Press Release
The African Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL), in collaboration with Progressive Impact Organisation for Community Development (PRIMORG), will Friday, June 4, 2021, begin an 8-week radio townhall meetings on whistleblowing policy and whistleblower protection.
According to a joint statement signed by the two partners, the programme will run weekly for one hour alternately on Raypower 100.5 FM and Kiss FM 99.9 Abuja. A rich blend of participants, including government officials, civil society actors, legislators, journalists, lawyers, public affairs analysts, and whistleblowers have been lined up to feature during the meetings.
Since 2017, AFRICMIL, through its Corruption Anonymous (CORA) project supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been working on building public support and confidence in the whistleblowing policy introduced by the federal government in December 2016 to curb endemic corruption in the country.
The project focuses on raising awareness of citizens on the importance of whistleblowing, working with administrators to ensure effective implementation, and advocating protection for whistleblowers.
The radio townhall meeting is aimed at building on the successes whistleblowing has recorded so far and exploring ways of enhancing its cultural acceptance as a tool for demanding accountability and exposing other forms of wrongdoing in the country.
Like AFRICMIL, PRIMORG is also a MacArthur grantee that has in the last two years been using radio and the social media to highlight the different nuances of corruption and mobilising citizens to join in the anti-corruption war instead of leaving it for government alone. Its flagship anti-corruption programme, Public Conscience On Radio, engages over 10 million listeners across five geo-political zones.
Chido Onumah, Coordinator of AFRICMIL, said “the collaboration aims to draw from the expertise and experience of both MacArthur grantees and leverage on the power of radio and social media in addressing issues of accountability and good governance through whistleblowing in a post-COVID environment.”
According to Augustine Okhiria Agbonsuremi, Executive Director of PRIMORG, “The collaborative effort aims to increase citizens’ active participation and involvement in pointing to the red flag of corruption and encouraging government to institutionalize the whistleblowing policy.”
