PwC made this submission at its annual Capability Enhancement Workshop four journalists.
While facilitating the final session of the workshop, PwC’s Head of Tax, Taiwo Oyedele said ” Nigeria according to him, is moving towards using data and intelligence to know every taxable individual and organizations.”
He added that most times, “there is a direct correlation between the quality of life and tax payment, and tax is a good tool for screening out touts from leadership.”
The one day workshop held in Lagos had as participants, journalists drawn from 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.
Meanwhile, 89 per cent of participants in a poll conducted by PwC said they do not see tax payers money at work in Nigeria.
The annual workshop in its fourth year with over 200 journalists benefiting from the training is a major component of PwC’s Corporate Social Responsibility strategy. It was instituted in recognition of the very important role of the media in society and in particular, the role it has and continues to play in informing and educating the public Nigeria.
Country Senior Partner, PwC Nigeria in his opening remarks at the session 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 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 has been 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 of what sustainable development goals are and the various tools to navigate track and report their attainment by Nigeria.
Founder and lead partner at BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde, 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.
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 CNBC Nigeria. This session explored how technology is changing journalism, the issue of Fake news and how journalists can prepare for the future.
The final session facilitated by PwC’s Head of Tax, Taiwo Oyedele and Kenneth Erikume, also a tax partner with the ,focused on the Voluntary Assets and Income Declaration Scheme (VAIDS) and the role the media can play in making Nigeria a tax paying nation.
The capacity enhancement workshop precedes the award gala nite for the announcement of winners of this year’s PwC Media Excellence Awards which is scheduled to hold on Friday 6 October 2017, at Oriental Hotel, Lagos.
and then