Courage under Fire:A Review of Trials and Triumphs – The Story of The News by Wale Adebanwi

By Kayode Fayemi

Chairman, Excellencies, Media Gurus, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen. We are here to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of a rare phenomenon in the annals of crusading journalism in Africa. Fifteen years may not exactly be a long time in the over 140 years history of newspapers in Nigeria; and TheNews is certainly not the oldest publication of its kind in the country. However, when one considers the mortality rate of such publications and the context of birth – a magazine conceived in the crucible of Nigeria’s long and tortuous struggle against military dictatorship and nurtured in the suffocating uncertainty of life under authoritarian role, it is easy to come to the conclusion that it is not how long, but how well. In that context, every year spent in that crucible is well worth celebrating.

A fitting emblem of this worthy celebration of courage under fire, high patriotism and selfless sacrifice is the publication of Trials and Triumphs – The Story of The News – a commissioned study of The News’ history written by that rare breed in the atrophying chamber of socially relevant scholarship, Wale Adebanwi, Bill & Melinda Gates Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Naturally, detached academics are skeptical of sponsored studies lest they be accused of privileging hagiography over hard facts and Dr Adebanwi reflects on this dilemma in his introduction to the book. The final product in my view however is an excellent testimony to the prodigious intellect of Dr Adebanwi and his interpretive capacity to navigate the labyrinthine maze of our recent history without refraining from highlighting the faults and foibles, indeed the challenges of an institution that espouses clear tenets of democracy whilst internalizing, albeit sub-consciously the authoritarian residues of the dictatorial State.

Dr Adebanwi has done our country - well known for its predilection of collective amnesia – a huge favour by producing this wonderful work of political history and media studies. Although it is not the first in the genre I have referred to elsewhere as “Struggle memoirs” and which Dr Reuben Abati of The Guardian has once called “literature of resistance” – books detailing our sordid experience under the military dictatorships of the Babangida and Abacha era, it offers a refreshing insight into the critical role played by the media in the demise of dictatorship and in the promotion of democracy. A reading of these books – Ken Saro Wiwa’s A Month and a Day – A Prison Diary, Wole Soyinka’s Open Sore of the Continent, Chris Anyanwu’s Days of Terror, Kunle Ajibade’s Jailed for Life, the Wale Oshun Trilogy – Clapping with One Hand, Open Grave and Kiss of Death and my own Out of the Shadows: Exile and the Struggle for Democracy and Freedom in Nigeria – to mention a few in a long list – serves as a sober reminder of the evil of military rule and how Nigerians in their various ways resisted their dehumanization by jackboots with bayonets. Taken together, they also remind us of the risk of basking in the false adulation of being a democracy since our country remains to a large extent a transition without transformation, a democracy without democrats. Indeed, we are still caught in that contradictory trap so well depicted by the Italian Marxist scholar, Antonio Gramsci when he argued that “the crisis of transition consists precisely of the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear…” The morbid symptoms are all about this polity as we witness brazen election rigging, monumental corruption and bad governance in all ramifications and many continue to wonder if they will ever disappear.

Yet, the birth of TheNews represented a rebirth of possibilities, of optimism that the morbid symptoms will disappear from our country. At the time of their unexpected resignation from African Concord Magazine for their journalistic daring of challenging the Babangida mystique, they were not oblivious, for instance, of what happened to Dele Giwa, the flamboyant but irrepressible Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch Magazine. They were more concerned about what the military was doing to their country. As Bayo Onanuga, the ‘non-radical’ self-effacing leader of the troops put it prosaically in his resignation letter to Chief MKO Abiola, “journalism is not meant for making the environment cozy for the leaders of nations; it is meant to prod them to act in the interest of the larger society. It is meant to cause them sleepless nights”(p.11). Even Chief Abiola who at the time thought Nigeria was not worth dying for and laboured hard not to die for Nigeria was to later realize the monumental risk of compromising with evil. In the end, he was radicalized even more than his departed wards by the Nigerian condition and eventually died so that Nigerian could survive.

In seven captivating chapters, gripping in detail and racy in its narratives, Wale Adebanwi chronicles The News’ journey in and out of proscription, detention, persecution, travails and triumph in the last fifteen years, and through them renders a vivid picture of how Nigeria tethered on the edge, danced at the precipice and then fortuitously pulled back from the brink (at least for now), but not without a lot of blood on the street. The 204 page book with a prologue, “Remembering Rufus” by Professor Adebayo Williams offers a fore-taste of what to expect. Adebayo Williams paints a graphic picture of a young team of steely resolve ready to provide intellectual ammunition for the formulation, articulation and implementation of ideas and mobilization of people against military dictatorship. The first penetrating insight one gets into The News’ worldview is appropriately captured in Chapter One in the way the publication treated its first major cover on Justice Olugbani – a cover that earned its editors their first trip to detention. As Williams rightly predicted, it took only four months from inception before the magazine suffered its first proscription, one which also coincided with the turmoil that the country was plunged into with the annulment of the June 12 1993 election.

Adebanwi demonstrates in unputdownable prose how the magazine coursed through these monumental challenges without losing its raison d’etre of partisan independence. As oxymoronic as this may sound, its founders made it clear from the outset that the independence of TheNews is no excuse for “opportunism and spineless neutrality in the major issues that affect the well being of the Nigerian people”. Indeed, in the fifteen years of its existence, The News has lived up to the billing of being ‘partisanly neutral on the side of the truth, justice and good governance.’ The range of issues and depth of analysis contained in the articles referred to by Wale Adebanwi depict intellectually engaging and incredibly versatile minds in the magazine’s eclectic coverage. Certain common threads run through these articles – an uncommon courage, commitment to the core values of building a good society founded on liberal democratic framework with full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Theirs has been more of a crusading journalism in which the consistency of vision and the focus of progressive politics became very clear early on and it is no surprise that some of the young men and women who, apart from the founding team, gave form and content to this crusade have moved on to exciting careers in journalism, academics and politics. The book in this sense is also a tribute to these young Turks too numerous to list in this review essay. But suffice it to mention that the courage of their conviction also led to the loss of Bagauda Kaltho and Seidu Mulero – two totally committed and selfless journalists to whom the book is dedicated.

For The News and its journalists - the newshound must be actively involved in the trenches with the subaltern classes in the society, working with them to help make the state relevant to the lives of all of its citizens. In short, the journalist must link journalism to political activism. For its founders, it is not just ‘all the news that is fit to print’ as the famous dictum of the New York Times goes, but ‘all the news that is fit for the struggle’. They certainly took to heart Vladimir Lenin’s counsel that ‘the press should not only be collective propagandists and collective agitators but also collective organizers of the masses.’ For this, the journalists of TheNews and their sister publications, Tempo and AM News suffered mightily. At a point, it was only the “communist” accountant cum journalist amongst the founding team, Idowu Obasa left behind to keep the publication afloat from various guerilla locations, having lost computers, printers and sundry items to the security agencies. His other colleagues were either in jail(Femi Ojudu and Kunle Ajibade), exile(Bayo Onanuga & Dapo Olorunyomi) or given up on the dangerous life of uncertainty.(Seye Kehinde). By 1998, 14 out of the 26 journalists and media workers in Abacha’s gulags were from TheNews group. The Magazine also had the highest number of journalists underground or in exile. Indeed, if the maximum ruler had not expired on top of his Indian paramours, the final solution for The News was about to be implemented by Assistant Commissioner of Police, Zakari Biu.

There is of course always a price to pay for holding firm to principles in the battle to ensure that ideas shape society. Wale Adebanwi is in my view at his best in his analysis of the crusading journalist as a corporate manager in the chapter – Beyond the Headlines – Consolidation and Growth; Disillusionment and Crisis. He argues, correctly I think, that given the circumstances of its birth, there were exaggerated expectations from both its investors and staff that The News group was going to be a contrasting model to the suffocating antics of the Proprietor as just a Businessman. It obviously failed to fulfill the dreams of some of the people who bought into the agenda and Adebanwi went to great lengths to capture the frustrations of many of the investors in The News, particularly their founding team member Sani Kabir, the journalists who saw themselves as part of a living history – particularly through the eyes of Ike Okonta, Ebenezer Obadare, Muyiwa Adekeye and Jenkins Alumona as well as the explanations of a management team caught in between meeting their readers’ expectations and keeping the business afloat. Leaving aside the disillusionment of the journalists and some investors in the team, the central question to address is whether things could have been handled in a different manner since this was not a problem limited to the news. Many institutions of civil society founded in the crucible of the struggle against military dictatorship suffered the same fate. The challenge is the adaptive capacity of such institutions in terms of improving corporate governance in the post-dictatorship phase without abandoning its core-values of putting people first. Many an organization, confronted with survival in a hard-nosed capitalist environment has tended to loose its soul and thus its constituency. How to manage and survive these invidious conditions must concern those keen on the rise of social entrepreneurs in a society dominated by capital.

In his acclaimed book, Agents of Power, J. Herbert Altschull (1984) discusses the challenges and opportunities the press faces in a capitalist economy and concludes that ‘the notion of the heroic press fighting the overwhelming power of the mighty and the corrupt in the interest of the grateful citizen…is more mythic fairytale than reality.’ Even if the media has indeed succumbed to the wiles of a dominant corporate influence and we do see signs of this all around us particularly in the ownership structure of our various newspapers and magazines in Nigeria, one can still argue that The News represents the opposite end of this trend and demonstrates why the media in Nigeria cannot be described as an instrument of undemocratic power. The fact that it is not a shadowy enterprise is certainly a plus, even as one acknowledges the need to improve its own corporate governance and shareholding structure. Its’ open, public character certainly underscores its endearing quality for our democracy and the self-sacrificing role of its founders.

Our concern ought to be that our media is ready to play a watchdog, adversarial and an agenda-setting role, rather than a lap-dog role for the establishment; localizing universal principles of freedom of expression and re-ordering power relations in society in favour of truth-telling and on the side of the weak and the oppressed. The News has certainly played a frontline role in the struggle to open communicative spaces that may serve as enclaves from which further efforts to promote democracy may grow. The role of the independent media in the fostering of a discursive public realm, in which issues of national and local concerns are ventilated remains of critical importance and publications like TheNews cannot afford to rest on their oars lest they fall victim of the Chomskian notion of manufacturing consent and inducing conformity on behalf of power. Democratization is a continuing struggle, not just about consolidation but also about contestation, a struggle for the continuing expansion of communicative spaces within which people can gain the social and political confidence needed to act more authoritatively in the political arena and TheNews can be proud that it has done well so far.

Of course, given Adebanwi’s magisterial testimony in the book and our own lived experience of what TheNews group has contributed to the opening of democratic space(s) in Nigeria, it is probably enough to ask all those who have been part of this social enterprise to take a bow. Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the question that the book leaves hanging in the mouth of any reader is: What next? Where does The News go from here? The Editor-in-Chief, Mr Onanuga has provided some answers in the current edition of the magazine when he talks about electronic publishing and diversifying into non-media businesses, citing the example of The Washington Post making more money from its non-media ventures than from its newspaper sales.

As for me, the possibilities are legion, but the most important challenge is ensuring that the magazine continues to define the present and shaping the future of our democracy and not sacrifice its soul at the altar of profit from non-media business. But I am almost sure this would not happen. The only way to firm up this belief is to ensure the preparation of a successor generation beyond the founding team. Perhaps it’s time to revive the Independent Journalism Centre, that crucible used by ICNL in training over 450 journalists between 1999 and 2006. Such a venture should be revived, not rested. .