The media in Nigeria is the only professional group given specific role by the constitution to serve as society’s watchdog. It has a role to play in governance by virtue of section 6.6.c and section 22 of the 1999 Constitution; It saddles it with the responsibility of monitoring governance and holding government accountable to the people.

There however have been complaints of limitations in the same constitution that gave enormous responsibility to the media without making the provision in the constitution actionable. To this extent, while the constitution specifically states that the media shall hold the government accountable to the people, same constitution does not give the media the power anywhere to effect this, as the section 22 is not actionable.

In spite of the constraint above, especially in the absence of freedom of information law, the media has tried to respond to some of the challenges of good governance that have reared their heads in recent times. Some of these include reports of budgets and the on-going campaign against corruption in the country.

What is observable however is that the media still has a lot more to learn in order to be able to mount a desired robust anti-corruption campaign and monitor budget and budget implementation across the country (See Problem Statement below).

In 2005, the International Press Centre, Lagos leading other partners in the Media for Democracy Group, applied for and got support from the European Commission in Nigeria to conduct some Media Monitoring Activities on Corruption Reporting.

Activities of the Eurpean commission supported project include the following:

• Monitoring of EFCC’s prosecution of three selected anti-corruption cases (Tafa Balogun, the former Inspector General of Police; Fred Ajudua and others and Mohammed Bulama, former Managing Director of Bank of the North) and wider corruption issues in the media
• Training workshop for journalists and anti-corruption activists on corruption reporting and use of media in advocacy against corruption
• Publication of bi-monthly anti-corruption summary (reports, analyses, messages) in the print media
• Publication of a quarterly journal, “Index on Corruption” to focus on developments in tracking and curbing of corruption

The EC funded project is being implemented as described above. In the course of implementation, following lessons have since been drawn:

• That the EU project has a wide area of coverage including monitoring of agencies i.e. Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), therefore is not media specific
• That the project made provision for just two trainings and the trainings are based on assumption of needs as observed overtime in news reports and are not based on survey or study specially conducted for the purpose of the project.
• That the design of the training for journalists was non-participatory i.e. input was not made by stakeholders.
• That the involvement of other CSOs was not intense and detailed enough.
• That maximum gains from the project would have been ensured if provision is made for training manuals evolving from the project and continuous review and reprint of the manual is guaranteed in a sustenance plan.

It is in recognition of the need to improve on the current activities that a new proposal is designed that will benefit from the experience of implementation of the EU funded project. The EU-funded project is also expected to benefit from the proposed new project. The complementarities of the project is expected to add value not just to the two projects, but the campaign against corruption in Nigeria vis-à-vis improved media capacity to give the public appropriate picture and cost of corruption as well as the media capacity to monitor budget implementations.