We present an exclusive interview with Dr. Peter Iorper Ugondo (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Patience Ngunan Achakpa-Ikyo (Co-Researcher), recipients of the Media Studies Grant 2025. Their project, “Echoes of Change: Unveiling the Climate Crisis through Historical Narratives in Television Archives of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA)”, examines how Nigeria’s national broadcaster has represented environmental and climate-related issues over the past 44 years, and what this reveals about the country’s collective memory of the climate crisis.

In this interview, they discuss their motivations for pursuing this topic, the challenges of working with archival material, the broader impact of their findings, and more.

Echoes of Change: Unveiling the Climate Crisis through Historical Narratives in Television Archives of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA)

What motivated you to choose this topic for your research?

Our motivation for this research stems from two intersecting and disturbing realities. First is the communicative history of climate change in Nigeria, and second, the institutional materiality of broadcast archival preservation.

Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges facing the world today. In Nigeria, recurrent experiences of flooding, drought, heatwaves, and environmental degradation are not only ecological events but also mediated realities that are repeatedly reported, interpreted, and framed by the broadcast media. Formally established in 1977, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Africa’s oldest television station and Nigeria’s most influential broadcaster, has historically served as a central voice in shaping environmental discourse, translating policy narratives, and reflecting national developmental priorities. By that mandate, the station would not ignore climate change, which was highlighted as a global challenge in the Gro Harlem Brundtland report (Our Common Future) in 1987. Since then, political momentum and coordinated international action have been on the rise. However, the question remains: how has the institution historically constructed and mediated Nigeria’s climate narratives? What silences, continuities, or shifts can be discerned in its framing of environmental change since 1987, when global attention began to crystallise around ecological sustainability? To us, revisiting the station’s archives is both a historical and communicative act. We see the need to revisit memories, past voices, and environmental transformations, and invite society to listen again in view of contemporary realities.

We were also deeply motivated by the archival richness of NTA’s collections. Since its inception, NTA has functioned not only as a national news provider but also as a key platform through which the state narrates development priorities, including environmental and climate issues. Yet, despite the institutional and historical significance of NTA, scholarly engagement with its archives has been limited. Archival studies remind us that archives are not passive storehouses but active sites of memory and power. They are not just repositories of broadcasts but living socio-environmental memory banks that document how Nigeria has engaged with climate challenges from the 1980s to the present. NTA’s archives, therefore, constitute a vital resource for examining how national priorities such as climate change are narrated and remembered. Revisiting these archives, we aimed to uncover both the continuities and silences in environmental storytelling and to demonstrate how broadcast archives can inform today’s climate communication and policy interventions as well as the institutional materiality of their preservation.

Most importantly, we were motivated by the need to contribute a case study from the Global South to a predominantly Eurocentric discourse on broadcast archives and climate change. Much of the existing scholarship on archival climate communication draws from European and North American contexts, often neglecting the rich and complex media histories of African nations. Thus, engaging with the NTA archives, our study seeks to foreground how climate narratives have been mediated, institutionalised, and preserved within postcolonial Nigeria.

What challenges have you faced in accessing or working with archival material?

Accessing and working with the archival materials of the NTA was not an easy task. The first challenge we encountered was bureaucracy. Since the archives are housed in the station’s library at the headquarters in Abuja, we had to travel from our states to apply and follow up for the approval from the Director General. This would have perhaps been easy if the archives were stored in the cloud. The retrieval process would have also been less cumbersome. There was scepticism in granting approvals until an adequate explanation was made about the intent and use of the archives. The reasons we were given are that similar requests granted to an individual led the station to lose rights to some of its archives. Someone accessed and copied archives for commercial use, thereby depriving the station of the patent rights to those archives and the revenue that would have accrued from them.

The physical condition of the archives and space is another challenge. The space where these archives were kept is compact, with limited space for movement within. It was also very tight for two or more people to work in the library at the same time. Most times, it was the Librarian who was the only one to access and transfer the content to a hard drive for us. However, we were told of a building under construction for the library. The archives were largely on tapes, including Betacam, VHS, or MiniDV, especially records from earlier than 2010. Working with them was difficult. We had to search for and copy what we needed to the hard drive first before previewing. This extended the initial time we had allotted for working with the archives. It also lends some tapes to deterioration, which complicates digitisation and long-term preservation.

Cataloguing and indexing are uneven. Many materials are only partially documented, meaning one must manually sift through extensive reels to locate relevant content. Akin to this challenge is the fact that most archives were not found or catalogued. Our discussions with the librarian reveal that the move of the station’s headquarters from Lagos to Abuja was one of the reasons why some archives were not available. Two, the inability of producers to submit the programmes to the library for proper documentation. The third reason is that, due to a lack of space in storage devices, some older programmes are deleted to create space for more recent ones. The fourth reason is that the station previously lacked adequate and qualified personnel to staff the library. As a result, records were not properly kept and catalogued. In the end, we were recommended to follow up on present and past producers for archives in their personal holdings if they exist.

Finally, funding constraints limit the extent to which large volumes of footage can be digitised or accessed at once. This will amount to establishing a cloud space, employing adequate and qualified personnel as well as quality equipment to collect and transform the archives into digital form and space. These challenges, though daunting, highlight the urgency of investing in archival preservation as a national and global priority.

What do you see as the role of archives in furthering your field of research?

In the field of media studies, archives are active repositories of the past, serving as sites of knowledge-making that shape how societies remember, interpret, and act. They facilitate the tracing of narrative evolution, the construction of public opinion, and the intersections of media, politics, and policy over time. For us, archives serve as a laboratory where we can critically examine how communication practices evolved, and a mirror reflecting the social values, power dynamics, and cultural anxieties of different eras.

Within climate change communication, archives play a transformative role. It reveals how environmental issues were historically reported and framed, which metaphors and visual symbols dominated, which actors and voices were silenced, and how these representations shaped public understanding and policy response. They facilitate an understanding of how local societies perceive risk, responsibility, and resilience, long before climate discourse became globalised.

Equally important is the fact that archives provide a pathway for decolonising media knowledge. Much of the scholarship on broadcast archives and climate communication has been situated in Europe and North America, overlooking the contributions and experiences of the Global South. Engaging with Nigerian television archives, for instance, allows us to reposition African media as producers of environmental meaning, rather than mere recipients of imported narratives. This helps democratise global media history and broadens the epistemic base of media studies.

Therefore, we view archives as bridges between the past and the present, linking historical documentation to contemporary advocacy and policymaking toward climate change. Archives shed light on forgotten media practices, empower new interpretations, and inspire innovative ways of storytelling about the environment and climate change. Ultimately, studying the NTA climate change archives ensures that the memory of the media’s failures, achievements, and silences continues to inform the future of communication research, education, and social transformation.

What impact do you hope your research will have on understanding the value of archives for present-day societies?

We sincerely hope that our research will make significant contributions to the understanding of the importance and role of archives in contemporary times.  First, it will show that television archives are not mere repositories of the past but living infrastructures of knowledge that hold immense relevance for present and future societies. The analysis of decades of environmental coverage in the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) archives will reveal how historical media framings of flooding, drought, desertification, and pollution have influenced public awareness, policy responses, and collective environmental consciousness in Nigeria.

Revisiting the NTA archives will reveal dominant recurring patterns, silences, and innovations in climate change communication. It will foster an understanding of how certain media practices either obscured or illuminated the realities of ecological risk, and how lessons from the past can guide more inclusive, evidence-based, and culturally grounded climate change communication today.

Beyond the climate change lens, our research demonstrates the societal value of archives as repositories of national memory, cultural continuity, and civic imagination. It buttresses the need to preserve and digitise broadcast heritage, not out of nostalgia, but as an investment in resilience, democratic participation, and sustainable futures. Already, our research has awakened the consciousness of broadcasters and NTA management to the need for archival preservation. We strongly believe that our study will inspire policymakers, archivists, and educators to recognise archives as vital tools for learning from history and for shaping new narratives of adaptation and hope.

What key insights would you like the FIAT/IFTA community to take away from your research?

We would like the FIAT/IFTA community to note that the archives of the Nigeria Television Authority, the oldest and largest television network in Africa, demonstrate how a state-run broadcaster has documented decades of environmental crises, including floods, droughts, desertification, deforestation, and ecological degradation. They reveal how national anxieties and global discourses on climate change intersect within Nigeria’s media space. These records tell a story not only of environmental vulnerability but also of resilience, innovation, and adaptation.

Our research reinforces the importance of the Global South perspective in archival research. Analysing the oldest African television broadcast materials offers an alternative perspective to Eurocentric dominance in media and climate communication scholarship, affirming that Nigerian television archives also hold crucial insights that can enrich global understandings of environmental history.

Most importantly, our research exposes the urgent preservation challenges facing the NTA archives. Many of the materials, stored on ageing formats such as Betacam, VHS, and MiniDV, are at risk of deterioration. Without targeted investment in digitisation, cloud storage, and metadata-based retrieval systems, a significant portion of Nigeria’s broadcast heritage could disappear. Such a loss would not only erase vital records of media history but also silence decades of environmental storytelling, essential for informing policy and education.

There is therefore an urgent need to establish and sustain partnerships across continents, institutions, and researchers to ensure that broadcast stations like the NTA have the technical, infrastructural, and scholarly support necessary to preserve, democratise access and monetise its archives.