Welcome address: 2020 Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting by Ropo Sekoni

Award finalists and nominees for the 2020 honorary awards, members of the 2020 board of judges, ladies and gentlemen of the media, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. 

It is a pleasure and privilege to welcome you all on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism to the 15th Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative reporting.  

The Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting is an annual event, which had its maiden edition in October 2005. The award presentation event is held on December 9, the World Anti-corruption Day and eve of the Human Rights Day, to acknowledge best practices in investigative journalism and call attention to its significance in attaining good governance, accountability, and social justice as indispensable dividends of democracy. Permit me to bring you up to speed on activities of WSCIJ during this tough year of Coronavirus pandemic. 

But before I do this, let me quickly acknowledge those without whose sacrifice, we would not have been able to hold this event this year. The 2020 Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Foundation has been our formidable partner through this difficult year of the coronavirus pandemic. The Foundation’s humane policies have helped us to sustain our programmes, support our staff, and extend the encouragement to the media community that our centre serves. 

In addition, the Board warmly welcomes members of the board of judges who have made sacrifice to make this event possible today. We recognize that in normal times, serving as a judge for us had its own challenges, especially those that required poring over pages and footages of materials from the candidates, not to talk of having to do this extra work dictated by the pandemic and its special conditions of work and exchanging notes with fellow judges. 

By way of summary, our activities during the year include the following: 

1. In response to the pandemic, we had to tweak our focus to accommodate a special focus on the pandemic by launching the COVID-19 Reality Check project under which the Centre provided special training and support for reporters covering this crisis. We supported publication of 95 coronavirus related stories. 
2. We published in July two photo book on the challenges of basic education and electricity in the country, the poor state of the two sectors and the need for special intervention. 
3. The Centre held its annual lecture on July 13 to mark Professor Wole Soyinka’s 86th birthday anniversary on the theme “Data, Media and National Development’  
4. We commissioned 18 journalists under the Covid-19 Reality Check Project. 
5. We also released a special report titled “Nigeria at 60: Reflections on the media then and now.” 
6. The Centre trained 13 journalists on gender and Covid-19 reporting 
7. On the continental level, we collaborated with the journalism department of the Witwatersrand University to host the African Investigative Journalism Conference. This opportunity enabled us to give selected Nigerian reporters an international platform to share their works and views with peers from other African countries. 
8. We published a survey on the impact of our Report Women: Female reporters Leadership Programme in partnership with Free Press Unlimited. 
9. As part of the 15th anniversary of the Wole Soyinka Award, we introduced the ‘In-depth media conference and awards’ with the theme ‘Masked, not silenced’. The theme was chosen to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the policies against the independence of the media and freedom of expression in Nigeria. 
10.  The Centre also organized a two-day webinar on the 7th and 8^th of December. 
11. On a non-programmatic matter, Motunrayo Alaka was appointed the Centre’s Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer in January of this year.  
12. The award this year also attempted to shed light on developmental issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic with special focus on evaluating Nigeria’s preparedness to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.   

We heartily welcome you all to this year’s award night and wish you an exciting evening. 

Thank you very much for listening.