All things been equal, the Executive Secretary of the National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO), Dr. Barclays Foubiri Ayakoroma, may go back into full-time broadcast journalism after his years in public service.
Ayakoroma, who disclosed on Wednesday, December 12, 2012, on a Radio Nigeria programme “Bush House Nigeria,” a regular platform NICO uses for its sensitization programmes, to let Nigerians know how
prepared the Institute was, ahead its 3rd Annual Public Lecture, scheduled to hold on Monday, December 17, 2012, at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja, said with his background in broadcasting and the enabling environment under which private broadcast stations now operate in Nigeria, he will not rule out the possibility of going into full-time broadcast management.
He stated: “I have been a journalist all along. I was a pioneer member of staff of the present Rivers State Television and I started in the Programmes Division but along the line, my boss then made me Head of News and Current Affairs and that took me into journalism. Before then, I was writing feature articles for newspapers. So, as at that time, one was into serious broadcast journalism; but when I went to the university, as at 1992, I left Rivers State Television to go into teaching at the University of Port Harcourt when broadcasting and journalism generally took the back seat.”
Continuing, Ayakoroma said: “But then, as a literary artist, you cannot be divorced from a practice like that. In Bayelsa State, I had an active website, which we used very well and it was a platform then for us to also sell the Bayelsa State Council for Arts and Culture to the outside world. So, whatever I am doing now did not just start today.”
On how he had been able to bring NICO to limelight since assumption of office three years ago, the ES maintained that his background in cultural administration had positioned him in a way that he finds no reason for failure in the execution of the mandate of the Institute under his administration. His words: “I have a background in Cultural Administration. From teaching Theatre Management in the university system, I had the opportunity of relating theory to practice when I served in Bayelsa State Council for Arts and Culture for nine years; and nine years of tutelage is not something you can just wish away.”
According to him, before his entrance into the national cultural arena, he already had structures, especially in the media, because of his relationship with journalists, particularly arts journalists at the national level: “I had contacts with almost all the national papers and, of course, when I was drawn from obscurity to the national level, journalists in the culture sector were really excited because they knew that my running of the Bayelsa State Arts Council was exemplary.”
Ayakoroma said now that he is superintending an office that has a national spread, with zonal offices, his relationship with journalists has made Nigerians to be increasingly aware of what the Institute is doing, because he has the leverage to go all out to make sure that the activities of the Institute were brought to limelight, stressing that when people do not know what you are doing, there is no way they will appreciate the organization.
Caleb Nor
Corporate Affairs