At media summit, Buhari alleges practitioners’ partisanship

President Muhammadu Buhari has bared his mind on Nigeria media, saying extreme partisanship and lack of objectivity have negatively affected the practice.

At the event, frontline advertising practitioner, Mr. Biodun Shobanjo, presented a comparative picture of cost of advertising in Nigeria, noting that the challenges of media placement have grown astronomically between 1975 and 2015.

Buhari, represented by his Senior Special Assistant on Media, Malam Garba Shehu, at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, disclosed that but for the belief of Nigerians and providence, it would have been impossible for him to win the 2015 presidential election.

He alleged that full weight of state power and influence was brought to bear in the election to the extent that placing advertorials in two electronic media, including the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) was permanently denied him and his campaign organisation.

In his goodwill message to the organizers, Buhari expressed gratitude to Nigerians for making him win an election that many people thought he was not going to win. He lamented that aside from scant campaign funds, even when he got little money to spend on advertising, the NTA was not available.

“I remember on a particular night I called NTA, they had 16 slots of one minute adverts and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari campaign, they said all 16 had been sold. There are some other instances that exposed the partisan slant of the NTA; money was returned to us from AIT. They simply won’t advertise for us,” Shehu said.

He thanked Statecraft, an arm of The Red Media, for “selling an unlikely candidate to a very skeptical nation,” saying that in addition to security challenges, the discrimination of the media proved frustrating during the electioneering campaigns.

Shobanjo, who was chairman of the occasion, recalled how in 1975 it cost N16 for a billboard advert, pointing out that nowadays the same exposure costs between N7 million and N10 million..

“Today, all of that has changed, both from the perspective of those who are in marketing to those who are used to distributing that information. Marketers must embrace a world with more uncertainties and must use multiple media vehicles to reach their target markets,” Shobanjo said.

The Troika Holdings Chairman noted that between 1975 and now, there has been a massive flux resulting from a media flux, stressing that while in the past it was easy to plan with about eight to 10 media platforms, today it is so difficult to plan on how to reach the consumer.

“In 2013, about N136 billion was spent on advertising in Nigeria – N63.3 billion to TV, N23.5 billion to print media, N20.5 billion to radio, and N23.8 billion to outdoor advertising. Those days you knew who your consumers were and what you wanted out of them.”

The summit which is in partnership with Troyka Holdings and the School of Media & Communication, Pan-African University, saw media moguls across all communication spectrum -broadcast, print, public relations, advertising and new media come together to discuss the future of the media industry in Africa.