How did your media journey begin?
I wasn’t a journalist by accident. I was a journalist by choice. I read a lot when I was young and the only job I thought I was fashioned to do when I was young was journalism. That was the only job I could say had the kind of promise that one was ready to fulfill, so I didn’t get into it accidentally, I got into it with my eyes wide open. Journalism is not always the most popular job for people to do. I remember an uncle of mine; when I told him that journalism is what I wanted to do, that I wanted to go to the university and study and practice journalism, he asked me a question. He said: “Are you ready to go to jail?” I said “if it comes to that I would be ready but I doubt if it would ever get to that.” That was me talking straight from the heart, and the head of course. If it came to that, I was ready but I had a feeling that it would not get to the point of going to jail. The man said ‘well if it’s your choice then, it’s your choice.’ For me, it was a dream. I had it as an aspiration and when I said I read widely, I read widely. I don’t know how the younger people are doing these days, I don’t even see how you can be a journalist without reading. I started by reading novels and all kinds of fiction. In fact, I read virtually every book James Hadley Chase published. When I got tired of crime authors and fiction, I started reading biographies, books on law, books on politics, books on government and the more I read, the more I realized that this thing is the kind of things I wanted to do. I wanted to write, I wanted to influence people. I wanted to help people to articulate their opinions. Many people have too many scattered dreams and they never really are able to put it in focus. Today, they like this tomorrow they like another. But the journalist focuses on the good in the society and you put it out there and the people own it as if it was their own opinion.
I really cherish that when a journalist wanted to tell the story of life generally, the story of living, the story of people who are governing – and that doesn’t mean that the story will always be good, it can be bad, they do that. I wanted to be able to tell those stories and I was going to be able to tell those stories, I have to read the stories others had told. So, the first thing that prepared me for journalism was reading. I read widely. My room in my father’s house has shelf all round the wall, the only part without a shelf was the door. Even the window had shelf covering part of it and all of them had books. I enjoyed reading.
So, journalism provided me with the kind of opportunity that I needed to have to express the sort of things that people were able to express both in books and in other genres of communication.
Where did you start sir, has it always been The Guardian?
No, The Guardian came later. When I left school, I got a job in a small weekly newspaper called Sunday Graphics. It was a very good newspaper too. I spent close to two years there before I left to join The Guardian. That was the only other place that I practiced journalism before The Guardian. However, as a student I was writing articles. I started doing regular articles then in the Nigerian Observer in Benin. At that time as a student, I was also being published in the New Nigerian in Kaduna. It was the same with The Punch in Lagos also. When New Nigerian set up their Sunday publication, from Day One, I maintained a column. I hadn’t even become a journalist but because I had been writing, they gave me a column on African and international affairs. So, I wrote on foreign issues every Sunday in Sunday New Nigerian until I left to focus on a career elsewhere. So, my real, first time, full time job as a journalist was at the Sunday Graphics.
Before then, as a student in the university, I was doing news analysis. Whenever I went to Benin, I was doing new analysis for Radio Bendel. Whenever I was in Lagos, I was writing news analysis for Radio Nigeria network service. Sometimes I could write up to three articles in a week. They were broadcasting it and Radio Nigeria was paying me. That helped because I was a student and I was making money. I would go to class, come back and they would hear my name on radio because they would read my name during the network news. Back then, at the end of every network news, they would read news analysis and my colleagues would hear my name and would be completely over-awed. “How did you manage to get to be writing news analysis for Radio Nigeria?” Of course Radio Nigeria was the radio station then.
What was the first newsroom experience like when you got to the Sunday Graphics?
Graphics was a new newspaper and because of this, I witnessed the setting up of its newsroom. So, I didn’t have that proper newsroom experience as such. A former Editor of the Nigerian Observer was our News Editor and we had many senior journalists who were working there and they knew how to run a newsroom. I was just coming from the university and didn’t have any clue. However, it was very wonderful from the beginning till the time I left.
However, I saw that the newsroom was a leveller. These days people talk about hierarchy, hierarchy didn’t obtain in the newsroom that I began and continued with. By hierarchy I mean it in the sense that somebody will come and say this is it and nobody will say any word. No.
When I left Graphics and came to The Guardian, it was even more so because it was a much more sophisticated place, and more established and the best people who could work in a newspaper were working in The Guardian. There were reporters who had PhDs, not to talk of those in the Editorial Board. The egg heads were all there in The Guardian Editorial Board. Professor Fred Omu, a Nigerian media historian, wrote a chapter in a book published by the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Lagos Chapel. I think this was when Lanre Arogundade was the Chairman. It was a very seminal book and in it, Prof Fred Omu said that two epochs had happened in the Nigerian media up until that time the book was published. He said the first was the coming of Newswatch for the magazine segment and the second epoch was the coming of The Guardian for the newspaper segment. He said both of them attracted very highly-educated people many of whom never practiced journalism before or never studied journalism. They were brought into their newsrooms and turned them into a very wonderful environment for people to exchange viewpoints, disagree – sometimes virulently – but yet they were able to produce very good newspaper, very good magazine. He also noted that both of them conditioned the Nigerian media after they arrived, which is true because every magazine wanted to be like Newswatch. In fact, most of those who set up magazines after Newswatch had already worked in Newswatch. The Guardian was essentially the same. The Guardian came and said it was not a tabloid. The point size of its lead story was always going to be maximum 48 point size whereas others published up to 120 points of fonts. We used to say “The Guardian is a complete newspaper.” You cannot say ‘I took this beat and made it fat’. The mast head must always be bigger than any story in the newspaper. No story is bigger than The Guardian itself. We never published editorial on the front page. Editorial must be on the editorial page, the front page is too important to mix it up with opinion. It must be news. You don’t work in such places and they don’t affect you, you get really positively affected.
Looking beyond that time, what did you see?
I could say the same of those who had told me stories. I have friends who had worked in the Nigerian Tribune. Walking in the corridors of Tribune is like walking on hallowed grounds. You look at the people who had passed through that organisation – people who had been editors, who had been MDs, who had been columnists, who had been editors-in-chief; look at the people who had written stories there as reporters and you might as well compile a list of who’s who in Nigerian journalism over the ages. The newspaper then was really something you wanted to work in.
That time, the Daily Times was the biggest. The Sunday Times used to print more than 500,000 copies every Sunday. Then Sunday Times of Nigeria was like the largest circulating newspaper in Africa. We didn’t have the large population that we have now but everybody wanted to read the Daily Times during the week and Sunday Times on Sunday.
Another thing to consider is the fact that Tribune survived in Ibadan. Many newspapers have come and gone. For instance, Sketch used to be a very powerful newspaper at a time. We know what has happened to Sketch but the Tribune survived all through this period. One of the greatest lessons I’ve learnt in journalism is that the people who own or run the best newspapers; who have the newspapers as their interest, who do it better are usually private individuals or family. Governments come and go.
When Daily Times was a private organisation, Alhaji Babatunde Jose, as the managing director of Daily Times, was bigger than any president of Nigeria. Alhaji Jose was at that level, not minister. Which minister will talk to Alhaji Jose? That was when Daily Times was at its height. I don’t want to talk about the other newspapers that came after them; the important thing is that the private newspapers were run better than the government newspapers or public organizations. Government never really was able to do it well. This explains why private newspapers are still surviving when government newspapers cannot. Look around you, virtually all state governments had newspapers. How many of them are still surviving now? How many of them do you read? Look at Lagos, there is not a single government newspaper surviving in Lagos. The papers making waves in the North are private newspapers – Daily Trust, Leadership, People’s Daily and so on. The government papers there are dead or they are like the living dead.
You formally came into journalism like a star but you must have met some other stars whom you regarded as big names in journalism. Who are some of these people in your early days in the profession?
You can’t live at a time people like Dr Stanley Macebuh lived without just looking at them as larger than life. Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Dan Agbese. Dan Agbese, for me, was such a hero as an editor in New Nigerian even before he came down to Lagos. What about somebody like Alhaji Lateef Jakande…? Baba was just a monumental icon. Journalists like Chief Bisi Onabanjo did nothing other than the fact that they had character. I read a lot about them.
I was just a boy when I read some of the books written by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. I read Awo’s Prison Notes for which the library in Enugu kept writing me that they couldn’t find the book whereas I returned the book after finishing it. You read those stories, your life is changed. If people like Awo, people like Nnamdi Azikiwe can do newspapers, and they were writing, how is it that people like us who are too small and who don’t have the kind of pedigree they had, how is it that we are going to be rubbing shoulders with them. But in the end, that’s essentially what happened because we started walking in those large footsteps. The rest is history because we are thanking God that we ourselves had walked the path those great men before us had charted.
You reported, wrote features and worked generally as a journalist. What was it like when you were first published, especially by The Guardian, a big platform?
The Guardian was another revelation to me. I must be the first non-editorial board member that was given a column in The Guardian. I wrote that column up to the time I became Editor. I kept writing. It was when the late General Abacha proscribed us and we returned from proscription, and I knew that the job was already larger, I said let me rest it. But before then, every time I finished each article, it was like I just won a lottery. The joy never failed, and it hadn’t even been published. Just finishing it, re-reading it and then I’d be asking myself ‘where did you get all these ideas from?’ It’s just great to do those things and when it comes out in print, you would be asking where all the ideas came from.
When these soft-sell papers were coming out and everybody was panicking, and people were complaining, I did an article that I called “Junk Journalism”. That was the first time that term was used. It stuck with them. I was trying to compare what was coming out of those papers to the junk food people were consuming and seemingly enjoying to the detriment of their health. That headline stuck. Every time I completed an article, even before it went to the press it was like I had won a lottery. There is nothing like writing and expressing yourself properly.
Are you worried that the newsroom is losing that verve of old, that people who read are not in the newsroom? Is anything worrying you about the newsroom of the future air?
Not reading is one of those things you will always feel worried about. One day, I asked Mr. Debo Adesina to let us ask what book everybody in the newsroom had read in the previous one year. It was an exercise with which we intended to underscore to them that you must read at least two books in a year. However, if you stop at one that would be a good start.
However, I recognise that the times have changed. The reading culture now is such that people are feeding on byte size publications. Now, people don’t feel obligated to read the kind of books that I was talking about. How many people are driven to read spy books or books written by prime ministers or presidents – their biographies, autobiographies or books written about them? Each of our Independence fathers have autobiographies or had autobiographies written about them but how many Nigerians feel obligated to read their stories? How many people are interested in what KGB, CIA, MOSSAD or other spy institutions are doing. You don’t see people who are driven like that. The people governing us today might have books written about them but they don’t tell human stories. They pepper over many things whereas people want to read about others. But people don’t find time to read, there are audio books but instead of people who spend hours in traffic in Lagos to listen to audio books, they listen to music. I remember seeing Dr Olatunji Dare reading O’Level physics one day and I was perplexed. He said he wanted to refresh his knowledge of physics. That is a man who understands the principle of reading. Many journalists don’t even read their own stories, once they see their byline they assume that the story was good without looking at the work done on it. Good books are still being written, whatever your choice, read something
If you are to specifically address journalists, what would you tell them?
I will tell them that journalists must be driven. My career was as a resolve of inner drive. I left but came back and I’m discovering that old habits die hard. I returned and found that the problems have even got worse. Journalism cannot be successful without you being passionate about things – passionate about changing something. Be passionate about changing your country for better. You must be passionate about changing the lot of the real common people. You must be passionate about helping those who have the responsibility to govern to do a good job of it. Our job is not just to run them down, our job is also to show them the way. Journalism makes us policy makers without realising it. We articulate positions that the people in government read and adapt to what they want to do. They confiscate your view; add it to their own ideas and things become better. Journalists must be solutions, we must not be part of the problem but today, journalists have become part of the problem. We seek to be the solutions to the problems we have not be part of the madding crowd. Journalists must believe in something and be driven by something. He must desire to achieve something. Journalism is not just about earning a living but it is also about seeking to transform your environment for the better. Journalists are special people. Journalists are a special people. In many countries, their best go to only three institutions: First institution is the military, the second is the bureaucracy and the third institution is the media. Check the people editing proper newspapers abroad, check the schools they went and you will find that they are the best. so, journalists must see themselves as special and you are not doing this job like you’re hawking on the streets or working in a bank. You are articulating views to make the country a better place and that is why they tell you that your pen is mightier than the sword. However, we must strive to make a difference because the pen of these days are not even as mighty as the pencil of old.
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