NOA Seeks Community Radios for Value Orientation

National Orientation Agency (NOA) has called for the establishment of community radio stations across the country to help inculcate ethical values in the society.

Mr. Mike Omeri, director-general, NOA who made call at a forum in Abuja, said there were more advantages in community radio that its disadvantages.

The forum entitled “community radio briefing and strategy meeting” was organised by the Democratic Governance for Development, an NGO, in collaboration with Nigeria Community for Radio Coalition and was aimed at ensuring the licensing of community radio stations in Nigeria.

Omeri said that ``Community radio has a number of advantages; it can help transmit values that we have been forgotten, because it is a medium of records that can help to transmit consistently those values that have become part of our communities.

``Working with NOA, part of what we do is to promote Nigeria’s core values; we will put them together and develop contents that are tailored towards maintaining or even restoring what is lost.

“We are going to use contents generated by the communities and these contents will be value based, a number of people will be engaged.

“First, in rough arithmetic, 12, 000 people will be engaged automatically, imagine those on industrial attachment, who will benefit from that experience.

“Which means people will just be posted back to their communities, to go and do industrial attachment in established community radio stations.

“We have students who are reading Electrical and Electronics Engineering; they will be used to service or maintain these facilities; that is another aspect of job creation.

“And then, youth programmes relevant to communities will be developed; we will use that to promote culture of volunteerism, which you know is largely driven by the youth.”

He, however, said that the organisation had proposed for 800 licenses of community radio stations across the country as means to promote value orientation.

He said that establishing such stations would boost political education and ensure increased participation in governance processes.

“We have 774 Local Government Areas and going by the number of local government areas; if there are some communities like Lagos and Kano, Ibadan, they are big places that might need more than one radio stations within the metropolis.

“So this is what has informed our request for 800 licenses and that is what we are doing; the communities are the elements that will mobilise for popular action, popular participation, for political education and so on.