‘’No Media, No Nation building’’, says Prof Pat Utomi at ABS 30th Anniversary

                                                            Utomi and Obiano

 

Onyima and MD/CEO ABS Uche Nworah

www.odogwublog.com reports that the Co- founder of Lagos Business School and Founder/CEO at Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL), Prof Patrick Okedinachi Utomi has given an illusion that there would be no nation building without the media.

Utomi , a professor of Political Economy , management and Entrepreneurship announced this during the 30th Anniversary Lecture of the Anambra Broadcasting Service (ABS) to herald its Annual Media Leadership Forum at the Women Development Centre (WDC), Awka.

 

Willie Nwokoye, PS, Ezeoke HOS and Utomi

Speaking on the Theme, “Media, Politics and Nation-building,” Professor Utomi,  recalled that media influence of the society dating back to early 20th century and opined that  a powerful media has the capacity to literally determine society’s orientation and equally administer reality to the audience.

The 2007 Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) however noted that there has been a paradigm shift of  which indicates a movement from the hypodermic media effect theory to through the perspective of opinion leaders mediating media influence  towards social action and finally to functional media influence of agenda setting.

“Since so much happens in the world, and only a few of these occurrences enter our consciousness, and a fewer still dominate our consideration, the gate keeping function of the media allows it to set the agenda in the sense therefore that the media helps us, or decides for us what is important. The media has great influence,” he averred.

 On the linkage between the media and nation-building, Professor Utomi used the Growth Drivers Framework to illustrate that in advancing the quality of policy choice, moderating contending  voices in a manner that result in boundaries that become institutions, the media advances the possibilities of progress because institutions as Hernando De Sota argues in The Mystery of Capital advance the material possibilities of man.

But where the narrative is one of impunity as has been that of our recent history, our institutions atrophy and society’s progress remains putative,  just potential.”  
Meanwhile Governor Obiano has declared that Nigeria’s nascent democracy would be hanging in the air if there were no robust media institutions to lend firm roots to it.
Obiano observed that  “experience has shown that no truly accountable and democratic society can thrive without a robust media. My administration is fully aware of the growing importance of the media in a world that is essentially driven by the hunger-to-know… stimulated by the media and satisfied by the same media.”
He also lauded the Guest Lecturer Professor Pat  Utomi, a Director of the Centre of Applied Economics at Lagos Business School saying that, “over the years, Prof Utomi has established himself in the people’s consciousness as an important voice in national discourse.”  

Concluding, the governor called on the good people of Anambra State to embrace the new spirit of Anambra which he said has been his administration’s driving force, in the past one year.