Mr. Mike Asukwo is about the most popular editorial cartoonist in Nigeria today. He tells SAM NWAOKO his media story in this interview.
How did you begin your media career? How did you start out in journalism?
It might be very hard to pinpoint the exact time I made that move into the media. I think it was a gradual thing because I am an artist and there was always this need to speak out, to use my art to speak out against some ills around me then because, right from secondary school, I discovered that art was powerful. You could use arts to talk about what was going wrong or what was going right at that time. It could even be in the classroom, we could use cartoon to draw noisemakers and all of that. With the art, you could send the message straight. After secondary school, I studied sculpture and tried to infuse my messages into sculpture. It was always interesting but in most cases, the messages get misunderstood. The messages also do not go as far as one would have liked. I’ve tried to do a sculpture of the problems of Nigerian workers and the sculpture goes to an exhibition; it was bought by somebody or collected by a collector and it leaves the exhibition hall to a private home or a corporate environment. The meaning of the sculpture in most cases is lost because, in different situations or atmospheres, anybody could give any meaning to the sculpture. That was the problem I was facing. The works and messages I was trying to push out did not really speak, apart from people just enjoying the aesthetics of the works I produced. However, I made sure that each work or sculpture I produced had a message and is arresting. You had to look at it again and ask questions.
I draw a lot and we started by doing an illustrated magazine. The Editor of Business Day Newspapers who also contributed to the illustrated magazine saw my drawings and got interested in them. He saw the illustrations and wanted to see me and we met. He said why don’t you just come to Business Day and work with us? At that time, I’ve never had my cartoons published before then. I had a couple of cartoons like that but I never had them published in a newspaper like Business Day. When I got there, there was nobody on the cartoon desk; I think it was a freelance staff that was handling it before I came. I had never done editorial cartoon before and I set to work. It was like learning everything on the job, but I got interested. I think I got inspired by the fact that I was getting feedback from the public. People were calling the newspaper to comment on the cartoons and all that. That was where I discovered that it was even here that I can say a lot of things I want to say. Gradually it became very important so much that I see the messages. I left Business Day, went to Calabar, Cross River State. I returned to Business Day and I have been there for the past 15 years.
Do you still do your sculptures?
Yes, I still sculpt because that is where the real money is. However, patronage has been down. I do a lot of monumental sculptures which are mostly commissioned by corporate bodies or organisations. They don’t come very often. But, it’s a job I like to do a lot and most of my friends are sculptors.
How about friends and colleagues in sculpturing from Yaba Tech, do you still keep in touch?
Yes, we are in touch. We interact. Sometimes, they even call me to give a talk t the students and so on. Some of the lecturers still call me regularly to just ask how I’m doing and we are in touch. We were very close when I was there.
Now that cartoons are what take your time the more, what are some of the marked feedbacks you receive on your work compared to when you started out and now?
Initially, I was just working for myself. You just push out cartoons and just wait for the pay. It has gone beyond that now. It is no longer just about the job and source of livelihood. It went beyond that, years ago, when it became more of an advocacy thing. I discovered that I could actually use cartoons to cause some change in some aspects of our life. Initially, I did not know how strong it was, but then, the feedback became very strong. It came from people, corporate bodies and so on. I go to places, people walk up to me and say ‘I like what you are doing’ and I just ask myself ‘for this little thing I’m doing?’ The reactions gradually got overwhelming and you now discover that there are actually people who expect you to be their mouthpiece, who are happy that you are saying a lot of things they would have loved to say but they never got the opportunity or the platform to say it the way you are saying it. They now look up to you to say it the way they would like to say it. It is like if you stop, you will be disappointing them.
Your works are beautiful, crisp and colourful. They are also pungent. Did modernity spice up your work or how much would you say technology helped what you are doing?
Technology has helped my work to a very large extent. I actually started out with pen and ink. Pen and ink is still very beautiful; still very mature. Technology has made the work much easier. It also makes the work more aesthetically beautiful. As most of them are seen on TV, laptop or phone screens, they are more attractive. Technology has made us to adapt to those devices and the works come out more beautiful even if they were in black and white. It also makes it more available for almost anybody to see, I mean it could be shared easily. However, there are things that are required, like the tools you need to be able to do this. I have worked a lot to ensure that I keep up with the times, and this was from the time when I was in Yaba College of Technology. Unless I’ve not heard of that material, I will learn to use it. I try to experiment with it. When I joined Business Day, I immediately set to work to understand the tools that I needed to create cartoons. One of the tools is Photoshop, I tried to learn Photoshop and it was even like a prerequisite. You really needed to go digital and I went to learn Photoshop. With that, I was able to keep up with my work.
Are there some feedbacks you received that surprised you, like some people you didn’t expect who reacted to your work?
There is no kind of reaction I don’t really expect. You cannot control people’s action or reaction to the work. The only thing I don’t expect is reading your work out of context, or using the work to a tool of attack of either my person or some other person. That is not what the work set out to achieve. The cartoon ridicules right, but it doesn’t ridicule maliciously. It just calls attention to some ills of the society. Some people, however, may want to settle some scores using your cartoons and all that. So, it is not meant for that. However, sometimes, you cannot help it because even in science, when people create formulas, those formulas would be used to create weapons of mass destruction. So, the cartoons I do are just to draw attention basically and in doing that find humour in some of the things that we are going through because I believe that if we can laugh about it, we can survive it. That is what I’m doing.
However, some people feel that the cartoons I’m doing are an attack. Some people have called my publisher to say that Asukwo is being paid by this one or that one but my Publisher would say Asukwo has worked under Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan of PDP; and Buhari of APC, so who has been buying him them? If you say he has been paid by a political opponent to attack another opponent, who then is doing the payment? Because of that, they hardly step down any of my cartoons. They hardly step down my cartoons.
Has any of your cartoons got you into trouble before?
It has not got me personally into trouble but it has gotten Business Day I work for into trouble. But then, Business Day is an organisation that has no political affiliation. That is one thing that keeps us very strong and that is also one of the reasons I am still in Business Day up till now. I’ve been invited by so many other newspapers in Nigeria. When I find out who is financing you I will just know that I cannot survive there because I will come in there and you will start telling me who I should not go near and all that. Business Day does not have no-go areas when it comes to politicians in Nigeria. Yes there are some corporate bodies where we might apply the brakes on sometimes, but when it comes to politicians and government officials, we don’t have no-go areas. That has been my main inspiration and support.
But Business Day has suffered. Sometimes, we used to go without adverts. Some adverts can be withdrawn and so on. We don’t really have much patronage from government and government people. They might be planning to bring advert to Business Day and you open one edition and find that you are the subject of one cartoon like that, they will just withdraw it.
That is it for Business Day. For me a lot of people always express concern about me, including family members. They will say I should take it easy. There was a day I went to Abuja and even attended an event. I met a lot of people there including government officials. They feel I had not been too kind to their principal or they themselves but there is nothing they can do about it because they know that I don’t have any issue with them. I’m just doing my job. However, some people call me and warn me and all that. “Look you have to be very careful otherwise we will deal with you” and all that. I just laugh it off because I don’t think cartoon will make you to come and harm or even kill me. The only thing I believe you could do to me is maybe sue me for slander or defamation but nobody has ever done that. If nobody has ever done that, then there’s nothing to worry about.
You’ve won many awards, foreign and local. Is there any one of them that gives you a special kind feeling; any one of them that resonates differently?
I started winning awards early and perhaps, that might have me to say I’m used to awards. If I was to collect all the awards and certificates, I think I will have a big cabinet of it. The award that might surprise or wow me now is if I’m given an award for singing. That will definitely surprise me because I know I cannot sing. If I get an award because of anything related to what I’m doing, then I’m in a familiar territory. However, I consider that every award is important so long as you don’t pay for them. When the awards come, I appreciate them because I believe that they are freely given by people who recognise you for what you do without you making an appeasement for their recognition. That is why I treasure all of them, but honestly, I haven’t really been surprised about any one of them.
When Dr. Chris Ngige was the Minister of Labour your cartoon “Ngige and his surplus doctors” rang so loud. Did Ngige himself react to that cartoon and what was his reaction?
Recently, Dr Ngige was planning to do a collection of all the cartoons that had been done about him during his tenures as governor and minister. A friend approached me and said can you send something. I told him that Ngige will not like some of the cartoons I had done about him. He insisted that I send them in, notifying me that Ngige himself said that it didn’t matter what it was. He forced me to send them. I now sent some of them. One day, I now asked him ‘how far with the cartoons I sent?’ and he said “ah! Ngige said he did not like these ones o!” I laughed. I know it takes a lot to stomach some of the works. Sometimes, I think I am not speaking enough.
There was never a time I had struggled to come up with a concept for a cartoon. This is because things are happening and there are always materials. The problem is that which one among them will one talk about with all these issues. Sometimes, I think that one cartoon can cover a lot of the issues in one subject. That is what happened in that Ngige cartoon. A lot was happening, we were in dire straits, then a minister, who himself is a doctor, and I understand that he has a son who is also a doctor, made that kind of statement. It was like he himself did that cartoon. You are a doctor overseeing the ministry of labour in which doctors are leaving in droves… and you are saying that Nigeria has surplus doctors?
It also brought up the issue of who Nigerians see as ‘doctor’ where they find themselves. If you go to some places, the ‘doctor’ is an itinerant patent medicine hawker. There are some people who are just chemists but who would even perform a brain surgery if you give them the chance. That gives us perspectives to what a doctor is to some people.
You are training young people in the visual arts. What is the motive behind this activity?
We have problems in our society right now and one of them is that people mistake the creativity or gift of an art-inclined child for something else. Growing up, I experienced this. I was running around, touching almost everything in the house, wanting to repair things. Everybody thought Mike would be an engineer.’ However, that in that restlessness, creativity and curiosity is what a child wants to be. A lot of parents don’t see that. They want to impose on the child – you will be a doctor, you will be a lawyer and so on but not what that child really was made to be. Most of the times, the signs are there but the parents ignore it. I have met a lot of parents like that. I attended a start-up programme in Uyo and a lot of parents came to me after my presentation to say that I spoke to them. They asked me what they should do and I told them to let the child be. They think that artists don’t feed or that they don’t have anything to do or even that the child would end up as a road-side artist but I try to explain how big that sector itself is and how useful a child can be there.
I am an example. I have never had to present my certificates anywhere and my results were quite good. I got A1 in Mathematics but I doubt if up to 10 people have seen that result because nobody ever asks me for it. I graduated with Upper Credit from Yabatech but nobody asks me for my results. Even at Business Day, I started work long before they even asked me for my certificates. When I brought them they just filed them. That is what talent can do for you. A lot of children are just moving around in the wrong job because if you love what you do, you will never have to work. If you do what you love, you will never see it as work. Some students will go to school suffering and stressing themselves because they are trying to read a course they don’t have any business reading. So, our own is to let the parents allow their children to use their talents but first of all, identify that gift that they have. Whatever gift that child has, let them enjoy being themselves. If they are artists, let them be because they think around their subjects, they are not linear thinkers. The artist is given to take things from every perspective and the artist is the one that always have answers to problems in the house.
So, the idea of the training is to allow these children to be themselves. If they be artists, let it show in them, it doesn’t mean that they cannot be doctors because they are artists. Ben Carson is an artist. He said that his understanding of the three-dimension helped him to be such a good surgeon because when he is working on the brain, he is imagining the other part of the brain, and that that helped him to properly handle that part of the brain. It doesn’t mean that an artist cannot be an engineer, an accountant or in any other profession. Of a fact, the way he will handle that subject will be excitingly different.
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