National Orientation Agency and Untold Stories
Nigeria cannot leave the telling of its stories to chance…
When you meet a random person in Europe or the United States who manages to know that there is a place called Nigeria, chances are that football or music will be their reference point. That is, when in conversation with a Nigerian. When alone in the comfort of their friends, their reference is most likely something to do with cybercrime. None of these perceptions has anything to do with any effort of the Nigerian government, now or in the past, to shape the way the country and its people are perceived abroad.
The country does not care about how its own citizens and residents perceive it and its programmes and projects. Any claim to the contrary is reflected in its annual spending on national orientation. Our country sometimes plays on the edge of an anomaly. If you don’t understand it, you’d be directing your angst at the wrong end. Take the 2025 budget. The Ministry of Power gets about N8b for ‘sensitisation’. Other such ministries and agencies have such related budget line totalling about N20b in 2024 to some N40b in 2025. You start to wonder, is the Ministry of Power a sensitisation agency? If it is not, why does it need N8b to advance its policies? Who sets these priorities?
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu said, “We are a people of over 200 million strength. So, we need to go through all the loopholes, through social media, through digital media, through the print media, to actually orientate and do this advocacy. So we have N8 billion”. Meanwhile, the National Orientation Agency (NOA), the body whose responsibility is to sensitise Nigerians about all these policies, programmes, ministries and agencies is trusted with N400m to do same. That’s N2/Nigerian to learn about all the new policies, programmes, their essence and the need to support them. Often, Nigerians ask, “what is the NOA doing about X?”, but we’ve got to find Y beforehand. Y is in these numbers. That is why.
Agencies like the NOA are incapacitated by budgetary allocations that make them appear to be afterthoughts in the national design for policy development. Nothing suggests we understand the place of the NOA in policy design and development. The gaps we see between the government’s policies and its intentions, versus the people’s understanding of such policies is reflected in the lack of support for the reforms that in a sane world ought to be driven and advanced by the people. The opposite appears to be the case.
Nigeria’s tourism has just enjoyed a great December powered by its diaspora and renewed attention from some international public figures and celebrities. We aren’t looking to create or advance a story to help scale interest in the future. Platforms like The Hook Creative have laid the template for the power and effectiveness of storytelling. Seeing the power of Nollywood and the way it has influenced people within Nigeria and shaped our perception outside it, The Hook is now developing socially conscious movies and documentaries that’d better reflect the Nigerian and African story.
Nike Okundaye’s grass to grace story for instance is now documented in the time honoured power of advertising, via Meristem. Farooq Oreagba’s story, culminating in him stealing the stage at the 2024 Ojude Oba festival which tells the limitless story of what can be, in another ad for Airtel. Efforts like that of The Hook blending real stories into commercial themes is the sort we need to position Nigeria as an investment destination and tourism hub.
The National Orientation may dream of such storytelling to align the Nigerian people and government on a common vision, but how do you deploy N400m in 2025 to sensitise and influence 200m people across various projects, programmes and policies? You’d need a miracle. Which suggests that the government is banking on some accident, incidents beyond its control to help ensure its citizens understand what it does, why it does them and how those intentions and actions are good for the people. The thing with such accidents is that, when they happen at all, they are hardly ever positive. People often end up perceiving these intentions and actions as an affront on their right to thrive and prosper.
This is why we need to be more intentional as a people and government. That intentionality will be reflected in our commitment to the NOA, the sums we dedicate towards designing sensitisation programmes and stories to help it shape the minds of our people and those watching our country from outside. The era of designing policies without a coherent plan to design a change management agenda that focuses the education and enlightenment of the people in their implantation should become a thing of the past. If not, the government will continue to stay behind the trail. The immediate consequences of the policies, often unpalatable, and the opposition will continue to take the lead in terms of how the people see these policies. The problem with this is that, without the support of the people, such policies could get derailed before they start.
The Nigerian government needs to prioritise national orientation. The tools and framework for sensitising a population of 200m comes at the sort of cost that N400m cannot move any needle, especially at a time of seemingly unprecedented reforms. Let us learn from the innovative power of stories as deployed by agencies like The Hook Creative who know that you can create a legend out of common stories.
We cannot afford to leave Nigeria’s global perception to chance and accidents. We must set out to design what and how we want to be perceived. Leaving this to chance means often, the negative perception will prevail. That social media video where several respondents answered that Nigeria was the crime capital of the world, despite evidence to the contrary, suggests that we’ve got work to do. That work must start from inside, then out. Until we empower the National Orientation Agency, we’d be losing home and abroad in a game we ought to be dominating.
PS: Both the Senate and House of Representative Committees have rejected the budget proposal for the Information section, including the NOA. They insisted that the budgets were inadequate, considering the government’s many programmes and reforms. This piece was sent for publication before their decisions.
This piece appears in the THISDAY Newspaper of 17 January, 2025
