Larry and Yen have already underscored the issue before us. To avoid repetition, maybe I should just highlight some of the issues that occurred to me from the African perspective, because we are not just talking about media, we are talking about media in relation to global crises.

I listened very attentively to Mr. Muazzam Gill yesterday when he indicated clearly that globalization is the predominant engine of our time. The media ought to take note of this. People have been talking about building bridges between cultures and societies. Now the world is one global village. So it is important that if we want to talk about the role and responsibilities of the media, we should take off from the fact that it has to naturally follow the trend of global integration.

In other words, there is a need for the media to internationalize its practices—to work for the universe and discard the old idea of national politics being the sole arbiter of the behavior of the national media. We need to see every society, as Gill said yesterday, through its belief system, using a standard prism, using the same mirror for all. The media needs a kind of reorientation. It requires knowing that its role is a mandate. Where you are set up for a business, that is the purpose for which you are set up. If media lays claim to information, education, entertainment, enlightenment, this is not a triviality but a mandate. It is a role we have assumed.

In that regard, I would like to say that the kind of direction in Africa I would look forward to would de-emphasize disparities in the projection of different societies. For example, CNN has admitted that only 2.5 percent of its international reports concern Africa. Reporting on Africa also projects only negative occurrences—floods in Mozambique, droughts in Ethiopia and Sudan, war in Angola and Liberia, genocide in Rwanda and Burundi—as if those are the only things that happen in Africa. As long as this type of stereotype, this orientation, is there, for that long we exacerbate the problems in those areas.

The media engage in simplistic generalizations and indeed break journalism’s fundamentals, like not checking facts. My station, the Nigerian Television Authority, sent a group of reporters to Liberia, an aberrant country where there had been war for a long time. We found that foreign journalists who came to Liberia to cover the war send their reports to their editors at home from interviews they conducted in their hotel rooms in Monrovia, the capital of the country. But the fighting is going on hundreds of miles away from the capital city. My own country has had many problems with labor. Our president is a former military leader, and so there is this belief that because he was a former military leader he is not a democrat and doesn’t listen to people or care about what people feel. While there was so much trouble with labor, he was supposed to attend the G–8 Conference to attend. CNN reported that he had already gone, because there was a belief that he would go. Our own local media interviewed him and showed him in his Presidential Villa. He had not gone anywhere, though the world had been told that he had gone, which depicted him as a president not interested in his people.

I think that we need to do more of telling the truth, emphasizing significant issues instead of trivialities. I think the media needs to do more peace education. I just heard for the first time yesterday that the invasion of Kuwait had to do with the interpretation of the comments made by the U.S. ambassador in relation to the boundary disputes. In other words, that situation could probably have been avoided if the interpretation had taken the correct perspective.

I want to say that our own concept of globalization is that the world is not a global village, which presupposes that the world now manifests those attributes of a typical village setting: communal life, interdependence, equality. That is what we understand by the village. If that is what globalization is doing, then it is necessary for us to try and project those attributes, project the unselfishness of give and take action, as Thomas Walsh said yesterday. Unless we follow what men of goodwill like Rev. Moon and others are advocating, peace cannot be achieved. So the media must seek to stop crises and give accurate reports. We need to use the media to encourage those who support the principle of living for the sake of others. That is what Dr. Kwak said yesterday.

In Nigeria, we are very poor, but we spend over one-quarter of our very lean resources and lose hundreds of our citizens in peacekeeping missions in our own West Africa subregion. We die so that Liberia and Sierra Leone can survive, and we would like to be projected in that way. If it is only our feelings that are projected, then we could be dissuaded from living this life so that others can live.

I would like to encourage accurate media reports that project those things we have done well and those things we have not done well. But now everything that is projected is negative, so the tendency is to dissuade the peacemakers of the world.

We need to recognize this, and we need to realize that if you talk about where the media’s role and responsibility begins, you need to also talk about where it should end. In the whole of this seminar, I noticed an emphasis on the influence of the media. Everybody talks about what the media can do. Yes, the media can do quite a lot, but we all appear to be underestimating the challenges. We all believe there is this responsibility of the media and that whatever the media says is automatically accepted. We forget that there are people who have deep-seated prejudices and who take in news that legitimizes their prejudices. So not everything the media does is accepted. The media could do a lot and people could still take only that aspect that they want to take. This is not to say that the power of the media is not big. Rather, it is to say that the challenge is there, and the media needs to recognize that not everything it does is accepted.

If the media really wants to influence and make an impact on people, it has to do more and more. You have to recognize that public enlightenment is not a touch-and-go affair. It is something that needs to be repeatedly fed, especially in our own parts where the literacy rate is very low. You need to say something again and again before people understand what you are talking about.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Makabenta, what I am saying is that the end of the role of the media, the end of the responsibility of the media, has to wait for the end of time. Thank you.