The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has withdrawn the award presented to Abdulrasheed Hammad of Nigeria as the winner of the Telecoms and ICTs reporting category at the 2025 West Africa Media Excellence Awards. This was after the MFWA conducted a review of the eligibility of the winning story following a complaint lodged by a media house in Nigeria, the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR).
The complaint detailed that the winning story, “Fiscal transparency: Despite ICT advancement, Nigerian states’ open contracting portals inaccessible”, was originally published by the journalist on July 31, 2023, on ICIR’s website under its Open Contract Reporting (OCRP) project (see story here). It further alleged that the journalist republished the story on another website, Pen Press, a student news platform in Nigeria, at a different date, January 5, 2024, to make it eligible for this year’s award (see story here). WAMECA 2025 accepted entries for only stories published from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2024.
After engaging both parties, the ICIR and Abdulrasheed Hammad, the MFWA has concluded that the journalist’s story is indeed ineligible for this year’s award as it was originally published outside the publication time criterion. During the process of review and assessment for this year’s awards, hundreds of stories which were published before 2024 were rejected as ineligible. Abdulrasheed Hammad’s story cannot be an exception.
The ultimate idea of instituting publication time as a criterion for the WAMECA Awards is to recognise timeliness and relevance, ensure fair comparison of the work of journalists in the West Africa subregion at a given time, while promoting the stories for impact, in the case that they emerge as winners. Journalists republishing old stories with different media outlets with new dates to file for the Awards not only defeats this idea but also renders the publication time criterion meaningless.
The MFWA has therefore withdrawn the award presented to Abdulrasheed Hammad of Nigeria as the winner of the Telecoms and ICTs reporting category. In his place, Rabo Oumarou of Sidwaya in Burkina Faso, whose story, “Institutions d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche: Du wifi à « gogo » dans les universités publiques unique”, was the runner-up in the notes of the grand jury, has emerged winner of the Telecoms and ICTs reporting.
The MFWA wishes to emphasise its commitment to fairness, openness and integrity in celebrating outstanding journalism in West Africa under its West Africa Media Excellence Awards.
