EFFECTS OF ACTIVITIES OF THE 8TH SENATE COMMITTEE ON MEDIA AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS ON LEGISLATIVE SERVICE DELIVERY

EFFECTS OF ACTIVITIES OF THE 8TH SENATE COMMITTEE ON MEDIA AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS ON LEGISLATIVE SERVICE DELIVERY

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

The Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs is one of the Standing Committees of the 8th Senate inaugurated on Thursday, 19th November, 2015 by Senate President,Dr. Bukola Saraki, which tenure elapsed on June 9th, 2019. As enshrined in the Senate Standing Orders 95 and 96 (41) 2015, as amended, the Committee’s jurisdiction includes the following: Management of the image and public relations of the Senate; external publicity and other issues in the Mass Media concerning the Senate; other matters concerning the Media that may be referred to the Committee by the Senate (Senate Majority Leader); and annual budget estimates.

In ensuring that Nigerians were properly informed about the legislative activities of the Senate, to this end, the Committee Chairman, and other distinguished members immediately swung into action by having an inaugural meeting with the Senate Press Corps (Journalists reporting the Senate) to discuss how to carry out the mandate of the Committee for the Senate and National Assembly as a legislative body.The meeting with the Senate Press Corps birthed several other visits to various media houses by the Chairman who doubles as the Senate Spokesman.

Since the major mandate of the Committee was to manage and mirror the image of the Senate, the committee was able to get this done with its first contact through the channel of reaching out to the public that is the in house media (Senate Press Corps).

Globally, media is referred to as the fourth estate of the realm and purveyors of information in any democratic setting (Aleyomi &Ajakaiye, 2014). There is always a role for the media to play in any aspect of human endeavors, most especially in political governance and nation building. In view of the above, the Committee encountered challenges and tough times in properly informing Nigerians about the activities of an institution like the Senate which as an arm of government that Nigerians are ill-informed about its legislative mandate as elected and true representatives of the people.

The media renders conventional and social functions to the public, which is equally applicable in broader sense in national development pursuit. It could be said that through educating, informing and entertaining (primary media functions), the media thereby makes the society, members or the nation as well as the leadership of that very society aware of the importance and need to undertake certain process or processes of national development. Also attached to these three basic roles of media is another role of persuasion, where media are seen as virile tools of applying persuasive efforts to influence people’s actions towards a particular direction. The mass media are therefore seen for their role in furnishing the public with necessary information to achieve development or change goals and equally set agenda for discourse. This can also be deduced from the constitutional mandate of the media that makes government accountable to the people.(Chapter II, Section 22 of the Nigerian 1999 Constitution as amended).

Media is making it possible for the average citizen to become more involved in political decision making with the reduction in the cost of communications. Citizens are no longer passive consumers of political party propaganda but can challenge discourse, share alternative perspectives and air their own opinions correctly. Hence, media has been constitutionally empowered as a tool for the empowerment of the user by giving the user broadcast power through the provision of a flexible and multiple means for sending and receiving political information.

Bekkers, Beunders, Edwards and Moody (2011, p. 209) averred that these technologies are potentially powerful tools for collecting and disseminating information, for building organisations, and for mobilising for action'.

The media are a heavily and increasingly discussed subject, both in scientific and public debates on the functioning of politics. Although media effects are increasingly subject of empirical research, scholarly attention for media influence on the legislative process is rare. There is specifically a lack of studies showing the mechanisms through which the media affect lawmaking. As a result there is little knowledge of the role media attention plays in the behavior of legislators and its consequences for the content of laws.

In general, we know politicians adjust to the way journalists operate and anticipate on the media attention their performance may generate (Davis, 2009; Strömbäck, 2008; Van Aelst &Walgrave, 2011). The contact between political journalists, members of parliament and members of government is defined as a complex interaction (T. E. Cook, 2006; Davis, 2009; Jones & Wolfe, 2010; Kleinnijenhuis, 2003; Louw, 2005; Sellers, 2010) and their power relationship turned into a reciprocal one (Van Aelst &Walgrave, 2011, p. 307). Yet what the media-politics dynamic looks like when it comes to developing new legislation, a fundamental aspect of politics, remains largely unclear.

Most lawmaking processes thus remain out of the media’s spotlights. However, once bills are being covered by the media they often receive a lot of attention. It is reasonable to expect that policy makers, ministers, state secretaries, politicians and their assistants will closely follow what is being written and said about legislative processes they are involved with. As a result, we might expect them to be susceptible to the things they read in the newspapers, hear on the radio and see on television.

This dissertation aims to examine the effects of the 8th Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs on legislative service-delivery with the view of bringing to focus, how the Committee performed its image laundering role (s) during the 8th Senate of the Fourth democratic Republic.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Questions regarding the mass media’s effect on society are as old as the media themselves. Opposing views and conflicting research results have led to different conclusions ranging from minimal effects to powerful effects. A careful observer cannot but notice the gulf between the Nigerian legislators and the public. This, by no small measure, poses a great threat to the country’s growing democracy. And since the media mediates between the parliament and the public, the need to study the effects of the 8th Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs on legislative service-delivery necessitates this dissertation, Owing to this reason, this study attempted to determine the level of correlation between the 8th Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs and Legislative Service Delivery.

National Assembly has been the most misunderstood and whipping child among the three arms of government especially from the dawn of the 4th republic democratic Nigeria till date.

Public Relations as an occupation, in most government departments and has often been defined more by its techniques than by its theory. Most public relations practitioners in government have been the masters of a number of techniques. They have known how to secure media coverage, prepare press releases, write speeches, write and design brochures, produce video news releases, lobby representatives in conferences, stage special events, or prepare annual reports. In addition to being an occupation defined by techniques, public relations practitioners in government also have devoted most of their efforts to communicating through the mass media. Most have believed that they could affect large numbers of people through publicity alone. The organizations that employ public relations practitioners also have believed that they could get massive numbers of people to behave in ways the organizations wanted by creating a good "image" in the media. Despite all these efforts, there exists poor public relations between the legislature and public. The Media and the National Assembly, in an effort to gain greater efficiency, always attempt to both integrate and simultaneously consider its three subsystems (internal information, media and community relations) as well as best practices in the civilian corporate PR arena when approaching organizational issues but in vain. This proposed study sets out to assess role of Public Relations in the Public Sector.

This study will bring to the fore, what ought to be the legislative activities of the 8th Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs as enshrined in the Senate rule book for an enhanced legislative-service delivery, what exactly has been the activities of the Committee and how has it been discharged within the legislative tenure under study.

It has equally been revealed that there are gaps that constrained the Committee from effective discharge of its mandate in seeing the Senate telling its own story appropriately as the people’s elected representatives.

Arising from the foregoing, the study will explore all relevant administrative, legislative and strategies with skills to employ in filling these identified gaps constraining the Committee from helping to tell the Senate legislative story appropriately, professionally and timely through the relevant media of mass communication to the public.

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