JOURNALIST: PAPER QUALIFICATION, NOT PASSION OR EXPERIENCE DETERMINES THE STATUS
Ben Udechukwu
Working in a bank doesn’t make you a banker. If you collect, collate and interprete intelligence; have excellent interview skills but have not attended proper journalism/mass communications institutions, you are not a Journalist, so properly called.
Let me break it down, there are excellent guys doing great jobs in the business of reporting, broadcasting and “newspapering”. The number of years they have invested performing these duties, can never confer on them the status of JOJRNALIST. The Nigerian Press Council Decree (now an Act of the National Assembly) defined a Journalist as “someone who is not less than 18 years, who has ATTENDED (empahsis mine) approved Mass Communications/Journalism institutes, engaged in the art of collection, collation and interpretation of intelligence”. We are not talking about CITIZEN JOURNALISTS.
Passion is not a function of qualification. There are people who had attended faculties of law, perfected the skill of advocacy, legal Drafting and Conveyancing, or were even awarded a Bachelor of Laws, yet they are not LAWYERS. You know why? The Legal Practitoners Act (S.2) is specific about who can hold himself out as a Lawyer. A lawyer is that person who was adjudged qualified by the Council of Legal Education, approved fit and proper by the Body of Benchers and properly CALLED TO BAR. FIT AND PROPER because even if you are qualified, the Body of Benchers can still deny you CALL TO BAR. If you like, be better than Justice Oputa in Legal Reasoning or more prolific in writing than the legendary Nikli Tobi, you can never be called a LAWYER.
There are mechanics who are just good, so much that they are at home with the soul of machines, yet they can never be called MECHANICAL ENGINEERS. The reason is simple, paper qualification, not passion or experience determines the status. Unless you are saying that those “matrons’ in “maternity” homes could be called GYNAECOLOGISTS.
This submission does not seek to undermine the efforts of people with passion, who have successfully crossed over to other “professions” by way of practice. They are simply performing those duties without acquiring the status.
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