Chxta goes home

"Find a job you enjoy, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

---Confucius

The great sage was dead right. That I have discovered ever since I decided to take up Jeremy's challenge and explore my other side. You see for a few days now, I have been at 234Next, a news organisation that was set up to challenge the way the media is run in my country. Remember The Fourth Estate? That is what NEXT is trying to be, and God knows that Nigeria needs it.

I have started out here and to be honest, I have not worked at all. As someone who is naturally an amebo, this access to what is happening almost as soon as it happens is nothing short of orgasmic. It has just been fun all the way, and I remember sitting down at a point during the Ekiti Election re-run coverage yesterday and having the thought, "I could actually stay in this organisation forever!" That is how much I am enjoying what I have been up to these past few days.

My responsibilities at NEXT at the moment are in no way restricted to journalism since there is a niche to be filled in the technical side of their multimedia end, and yours truly wrote a dissertation titled, The Security of Compressed Multimedia. Also, yours truly writes a whole lot of rubbish which has apparently been identified as volatile enough to cause just the kind of trouble that the Nigerian media needs to cause but has traditionally failed to do.

Take for example yesterday's Ekiti coverage. We had people on the ground closely following the happenings, and we were posting their reports live and in real time to the web. Something that has not quite happened in the Nigerian media space ever before. There were problems for example as a lack of internet access in Ekiti meant that the pictures of the bedlam that occurred did not find their way to the newsroom. There was also the issue of one of the reporters being 'arrested' by thugs loyal to the national ruling party at a point. Then there was the strange issue of mobile phone service suddenly dying in the Ekiti area at around 1400 hours. Service was not restored for about 2 hours.

I found it rather funny (and sad too) that the NTA claimed last night that the elections in Ekiti were peaceful! Flipping heck! If those elections were peaceful, then Joseph Ratzinger is an adherent of Chris Oyakhilome's Christ Embassy!

We are still providing updates on what is happening in Ekiti (flash animation on homepage), and the prognosis for Nigeria's 'democracy' is not good as Ekiti in all honesty is a good test case for the 2011 elections...

In any event on a personal note, yesterday was one of the most fulfilling days I have had since God talked to Moses, and I would want to do it over and over again. This though would mean that Chxta's World would have to suffer as there would be a major conflict of interest. Let's see how it goes.

Recommended:
NEXT's coverage of the Ekiti Elections
NEXT's audio page with clips of interviews and analysis
NEXT's video page with regularly updated news