Prof Chidi Odinkalu, a former National Human Rights Commission chairman, will lead discussions at the Third Media Roundtable for senior professionals, which FrontFoot Media Initiative will organise tomorrow, Thursday, August 15, 2024. The event will be held at Bon Hotel, Ikeja GRA.

Odinkalu will speak on government accountability to the people and how media accountability makes that happen.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu is a Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law at the Fletcher School of Tufts University. He chairs the Truth, Justice, and Peace Commission, a transitional justice initiative established to address the crises of violence and agitation in the states of southeast Nigeria. He previously chaired Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and served on the panel of eminent persons that negotiated the return of The Gambia to the Commonwealth in 2017.

Odinkalu acted as counsel in international human rights litigation before Africa’s regional human rights courts and tribunals and jointly created the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. He is associated with several advocacy initiatives for the protection of human rights, including the International Refugee Rights Initiative. His research focuses on contemporary challenges of multilateralism in regional systems in development, human rights and governance. He co-authored Too Good to Die: Third Term and the Myth of the Indispensable Man in Africa (Kachifo, 2018).

Mr Emeka Izeze, director and partner of FrontFoot Media Initiative, said the Media Roundtable will mark the end of a three-year programme wherein FrontFoot featured in a cohort of NGOs as part of the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development, Inclusion and Accountability Project led by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

During the programme, the FrontFoot Media Initiative led advocacy for audit reporting in Nigerian media as one of the tools used to enhance accountability and public service journalism. FrontFoot also trained over 160 journalists in reporting government audits stipulated in the Nigerian constitution.

FrontFoot held the Audit Reporting Workshops in Benin, Awka, Abuja, Lagos and Gombe.

Izeze stated that members of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers, the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), and the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria will participate in the roundtable. Representatives from the mass communication faculties of contiguous universities of Lagos, Covenant, Pan-Atlantic, Lagos State University, Trinity University, Yaba College of Technology, and Augustine University, Epe, will also feature.

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