Mariam Mariam
November 11th, 2005. It was just supposed to be another day of the year. Last Friday, I had gone to attend my cousin’s daughter’s call to bar at the Nigerian Law School, Bwari. Quite a number of members of my family came in from Ilorin for the same event, thus creating an opportunity of a reunion, since I had not visited Ilorin for over six months. The publishing schedule of daily work as the editor of the newspaper leaves me with just one day off duty per week; not enough time to travel as often as I would have loved, to Ilorin. As it was that Friday, the 11th of Novemberr, 2005 had a special ring to it, .which I didn’t quite think about consciously, until one of my cousins, Usman, pointed it out to me. It was actually the last day that I signed Daily Trust, as editor of the paper! He insisted that I autographed that copy for him as a special gift, I did; not too long after, we parted.
The week which started on Monday, the seventh of November (incidentally the anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917), had seen the emergence of a whole sale change of batons at Media Trust. I was given a letter that morning, which appointed me as the chairman of the Editorial Board of the Media Trust Publications and coordinator of the Radio and Television project that is being contemplated by the organization.
I received the new development with mixed feelings, because in the three years and five months that I had edited Daily Trust, since June 6th, 2002, I’d come to develop very strong emotional links with the paper. The schedule of daily work could sometimes be pernicious, what with the very brief periods one had with the family and the growing children; the long hours of work; the unending demand of the daily deadline, and so forth. But I cherished the opportunity I got to be part of a very dedicated team that was building a new trend in Nigerian journalism.
Daily Trust gave me the opportunity to complete a remarkably unique “cycle of joumalism,” that most professionals could only envy, and that was to have worked on radio, television and in the ‘pressure cooker’ ambience o f print journalism. To that extent, I must be one of the luckiest professionals there ever could have been!
It is in that very special sense that I will miss the job of being editor of Daily Trust. But I built incredible bonds with our readers that cannot be broken, the way appointments often are, largely because for me, from the beginning, apart from the professional challenge, working on the paper had the intensely emotional quality of being the platform to give a voice to the ordinary peoples of Nigeria. It drove me ceaselessly over the past three and a half years. I just hope that, when taken in full measure, along with my human weaknesses and professional inadequacies, you, the reader, would be able to forgive me, in those areas where I did not measure up to your expectations.
There has always been a great amount of controversy within our industry, about working in the Editorial Board of a newspaper. On the negative side, there are those who see the posting as being sent to the wilderness of “Siberia,” away from the bustling, hands-on existence of editing the newspaper each day. From this mindset, becoming the chairman of the Editorial Board resembles being kicked upstairs into idleness and eventual irrelevance.
On the other hand, historically, the Editorial Board represents the THINK PAD of a newspaper; a place where ideas are generated, debated and synthesized and eventually written out as editorials of the paper. It is where ideas are generated for the enrichment of the newspapers. At Media Trust, we have very lofty ambitions to grow into some of the best newspapers ever produced in Nigeria, and do believe that we must beef up the Editorial Board to generate ideas to match our ambitions.
My duty as the chairman of the Editorial Board is to lead this process. In the next couple of months, we shall be deepening the content of the work of the Board through the provision of a greater scope for the participation of more specialists, intellectuals, civil society organizations’ representatives, etc. in the work of our Editorial Board. I look forward to the challenge and do believe it offers a new scope to contribute to the betterment of society, the central pillar of my ideological commitment, since I was about sixteen years old!
There is also a sense in which my professional life was coming full circle, with the added responsibility that I was given to be co-ordinator of the Radio and Television project that the organization intends to bring to fruition, hopefully before long. I spent the first twenty years of my professional life working for five radio stations in Nigeria and in Europe; the next five years, I made the progression to television, and in the past three and a half years, I have been a print journalist. I think I have been incredibly lucky in every respect. I look forward to giving my all to these different responsibilities. The Cuban national hero, Jose Marti, used to admonish that we must always stay on the side of duty. So here I am!
Pardon me if I have dwelled for so long on the theme of the personal; after all, we live our personal lives no matter how intensely, within a set of social variables which mould us, and condition the context o f our persona! Experiences of life.
Nigeria has gone through very interesting phases in the past couple of weeks, that we must not fail to comment on the more remarkable strands of its lurch from one crisis to the other. In response to the conquest of the much vaunted ‘largest political party in Africa,’ the PDP by President Obasanjo’s team, some members of the political elite, woke up to a realization of the danger that the dictatorial proclivities of the Obasanjo team now constitutes to the nation’s political process. So early this month, the Movement for the Defence of Democracy (MDD) was launched in Lagos. The emergence of MDD has generated a lot of commentary in the media, while also jolting the authoritarian Obasanjo clique that is in control of the PDP. The question that is relevant, in my view, is just how’ far can members of MDD go in the declared intention to ‘defend’ democracy?
There is no gainsaying the fact that the political manipulation is being perfected to ensure that the constitution is subverted to achieve the ambition of a third term for Obasanjo. This piece of news has come to the fore this week, with the report of a sub-committee of the National Assembly’s (constitution- making committee recommending a third term, in tune with Obasanjo’s heartfelt desire to stay in power against the wish of the Nigerian people beyond 2007. Yesterday, Daily Sun also revealed the endorsement of the illegal third term project by the Manufactures Association of Nigeria (MAN).
So how far does MDD intend to go? Is the elite ready to carry out a full-scale mobilisation of the Nigerian people to stem the tide of the dictatorship of Obasanjo and his clique? Or are they just looking for a way to get back into the inner sanctuaries of power after losing out in the vicious, cut-throat process of Nigerian politics? Are members of MDD willing to live with the consequences of the heightening of the consciousness of the Nigerian people that is certain to follow an antidictatorship mobilisation? What are they hoping to offer as platform of post-dictatorship re construction of Nigeria, if the Nigerian people join in the battle to defeat the unpatriotic agenda of Obasanjo and his team?
Are members of MDD aware that the Nigerian people will not settle for anything less than a wholesale overturn of the unpatriotic economic reform programme of the Obasanjo dictatorship, which has resulted in the illegal sale of our national assets; the loss of jobs; the increasing impoverishment of the Nigerian people and the generalized insecurity in Nigeria today? Can the MDD conceptualize a different Nigeria, removed from the total surrender to imperialism and its running dogs, the IMF and the World Bank? Do the members of the MDD know the forces they potentially can unleash and the powers they might confront?
It’s all very good to realise the need to ‘defend’ democracy, especially because many of the gentlemen huddling together under the MDD tent were a few days ago in cahoots with Obasanjo, as *he unleashed his dictatorship on the land, was laying our country to waste with his economic reforms, and yet were too busy ‘chopping’ to be able to see the danger, until they lost out. Nigerians have been failed for too long, and have become quite cynical about the political elite. Yet they want to be liberated from the scourge that Obasanjo represents. This is the basis that MDD can climb to relevance, but it must think through its ideas to make them genuinely patriotic. Any attempt to perpetrate “Obasanjo-ism” without Obasanjo will not be acceptable to the Nigerian people.
