Naija Konnecti: Reconceptualising the Use of Radio for Social Change

Abstract

One of the often-touted beautiful characteristics of Nigeria, the world's most populous Black Country, is its “unity in diversity”. At least 350 tribes make up the country, although there are four dominant ethnic groupings – Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, and Yoruba. Soon after the country secured independence from Britain on October 1, 1960, the famed "unity in diversity" began to witness tremors. The country survived a devastating civil war. Leadership became a big issue; internal-communal wars, banditry, corruption, political apathy, insecurity, and general intolerance have escalated in the past decade. It was with this background that Development Communication Research Centre, (DCRC), a not-for-profit organization, based in Lagos, conducted a baseline study on how the foregoing challenges could be resolved. the country had been spending billions of naira to acquire weapons and give palliatives to millions of 
people displaced because of these crises but largely ignored the need to re-orientate Nigerian and that this was what motivated the organization to approach Ford Foundation for support - to use the entertainment education model to address the problems. The entertainment-education (E-E) model has been used successfully by international organizations, especially United Nations agencies, to tackle various social, political, and economic problems. The target segments of the population are fed with entertainment laced with hidden educational content aimed at fostering awareness, attitude, and ultimately, behaviour change. The E-E model, 
despite its tremendous successes in the past (for example through the Village Headmaster, Masquerades, and Tales By Moonlight programmes on the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA) had not been applied to solve the problem. With financial and technical support from the Ford Foundation, the organization created a 30-minute radio drama (comedy) series tagged “Naija Konnecti”. The plot of the drama is an imaginary Naija Estate where various Nigerians live together. The intrigues of their survival in this Estate are used to mirror the real Nigeria. Challenges being addressed in the real country are set and resolved within the Estate and the 
episodes are aired on six radio stations strategically picked, one in each of the nation's six geo-political zones. Sixty-five artists, including eight Nollywood veterans such as Ngozi Nwosu, Jide Kosoko, Saeed Mohammed, Dele Odule, Mong Kalu, and Jeremiah Francis were cast in the 52 episodes which ran from May 2022 to June 2023. The issues addressed in the first season of the series included corruption, inter-ethnic relations, tolerance, patriotism, banditry, nepotism, civic engagement, and political apathy. The results were encouraging. The organization commissioned an impact-assessment study at the end of the first season 
(June 2023) and found a high level of awareness amongst the citizenry in the campaign locations. The listeners became more conscious of their relative contributions to the challenges of the country and that they also needed to be part of the solution. The programme was exposed to 1,974,400 listeners, which means there were about 99,479,200 listening times during the campaign.