ACCRA, GHANA (Chatnewstv.com) — The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has withdrawn an award given to Nigerian journalist Abdulrasheed Hammad after determining his winning report was published outside the eligibility period for the 2025 West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards (WAMECA).
Hammad was initially named the winner in the Telecommunications and ICT category. The award was presented to him by Samuel Bartels, Senior Director of Regulatory and Government Affairs at MTN Ghana, during the awards night.
The decision to revoke the prize followed a complaint filed by the International Centre for Investigative Journalism (ICIR), a Nigerian media outlet.
The ICIR alleged that Hammad’s award-winning report, titled “Fiscal transparency: Despite ICT advancement, Nigerian states’ open contracting portals inaccessible,” was originally published on the ICIR website on July 31, 2023, as part of its Open Contract Reporting Project.
WAMECA 2025 accepted applications only for articles published between Jan. 1, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2024.
The ICIR further alleged that Hammad republished the same article on a university media outlet, Pen Press, on Jan. 5, 2024, seemingly to make it eligible for the prize.
After consulting with both Hammad and the ICIR, the MFWA concluded that the report was indeed ineligible due to its original publication date preceding the required period.
“The main objective of establishing the publication period criterion for the WAMECA Awards is to reward the relevance and timeliness of journalistic productions… The fact that journalists republish old articles in other media with new dates in order to submit them for awards undermines this objective,” the MFWA stated.
The foundation noted that hundreds of articles published before 2024 were rejected for ineligibility during the selection process.
Following the withdrawal, Rabo Oumarou of the Sidwaya newspaper in Burkina Faso has been designated the new winner in the Telecommunications and ICT category. His article, “Higher Education and Research Institutions: Wifi Galore in Public Universities,” was originally ranked second by the grand jury. Oumarou had previously received a finalist merit certificate from Rebecca Ekpe, vice-president of the Ghana Journalists Association.
The MFWA reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining “fairness, transparency and integrity” in celebrating journalism excellence in West Africa.
