Okey IkechukwuIn the build up to the 2023 general elections, the Network and Advocacy Group of Lux Tera Leadership Foundation has been in the forefront of organisations working assiduously to drive citizenship education.
It has organised various leadership training programmes, targeted campaigns, public enlightenment programmes, youth development initiatives and community-based initiatives. The Foundation has also organised developmental workshops, in the course of which it generated and spread advocacy materials, to guide the citizenry towards informed political decision-making.
One of the tool it has deployed most effectively is the media, especially by the facilitation of television discussion programmes in this regard. Besides its own branded television programme, it has also, on various occasions and through its programme partners and members of its Think Thank, expanded the frontiers of national discourse through the deployment and appearance of Third Parties to drive its developmental narratives, and the one goal of creating a better society, on various media platforms.
For the 2023 elections alone, the organisation has remained consistently visible in the public space through its well thematized initiatives, including, and especially, through its Advocacy Thursday interventions. These are targeted, periodic releases, skits and educational content, which focus on core legal, statutory and social responsibility steps and issues that would lead to free, fair, transparent and credible elections. These issues are central to the integrity of the electoral process/outcomes, as well as lasting development and citizenship education.
By ensuring that each such Advocacy Message addresses specific, current and urgent matters of leadership, citizenship, general public interest and general public good, the foundation has created a unique, impactful and admirable approach to building public awareness in a sustainable way. It is working with a carefully selected persons with confirmed Voice and Credibility in the Nigerian media, public and political space. It, thus, now has a committed group of persons who are held together by their convictions about the paradigms for sustainable leadership and followership in Nigeria.
The Foundation’s installmental and targeted advocacy works in such a way as to ensure that each advocacy theme builds on the one before it. The result is a series of mutually reinforcing narratives that allow breathing space for absorption and application in everyday life. This has been the approach in its handling of matters pertaining to the coming elections. The communication/campaign on the new Electoral Act did not come before the one on display of voters’ register. Nor did the one on the collection of Permanent Voter Cards (PVC) come before the advocacy message on the need to register, etc.
The approach allows for a period of assessment, a feedback mechanism and periodic review that monitors impact, the objectives attainment of desired impact and for the recalibration of subsequent interventions. All the focal issues for communication, advocacy and public enlightenment are articulated to improve the people’s understanding of the true meaning of development, better leadership, service delivery in office, sense of community, improved political decision-making among the citizenry and a better governed society.
As we walk into the last weeks before the elections, Lux Tera must be counted among the few organisations that have maintained a consistent focus on improving governance, leadership, citizenship and political engagement in Nigeria. When its Network and Advocacy Group Think Thank is measured against the background of its task as platform for the birth new ideas, promote discourse and suggest solutions for extant and emerging leadership, developmental and citizenship issues in Nigeria, the Foundation stands tall in every sense of the word.
The initiative of creating a pool of informed persons who, in addition to being active on their own across several socio/political advocacy platforms and activities of their own, are now part of the Lux Tera team of informed advocates, is a unique achievement of the Foundation. By generating, and projecting, new ideas towards creating a better Nigerian society, the Foundation’s well produced Advocacy materials have been effective in this regard.
The print, electronic and social media, and also Talk Shows and Roundtables, have been veritable platforms for advancing the Foundation’s enlightenment and developmental programmes. Its outreach and youth leadership training programmes, including the programmes organised for school teachers, students and education stakeholders are all now dovetailing into three main focal channels, namely: (1) Measurable political education, the expansion of social consciousness/ group cohesion, and (3) Confirmed commitment to, and impact on, the imperative of free, transparent, fair and credible elections in Nigeria.
By Dr Okey Ikechukwu
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