Dr Patrick Dele Cole, Dan Agbese, Lade Bonuola, Haruna Mohammed and Kabiru Yusuf are among the chieftains of the Nigerian media who will gather today, Saturday, November 19, to proffer suggestions and solutions to enable the media to do a more focused job of holding the political class accountable as the nation prepares for a general election.

FrontFoot Media Initiative has convened the Media Roundtable at Bon Hotel, Ikeja GRA, Lagos.

The Media Roundtable holds under the theme, “The Accountability Imperative: Holding Our Politicians’ Feet to the Fire”.

Mr Eluem Emeka Izeze, Managing Director, said in a statement on Friday that the Media Roundtable is in line with the focus of FrontFoot Media Initiative on accountability and the role of the media in ensuring higher levels of accountability by public officers.

Participants are from the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), and the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP).

The breakfast meeting follows the workshops on Audit Reporting that FrontFoot Media Initiative held in October 2022 in Benin City and Awka. The workshops drew professionals from two states, each in the South-South and the South-East.

FrontFoot Media Initiative is a non-profit, civil society organisation established to advance democracy and development in Nigeria and the African continent by enhancing journalism quality.

It undertakes projects to strengthen the mass media as a critical element in democracy. These will include various training and retraining programmes, a professional institute, and publishing.

FrontFoot’s flagship “Audit Reporting Training -X-Raying State Government Audit Reports” is a Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability Project, a targeted training of journalists under the auspices of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and the sponsorship of the MacArthur Foundation.

In this effort, FrontFoot teams, accompanied by experts in the field, work in pre-selected states to conduct free training for invited journalists. Participants learn how and where to locate the relevant State and Local Government Audit Reports, interpret the material and write engaging news stories and features that will enlighten, stimulate, and empower the electorate and discourage impunity.