to communication speaks for them. He noted that communication for participatory development was meant to create opportunities for the voiceless to be heard in the mutual negotiation and interaction between them and the official. He stressed that the aim of communication should be to serve people, to articulate their self-identified needs and pool their resources towards meeting those needs.

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The don revealed that the way community people perceive development is not the way broadcast media professionals do. While community people see development in terms of urgent needs such as schools, market, weed disturbing their crops, etc.; those in professional media see it in terms of national issues such as economy, beautiful cities, advancement, etc. He emphasised that development does not have to be a mirage, adding that, “Putting the people at the centre of development would require working with the communities and learning from them.”

In his quest to determine whose voice the mass media (re)present, the professor invoked the 160-year Nigeria’s mass media history. There are currently 430 newspapers and 601 active broadcast stations in Nigeria. In spite of this statistics, people in position of influence and authority take priority over others no matter how important the issues at stake might be to those people. This contradicts the normative expectations of the media in a developing country like Nigeria.

Given the fact that a government which requires the media to be partners in the development progress is the very obstacle frustrating the media in that progress, Ojebode opined that it would be unreasonable to expect mass media to serve the purpose of liberating citizens and supporting them for participatory development. According to him, one is because “mass media have grossly underperformed as far as participatory development is concerned.” And second, is “mass media cannot but underperform given what, how and where they are.”

At a critical point in the lecture, the professor asked: “Are social media ultimate liberators of muted voices?” This media provides instant and affordable access to news and information as they break, and allows anyone to create content and react to created content. He noted that twenty-nine million Nigerians social media users have demonstrated this media’s power as liberators of muted voices and as tools for deepening democracy, empowerment and accountability.

He further stated the four major roles of social media in a democratic dispensation: first, it is now possible to organise protests with hours; second, it is difficult to silence the doubts of the characters of the protestors; third, government seems to act quickly to certain demands but not others despite equal protests; and fourth, anonymity of the social media make it easy for overbearing users to silence others.

However, the don stressed that one has to exercise caution in assessing the contribution of social media as a liberator of muted voices because every new medium has the tendency to attract public exaggeration and alarm at the start, and that one could seldom state a fact and get away with it. According to him, some factors that hinder the performance of this media are basic literacy, political, economic and infrastructural challenges. “Indeed, the social media has a wide coverage but limited impact,” he said.

One of the many headaches of Ojebode as a researcher was to determine whether indigenous communication is of any value in the search for muted voices. Quoting Des Wilson, the don defined indigenous communication system as these media which have defied all effects by Western media to cannibalise them and perhaps supplant them.

Ojebode stated that indigenous communication interests him because it promises to unearth the treasures of muted voices and because it focuses on community rather than on individuals. He lamented that the indigenous people, once sovereign but no longer so, share experience of oppression and dispossession. On the other hand, he expressed hope in indigenous communication ability in restoring peace and promoting post-conflict healing, adding that, “It is hoped that this will be noted by those involved in post-insurgency reconciliation in North-East Nigeria.”

Ayobami Ojebose’s undeniable scholarly contributions in community radio and policy-prodding cannot be overemphasised. It dawned early on the professor that conventional mass media in their own existing configuration would not deliver on participatory development. So, he began exploring opportunities for more participatory communication to that effect. He stated that Nigeria’s broadcasting is on the exclusive, that it is only the president that could grant broadcast license. He frowned at the fact, prior to 2000, all West African countries had community radios, expect Nigeria and The Gambia.

In early 2000, the professor and others began to heat the debate on community radio in Nigeria, and forced opposition from government agencies and politicians who insisted that radio in the hand of the community would be a tool for fuelling ethnic and religious violence. With their struggle and interventions, the federal government released six licenses to campus radios and, few months later the licenses became twenty-seven. Years later, in May 2015, the government granted licenses to seventeen community radio station across the country. Then, in November 2018, government granted broadcast licenses to twenty-four communities. “My adventure into policy-prodding opened my eyes to the difficulty of stimulating policymaking in Nigeria… I learnt resilience, teamwork and smart work,” he said.

Before Ojebode concluded his lecture, he emphasised that the political and media systems have neglected and muted the voices that could engineer change. He advocated that people should return to the old truth, that development is about the people and their communities. He noted that community radio, community newspapers and community-focused social media are media that would help in community development and advocacy.

Finally, after acknowledging his university, colleagues, students, friends and family, the don reserved his special thanks to his wife. “She is usually the first guinea pig for most of my communication hypotheses,” he concluded his lecture.

Kingsley Alumona is with the Nigerian Tribune