By NAN
The Director-General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), Malami Jibrin Baba-Ndace, says the agency in the last six months has been building relationships with international broadcast Organisations to meet up with global best practices.
Baba-Ndace said the organisations include Voice of America (VOA), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio France and others.
The VON boss stated this when the House Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Values visited the agency on an oversight function on Tuesday in Abuja.
The Committee was led by its chairman, Mr Fatoba Olusola Steve.
Baba-Ndace said the Agency has 15 directors and two broadcast studios in Lagos and Abuja, adding that, it broadcast in four local and four foreign languages.
“While the local languages include Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Fulfulde , the foreign languages are Swahili, French, Arabic and English. We are planning to also start broadcasting in Madarin, Bayesa in Indonesia and Portuguese.
“So as VON, my step and the things we are doing which is to ensure that we consistently work with existing partnership with all media organisations.
“Since my assumption to office in the last six months, I have been activating and building partnership with organisations similar to ours, like VOA, BBC, Russia Broadcast, Radio France and others.
“This is to ensure we meet up with the global best practices. I have also visited a lot of embassies based on existing relationships to see how we can deepen relationships.
“For instance, just recently, I visited the Tanzania embassy, because they are our gateway to Swahili speaking Eastern African countries,” Baba-Ndace said.
He further explained that VON has a robust digital Platforms where it share and tell the Nigerian, Nigeria, African and Africa ‘s stories and narrative through various applications.
Speaking, Steve said the aim of their visiting to VON was to familiarise themselves with the activities of the agency and carry out oversight functions to ensure government policies and programmes are effectively implemented.
He added that they were interested in ensuring that the approved appropriation and parliamentary allocation are use judiciously to maintain public trust in governance.
“We also want to ensure accountability in the nation’s policy implementation and value for funds to checkmating corruption and misapplication of appropriated funds”.
News Agency of Nigeria reports that the Committee and VON entered into a close door meeting to discuss in camera, and after the meeting, the committee was taken on a tour of VON facility at its transmission station in Lubgbe. (NAN)