Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA (1969- 1973); Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge, England (1969-1973); Administrative Officer, Political Department, Cabinet Office, Lagos (1973-1976); Managing Director, Daily Times of Nigeria (1976-1979); Special Adviser to The Guardian (since 1980); Member, Presidential Panel on the History of Nigeria Since Independence, Nigeria-US Forum, Italy (1977); Nigeria-China Forum (1979); Nigerian Ambassador to Brazil (1987-1990); Deputy National Chairman (South-South), Peoples Democratic Party at Nigeria, PDP (1998-1999); Special Adviser on International Relations to the President (1999-2001); Delegate to the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity (now African Union) (1976, 1989, 1989, & 1990); author of Modern Elites in the Politics of Lagos, A Call on the Black World, Continuities in Nigerian Foreign Policy.
You are a Cambridge-trained historian, how do you see the journey of the Nigerian media to date?
PD COLE: From the earliest days of British colonisation, I think six years or so, there were newspapers already in Nigeria, and they have continued to exist and be vibrant throughout our history. So, the history of journalism and Nigeria are co-terminus. And from that early time, the job of the Nigerian press has been to play watchdog over British colonial government. There were a large number of ex-slaves – Brazilians, Sierra Leoneans, etc who could say: “Hey, what you cannot do in Britain, you cannot do here; if we are all British subjects, then we are subject to the same law.”
For the educated Saro and Brazilian elite, being British citizens was important. They held up, as it were, a mirror. They took pride in being British subjects, and therefore held the colonial government to account for all it was doing here.
British administration was very economical; they didn’t want to spend that much money and they wanted to develop the colonies to pay for themselves while propping up the home government by regular remittances. So, all the money went out, and a little came back.
Frankly, I don’t see too much of a difference between what happened then and what’s happening now. We were regarded primarily as producing countries, to produce things for the factories in Europe. The model was quite simple: colonies were to produce raw materials for the industries in Britain. To do this, peace must prevail. But there was also a belief by the British colonialists that their administration was to be paid for by taxing the people, hence excise and customs duties, stamp duties, and a host of other regulations aimed at raising finance. The template of colonization has not changed, Africa is still a colony. The methods and terminologies may have changed but not the essence. To the West, Africa is a continent to be exploited for raw materials, including human; its wealth is to be developed, not for the benefit of its people but for the benefit of Europe and the West. It is this mentality that was responsible for the large scale mining of mineral resources in South Africa, Congo Brazzaville, Zimbabwe (where Europeans also farmed and mined). In the 20th and 21st centuries, large parts of Africa were sold to Arab countries and to the West as an eventual food bank for the development of Arab countries.
One hundred and fifty years ago, did the media play a different role? Are they playing the role that they played then now?
No, I don’t think that the media is awake to this kind of new interpretation because of its almost instant nature, so “news” is always a two-day wonder: the thing happens, you report it, send the message, comment on it, and move on.
What’s the next thing? The media has not been able to step back to say, “Hang on a minute, what is it that has changed?” When you take structures that are formulated elsewhere and transpose them to our society and follow through almost automatically like a robot, when do we stop to consider the effects of the things we mimic, whether banking, insurance, or even in our style of consumption. It becomes a little frightening and ironic, that the West has to preach to us today about breastfeeding, that shows you for example, how far we have veered from our traditional culture. Today they have foundations which have come to teach Africans that say, “Look, my friend, the breast milk is still the best milk.”
But the media then was able to perceive and ask questions.
The media did.
Why are we not asking questions?
Because of the lack of a huge unifying force. The British colonial government was a unifying force that brought everybody under its rule, so, your enemy was a straightforward Mr. Colonial Man.
Today, the enemy is rather diversified, it is like a virus attacking every part of your body and your antibodies are unable to deal with it. Worse still, we are attacked by many viruses. Our immune system is woefully inadequate to deal with the onslaught.
And the body is now fighting itself.
Precisely. And so we have the left arm fighting the right arm. That is the nature of your African Union. The states themselves have not understood that the attack is not on individual states per se, it is a system that is dealing with the problems which exist in Africa, and if you want to fight a system, you yourself must have to be systemic.
Where are we going to acquire that capacity because obviously we don’t have it now?
We acquire capacity first by consciousness. It is interesting that the older you become, the more truth seems to have been imbedded in those early things which you learnt. The whole Marxist theory started by telling you that the first thing is consciousness, that is, to be conscious of the nature of what is oppressing you. So, like the communists and the Marxists, the first step is consciousness.
Collective consciousness brings people together.
In its classical formations, the proletariat (i.e. conscious working people) come together to fight against the bourgeoisie. The words, “proletarian” and “bourgeoisie”, seem hackneyed today, but the media has failed in this particular ability to create awareness and raise consciousness. And our journalists are not particularly good even in the copying of the more established dynamics of western journalism.
Most people understand that one way to power is to have a newspaper. You find that everybody who wants to be governor or president has a newspaper. So, the main purpose of many Nigerian newspapers today is to be the mouthpiece of politicians. It is an exceedingly difficult task to be the voice of a politician and also fulfil the classical objectives of newspapers, which is to inform, educate and entertain, without fear or favour.
That is true.
Now, the governor already has a voice because he has a radio of his own in his state. He probably has a newspaper also, maybe for his state or nationwide. But if you want to oppose him, then the only way to do it is to start yours.
So, the renaissance of newspapers in Nigeria is actually in the hands of aspiring politicians.
In fact that is the major problem now, because of the fifteen or so leading (I use the word “leading” advisedly) newspapers, at least ten of them are either directly owned or strongly controlled by politicians.
Yes. No matter how independent a newspaper is, it takes strong journalists, and I mean really strong, to keep away the influence of the proprietor; and only exceptional human beings who are proprietors will not want to influence the newspapers which they have established. In some cases, journalists have been able to limit the interference, but the mere presence in the consciousness of the editor or the managing director, that he has somebody at the back who can pull the rug from under his feet, is perhaps a sufficient deterrent for him to behave in a particular way, definitely not to go against his master’s interest, even if his master is a political harlot.
You experienced it. You were representing a military government at The Daily Times, but you were still able to give Daily Times some measure of independence such that today it is regarded as a great newspaper during your tenure. The influence of the military was not as overt.
No, it wasn’t, but in the first place, the military in 1975 had changed dramatically. It did not take the military long to know that they needed good quality civilians of high calibre in the civil service; people that they themselves respected. So you had the Asiodus, the Ayidas, Ime Ebong, Mohammed Garba, Abdul Attah, and other Cambridge and Oxford graduates —a kind of intellectual class in the civil service. The military then did a smart thing, by saying “Fine, what we will do is that we will ally with these civil servants.” And the civil servants came from a tradition where they were not afraid to say their minds. It was not an American- based civil service culture. It was the British civil service culture in which seasoned civil servants can tell the Minister, “Hey, Mr. Minister, you cannot do that.”
Yes.
And there were stories about – and I’ll tell you a few – where the military tried to insist, and the permanent secretary just turned around and said, “I’m sorry, no, you can’t do that. It is not within your remit to do that. This is the civil service.” There was that kind of restraining hand from the civil service on the military. But also the military’s objectives were fairly limited. They wanted development on a fast-track. They wanted the best people to do the best job as soon as possible. And once they put that together, they didn’t see any reason or justification for them to remain. Hence they left in 1979. They could not, by qualitative comparison, say that they were any better or indeed any more disciplined than the civil servants.
Apart from that, you had a third group of people, who were merchants, and the business ethos at that time was that if you set about planning your own business development, you would succeed.
So you had really successful businessmen like the Odutolas, the Ojukwus and the Bank-Anthonys. Where you had successful civil servants and professional soldiers, dialogue was easy. The derailment came really because the politicians were unable to actually talk to themselves. That is my opinion. Inability to communicate, cheap political exploitation of tribal sentiments, lack of leadership, led to the collapse of the civilian government in 1983
You were already in the cabinet office, and were already among those Cambridge and Oxford graduates working with the military, the people they respected, obviously well educated but people with the guns were still those calling the shots. In the case of The Daily Times, Obasanjo was said to have been misled, but by the time he came to realise it, the government couldn’t reverse itself. And so you came in, how did you handle the military?
Okay, let us say that there was a mistake in the intervention, in the sense that wrong information got to the military. But it was already done. I had two constituencies; I had journalists who were noticeably nervous: “Who is this guy from nowhere who has come to run this place? We don’t know him. And he is going to be listening to those guys from Dodan Barracks.” So, first I had to try to gain the confidence of the journalists, and the only way to gain the confidence of anybody working with you is to be able to tell and show that you can protect him/her. Hence the need for reassurance: “My friend, while I am here, I assure you that no journalist will be arrested, they will not close this place. Do your job, and nobody will ever call you and tell you what to write.” I can’t remember one single instance where I called somebody and said, “This is the way you are going to report.”
They were professionals.
So, the idea was to bridge the two constituencies and to build a wall protecting the journalists. The journalists also went out and did the work. And for that, Nigeria responded by buying the newspaper. So we were at 350,000 copies a day, 600,000 copies on Sundays – heights which had never happened since. This was not because they were reading a government gazette; they were reading things about themselves which they believed. We also introduced many other features; we brought the best writers that we could find. I went round bringing people back to Nigeria from overseas, because at that time I believed that the country needed the people. So not only bringing people into Daily Times, I brought them back to do other things.
For the military, I cannot tell you how many times they threatened to shoot and lock me up, and all that. But in the long run, I think they adopted the attitude of: “Look, leave him alone to run this newspaper, he is a crazy man, it is better we left him alone to run the place than to actually stir the pot further by trying to lock him up.” They also had a problem, which I think we were able to solve.
Transition government is always difficult because you had to sell the transition. You had to sell the programme, so how do you move from military to civilian. Definitely in 1976, ‘77 and ‘78, there were lots of Nigerians who preferred military rule.
Yes, because the politicians, as you said a moment ago, were pushing. They were basically outside of power and wanted to come in.
And you know, there was friction within the military elite itself. And I think (for want of a better word) self-preservation taught them that it was time to leave. Yes, they left because they felt they had fulfilled their programmes and promises, but they knew that if they stayed in politics, they would continue to subdivide and the idea of oneness in the military would dissolve with time, and that would be an anathema. In short the military left to preserve its unity.
But the unity eventually dissolved.
Maybe it eventually dissolved, but it was the same military that fought the war to keep Nigeria one.
I’m looking at the post-war period now.
Well, first of all, you deal with the war. They went out and fought the war and restored the nation. And then they said, “Alright, this is your country.” You run it. The politicians, by that time, had now recognized the fact that it was necessary to have allies in the military. And again, this virus of sectionalism and tribalism had surfaced.
The self-destructive virus…
We have the merchant class, which was corrupt; charlatans brought in and eventually got side-lined in the scheme of things, the civil service class and the military class. But of all the institutions in Nigeria, I think the military is one of the few that has kept the cohesion a lot better than the other institutions.
I am interested in those three classes that you talked about: the merchant class, the military and the civil service. Then the civil service of the literates and forward-looking was basically sacked en-masse.
More or less cut down to size.
So all the charlatans came in every sector, and the media became the errand boys of both the military and the politicians that were agitating to come in.
Well, I wouldn’t put it in those terms. The charlatans came in, but there were other counter-balancing forces, and this is one of the main reasons why when we talk about Nigeria, we must always remember that it is a combination of disputing people and these arrangements we make so as to survive as a nation. If you took out the compromises you make and look at the particular compromise, it would look as if tribalism or sectionalism is at work. But if you take the composite of compromises, what you see that has been at work is a continuation of something called Nigeria; that is why we are a federation.
Let’s take the easiest example: meritocracy. I don’t think anybody can argue against that, that under normal circumstances, every Nigerian should be able to attain the highest office in the land. The reality is that that is not possible. You have to come from somewhere, where you are strong enough among your own people, for them to see some kind of sense in your own success by pushing your ethnic agenda. So you have a situation where legitimately Igbos can complain that they have never had presidency, so why shouldn’t they?
You have a situation where even the political parties themselves now understand that for geopolitical reasons, you have six zones. And really when you look well, there are three zones where nothing unites them, neither tribe, religion nor tongue could possibly be used as an indication of why that kind of zone should exist.
The only reason the idea of zoning exists is perhaps because there is a bigger zone or there is another zone where tribe and tongue brought all of them together, in pursuing rotational presidency. For the feeling that “if I belong to this thing called Nigeria, at least somebody from my area ought to be president of the country at some point,” I used to think was a good thing.
You don’t think so anymore?
I don’t think so because the compromises you make along the way for you to achieve that is almost always at the expense of merit.
Okay?
Nearly always, and we do many things which we assume are okay.
Yes, but in all that you’ve said, looking for legitimacy, the media must help to project him, which explains why the politicians go first of all for the media. Now that puts the journalist in a very critical position, in the face of extreme pressure from the politicians, and that has maintained the cleavages since the ’50s or even earlier.
True, I think, but it is an issue which one of our conferences has to deal with. That is, basically how to balance professionalism as against the dictates of federalism, because in a unitary government, the unassumed belief is that whoever you have chosen as a leader has a constituency that is wide and doesn’t go around claiming one area; he has to stand for the whole country.
In a federation, you start from the opposite. You have to start from where your ethnic balance is, and push through, and then at the end, six or eight people come up, and out of that you choose one. Now as a journalist, you have to keep saying the following:
“Yes, I come from Yoruba land, but I am also a journalist. My job is to report the story in the news as it comes. And I will report it to the best of my abilities without fear or favour. I will report it, not because I am preaching the gospel according to Saint Yoruba or Saint Igbo. I am not pushing a particular cause or agenda. What I am pushing is a cause of fair-play and a level-playing field.”
Where my judgment is asked about the competence of some people, even though I am from a particular ethnic group, I should have the courage to be able to say this is a bad man, not fit enough to be president of this country or governor of this state, or whatever the case may be. Those are moral challenges to the profession, which at some point we have to deal with.
Has journalism succeeded? Have you made those calls at critical moments? What example comes to your mind?
I think, by and large, yes, we have succeeded because, at the apogee, at the end of a story, a Mr. Yoruba becomes president the rest of Nigerian journalism (for a while) supports the president, and watches him like a hawk.
Until…
Where he too begins to pay too much attention to that constituency, you would hear them say, “We knew that it was going to be like that, these people are always like that. That is how they deceive us.” Then you have a division. Now, all of a sudden, he begins to cultivate a journalist from his side; he goes to his own people to say, “That man has been insulting me because I made the Yoruba man chief judge (for example).” Ideally, the journalist has to bring in a sense of realism.
Frankly, how the hell does it matter whether somebody from the south-south is the president of Nigeria, if 90% of south-south people have never seen him and never will. Presumably, as president of Nigeria, he is no longer the president of south-south or president of the south. And so the sense of realism is that when you have elected your own kind to the highest office, you should realize that he is not at your beck and call, and that he has responsibilities and obligations to the nation.
You can’t expect that he is going to fill the place with people from his constituency. The constitution doesn’t even allow him. The constitution insists that he must choose a minister from every single state. Now that is as much as the constitution can by law insist on; that you should take a minister from every single state. The constitution doesn’t say, for instance that, because there are some ministries that are more powerful than others, you should give this powerful ministry this time around to this group, but next time, it should be to another group. So that becomes the matter of politics and political balancing.
Yes, and let the minister prove himself.
Precisely. Prove himself to be good for Nigeria.
To be good for Nigeria.
Or to be bad for Nigeria, as the case may be…
You didn’t start off in the media. Until The Daily Times job, I am not sure you had any strong interest in the media. In the cabinet office, you were one of the political advisers. How did Daily Times come about?
Very simple. I came back on a leave of absence from Cambridge. Philip Asiodu and Mr. C.O. Lawson had recruited me to prepare something that they called a programme of return to civil rule, in response to the military government’s promise to step down in 1976. How does the government change from military to civilian?
What are the handover procedures and steps which needed to be taken to effect the change from a military regime to a civilian government?
“What do we do? We are on the go, we have a deadline.” When I first returned, the deadline was ’76. So, we prepared something called the Nine Steps to Civil Rule, nine things which we had then thought to be important before the departure of the military. These included the creation of more states, relocation of the Federal Capital Territory, government reforms, guidelines to the formation of political parties, proper census.
We submitted our programme to General Yakubu Gowon, the then Head of State. And some members of the civil society, civil service, lecturers and professors believed that the military should not handover the country back to politicians, those you referred to as charlatans.
There was also a strand of opinion that believed in diarchy, a military and civilian hybrid government; another group wanted the military to continue in much the same way as General Nasser of Egypt had continued. They dissuaded the then head of government and his colleagues from accepting the Nine-Points Programme.
In 1974, General Gowon made the famous speech that politicians had learnt nothing, and therefore the military would not step down in 1976, as earlier promised. Within the civil service, the advocates of central national planning had the upper hand and felt that a return to civil rule should only follow after the completion of the then five-year development plan. In other words, the position of this group was “Forget politics, let’s develop the country and everything will take shape.” But some in the military were worried that the military itself was becoming politicised and that they had given their word that they would leave in ’76.
In the mid-70s, there were many African countries under military rule and none had returned to civilian rule. And many African countries were beginning to change from the belief that a short, sharp intervention into politics, quickly in – quickly out was the best; but still others were beginning to say, “Why should we go out? We have all the tools to stay.”
Many of them began to stay, and that also influenced some civil servants who then began to preach that we are not developed enough, that all the politicians would do is to squander our wealth. So, the proposals were turned down, but as I kept saying, within the military itself, the experience of having some officers as governors had created some problems, created a political class. Others had decided that the best thing for them was to totally withdraw (as it were) from politics, heal their own wounds which the intrusion into politics had done to them, make a proper constitution, get out, back into the barracks.
So, the stay put group rejected the Nine-Point plan.
They rejected it.
So, you had to go back to Cambridge?
No, I hung around for a bit, and in ‘75, as you well know, there was another coup. The file containing the Nine-Point Political Programme was lying in some office in Dodan Barracks. And the new people who came in hadn’t been very clear in their own minds what they actually wanted to do beyond removing the politicized, military-led government of General Gowon.
They later fell on this document, which formed the basis of Gen. Mohammed’s first speech, which was a Nine-Point Political Programme of transition. So, as it were, they found something the Political Division of the Cabinet Office had done, dusted it up, made few changes, and announced it as theirs. Soon after, they started implementation of the Nine-Point Programme until they came to point where they said, “Fine, we have the constitutional conference, the constitution was almost ready, how do we sell this to the people?” which was where The Daily Times came in. “So why don’t you go to The Daily Times to sell the programme?” they said to me. So that was how I went to Daily Times, even where (as it were) they totally misconceived it, thinking that I would be able to convince Nigerians about their Nine-Point Political Programme. One of us in the political division went to Radio Nigeria with the hope that he would be able to convince Nigerians. My boss, the permanent secretary, himself brought the Ministry of Information under him, and that office, the political division, had a consultant within the universities who did special assignments for us.
Who was that?
Yaya Abubakar was the permanent secretary.
Because I remember… I think at that time Tunji Olagunju was also…
Tunji was with us. Ambassador Baba Kingibe. We had also other ambassadors from external affairs; Professor Okon Uya, Professor Isaac Adalemo and a host of others. In The Daily Times selling the constitution, we had (if you like) town hall gatherings throughout Nigeria and published the views of a wide range of Nigerians. We opened pages for people to come and write, we published books on federalism and various other constitutions. We said, “You want the constitution? This is a vehicle for you to use.”
And so what the people wrote about formed part of the early presentation of opinion to members of the constituent assembly as to what Nigerians were thinking about the constitution. Whether they used it or not, I don’t know. Nevertheless, Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, Dr. Walter Ofonagoro and I edited the groundbreaking book on federalism in Nigeria.
Now, rather quickly, the journalism profession became your constituency.
Yes, because as I said, having gone to The Daily Times to sell the transition programme, you had to protect the professional journalist. In order to protect the journalist, the military guys had to leave me alone to do what needed to be done.
Now, what needed to be done was that I found surprisingly a lot of very courageous young men, and some veteran journalists, who had been in the fore for quite some time, and who didn’t deserve the abuse which they were receiving from the powers-that-be. I convinced the leaders of the military government to leave those guys alone, with remarkable success.
So, my first job was to give notice to the military leadership: “Do not touch, don’t come near; anything you want to do, you can tell me but just don’t come.” In those old days, several times I was called, carpeted, abused, nearly imprisoned, just because some journalists said something in the paper. And of course the most shocking was Fela’s mother’s case – a sad case and a bad day for journalism in Nigeria.
The second thing I thought I needed to do was raise the standard of journalism as I saw it, to bring in excellence and robust reporting. So as you rightly pointed out, quite a number of first class journalists had left, not because they opposed military government but because new publications owned by potential politicians were coming out. How do you get the level up?
It was by bringing people like Dele Giwa, Stanley Macebuh, Dr. Mbadinuju, and a host of others. I then set up for the first time in Nigerian journalism, something called an editorial board, an idea which I had picked up from Washington Post and the New York Times. And then I said to the board, “Okay, you decide what you want to put in the newspaper, in the opinion columns…”
I won’t even go to the meetings. I didn’t go. Luckily for me, we had exceptional journalists still in The Daily Times, for example, Tony Momoh had been there for ages…
You opened the door for him to be…
Well, it was a very simple thing, you know, we advertised for the post of editor for Daily Times. Many people applied and Momoh also applied.
He came first, but my other Daily Times colleagues told me that they had made him the Training Manager; I said, “Did you advertise for the post of training manager?” No. “What did you advertise for?” Editor? “You guys sat down, and you said he was the best, now you are telling me that he is the training manager; therefore he cannot be the editor of Daily Times. You must be joking. Since he came first, that is the job he is going to do.” So he became editor, at least that is my side of the story.
Now, it must have been very difficult, coming in from the political end, but you had people like Aliko Mohammed as chairman. What kind of a chairman was he?
He was fantastic. He understood the dynamics of what we were about and it was a very successful newspaper by the time I left. He was an eminent accountant, the figures were rising, he was very happy with these figures. He also knew that it was a short-term thing and we (himself and myself and a few others) convinced the then military government that, “Look, the government has no business being in newspapers. So, we are going to handover the newspaper to a trust.” And so we worked on the trust instrument, got all the papers, so as to make it The Daily Times Trust, in other words we were trying to formalize what was an informal arrangement between myself and the military, so that in the future, the paper would be protected. And all the documents were drawn up, and you would not believe it, the last document came to my hand and it was the last thing General Obasanjo signed on his way to hand over to Shagari at Tafawa Balewa Square. I signed it, everybody signed it, the one person who hadn’t signed it was the chairman of NICON who was somewhere in Calabar. So, I left, and that was the end. NICON was the repository the government used to warehouse 60% of Daily Times of Nigeria.
So, the Trust never saw the light of day?
No. In the end, when BPS had to sell NICON, Daily Times shares had to be reverted back to Daily Times. That was how government had the 60% or so. But believe it or not, the public still has 40 percent of Daily Times. So there may be hope to salvage it, if the public or the old shareholders were to come together and try to get it back. Nevertheless, shortly after October 1979, I left Daily Times.
You left after President Shagari came in.
Yes. Shagari wanted me to continue, but I said, “No. I don’t think it is right for me to continue.
In any case, I’m a civil servant; let me go back to the civil service. There is a hierarchy in place, so take the next man. That is how the next man became the MD.”
That was Emmanuel Adagogo Jaja.
And then I reported back to the civil service, as I should.
But around that time, so many journalists also left The Daily Times for Abiola’s paper.
Well, yes.
…there was this migration of Giwa and others.
NPN had come in and claimed that they had no voice.
Yes.
And M.K.O. Abiola offered them a voice. People tend to forget that there was another newspaper owned by the government also.
Not The New Nigerian.
No. New Nigerian was there, there was a third government newspaper that died, called Morning Post. Then, of course, there was the New Nigerian. Then, Chief MKO Abiola started his own, he was offering far better salaries than anything that we could offer. I didn’t see any reason why journalists should not go to another newspaper to get better pay, and so they left. But by that time, my own future was clear, I was going back to the civil service. So, it was the business of my successor to deal with Abiola and any other issue. Abiola had come to ask for Doyin Aboaba, Dele Giwa, Sam Oni… Daily Times had always been a modern lode of Nigerian journalism, so journalists leaving for other newspapers was not new. So long as they were willing to, and it was a new newspaper, you could take them. Things that people tend to forget is that we had a very rigorous training programme for journalists, we sent them all over the world, short and long term programmes, PhD and their Masters Degrees.
We sat with Abiola and said, “Look, you cannot deprive us of the services of these people because we have just finished training them.” And he said, “How much?” So we told him and he gave us a cheque. “This is the money which you used in training them.” I said, “No, no, no.” he said, “No, at least hold that.”
That era of pack movement of journalists from Daily Times to Concord, The Guardian and The Champion led to a situation where you had professionals being sucked into politics again.
You used the words, “professionals being sucked into politics.” I wouldn’t say that they were politicians, seeking power. But it is like a doctor, the fact that this hospital belongs to a politician doesn’t stop you from doing your professional work. So, I won’t be so hard on those who actually went to other newspapers. The question is whether they had enough balls or believed in themselves and in the profession to be able to withstand those pressures. Some of them are not so clear, but where you are clear in your position, you put your foot down.
But again, it was almost like a renaissance, 1979 was a new beginning where the Nigerian believed we could achieve anything. Our airline and our shipping line were the biggest in Africa, Nigeria was coming along the line of development like Korea, Malaysia. Our own GDPs were comparable to those countries. So, Daily Times was like a flower that was pollinating other flowers like Champion, Express. As a journalist – by that time, I started regarding myself as one, I think I had written enough by that time to qualify – I felt there was nothing wrong with it. Daily Times was like a necessary school to have gone through for you to pass into other places.
You went from there to The Guardian, eventually.
Yes
Guardian was started in 1983?
Yes. I will tell you about The Guardian… I tried to get back in the civil service. A very senior civil servant going back to his profession, and my coming back was like a threatening storm. The feeling was “Where are we going to put him?”
“What do you mean where are you going to put me? I’m a civil servant, give me a post, let me go.” Then they said, “Okay, Shagari is very keen on this thing called Open University. You used to teach, you were in the media, why don’t you now go and join Professor Ojo in starting the Open University.” I said, “Fine, I am a soldier. You post me, I go.” So, I walked to the Ministry of Education, where I had been posted. The man said, “No, we don’t have any letter for you. Wait a minute let me go and see my minister.” Then he went to see the Minister, who said, “Ah, no, we have one Igbo man – Prof., there was one Yoruba man – Prof. Ojo, we have to have one northerner, three of them now can start the Open University.”
So I went home, sat down, and said, “You mean in the civil service, I cannot get a job because somebody wants to do balancing? So if you were not Igbo Yoruba or Hausa, you cannot get a job in Nigeria?” That was the day I resigned from the civil service. My darkest day was the day I left the civil service.
And you had nothing planned?
Nothing. I had about 253 Naira in the bank, six children, no house, no car…
I can remember you moved to Ikeja after a while.
Yes. But before that, I moved to Victoria Island, where a friend gave me a room in 1004, where my wife, 6 children and I stayed. We stayed for about two and half years. Luckily, while I was in Daily Times, I had set up a staff housing policy, I had borrowed money to buy a piece of land in Ikeja. So that was the only property I had and it needed to be developed. And so, thank goodness, in about two years’ time we finished developing it and moved in.
And now, during that period, Alex Ibru said, “Alright, I don’t know what they were paying you in Daily Times, I don’t know what the civil service is going to do. Now, you have left the civil service. For the next twelve months, I will give you X naira for you to sit down and make up your mind on what you want to do. So at least you will have money to feed your family.” So, for twelve months Alex came at the end of every month with a small envelope and dropped this money.
At the end of twelve months he said, “Alright, I want to start a newspaper.” I said to him, “Don’t be stupid, what is wrong with you? Are you crazy?” He said, “No.” That he wanted to start a newspaper. So, it took him two years to persuade me to start The Guardian, during which time he never left my side. He talked terms. And I said, “Okay, if you must, we must.” First, I tried to deflect him “Why don’t we buy newspapers? We can buy newspapers in the Caribbean or in America, and there are lots of newspapers for sale.” He had the money. He said, “No.”
Your role at The Guardian wasn’t as visible as The Daily Times.
No, because there was no need to be. When we agreed, I said, “I will now get hold of three people who would do all your intellectual work and sketch out what a newspaper should be.
These are the guidelines.” So I called Stanley Macebuh, to whom I said “Okay, Stanley, leave Daily Times (they were giving him hell anyway). This is the new job you are going to do.” Then, I called the then director in charge of the mechanical team, Mr. Pius Ayan, our chief printer, from Ijebu-Igbo. We had to get a third person, Mr. Awosanya, to be in charge of it. So these formed the nucleus. So we were working flat-out, it took us about two years. By that time, because I was so horrified by my exposure in Daily Times, we quietly set about laying the foundation and building up The Guardian Newspaper. This is how it came out.
Segun Osoba had always been close to Alex and me. As the presses weren’t ready, it was Segun Osoba who printed The Guardian for us at the Sketch. I was certain in my mind that a newspaper of the quality of The Guardian was the only way to go. I didn’t have a messianic aim, I wasn’t hoping to save Nigeria. I was hoping to have pretty good journalists, working in a pretty nice atmosphere, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to be one of the most respected in Nigeria. No reason at all.
How do you compare your experience at The Daily Times and your experience at The Guardian?
I ran The Daily Times; I also ran The Guardian for some time, but from the background. During The Daily Times days, there was a military government that was dying to interfere, and my job was to prevent that. We had fairly close relationship with General Obasanjo, so we were on a first-name basis, but they were not interfering. In The Guardian, there was no need to protect anybody; we simply wanted to produce the best newspaper ever. Alex was a different person altogether. He had this rare quality. He said, “You guys are the professionals.
You have run Daily Times, so there is nothing I can really tell you about newspapers. So what am.
I coming there to do? I am a businessman, so far as the business side – getting money, the banking and all that – is concerned, yes, I will get that for you. Don’t worry your head about that bit.
Stanley, you are the editorial man. Go ahead and create the paper.” So, that was the relationship.
Alex never for one day intervened in the newspaper. Well, he did once, and I’ll tell you, this is the first time I am going to tell this story.
When we started, we had adopted a house style which you can see, hence the way stories are written in Guardian is different from how they are written in any other newspaper. Because we had insisted that “This is where we wanted to go to.” We wanted to push this thing a notch higher.
We also said we can’t go round giving everybody titles, Dr. this, Chief that, so we adopted the policy of “Simply Mr.” Then we had to give a report in which Chief Michael Ibru was called Mister. Alex came and said we could not do “the Mister thing.” I said, “Get away, what do you mean? Because of Michael Ibru? So far as we are concerned, this is the policy of the newspaper.
Mister. Nobody else. He said, that was his family, they have held a meeting… I said, “Alex, I don’t care what your family have said. You are not going to change this thing.” You know, so Stanley, Yemi Ogunbiyi, you know all the boys…
Eddie Iroh…
Eddie Iroh, all were hundred percent behind us.
So I went away. This is where your courage as a journalist comes in. I wasn’t in when the Ibrus met again, and in the end, the policy was changed
F.R.A. Williams also complained about being called Mister William, he was Alex’s lawyer.
The same time.
Yes.
We also called Felix Ibru, Mister.
Was Stanley Macebuh a good manager?
Very good. Stanley was an excellent manager; he knew how to delegate. For him, if you were features editor, when a piece leaves your desk and goes to him, and he would have to do the work which you are supposed to do, he didn’t like that. So, rather than do it, he would send it back. Sometimes, the person concerned didn’t understand, because Stanley had not explained.
But later, Stanley would go to the person’s desk to explain and correct.
And then, he wanted to call everybody a reporter because he used to describe himself as a reporter. That one too didn’t work. I said that is Americanism. It can’t catch on here.
What about Dele Giwa?
Fantastic. Really incredible. Well, you read his stories, he was a great journalist. For you as a Nigerian to have a Metro page in New York Times, which was where I got him from, shows you that he had been through the mill. So, by the time he got The Daily Times, he had his own page, which was well known, Page 7.
Page 7.
And what Daily Times did… you remember the Monday edition?
Parallax.
He did Parallax. There was this…
Parallax Snaps. It became Parallax Snaps. And there was Grapevine.
Grapevine! I introduced Grapevine into The Daily Times.
Yes, everybody pushed something into Grapevine.
So, basically, the Grapevine was the most feared because you didn’t know who it was going to take on next.
And nobody knew who wrote it.
And the information was basically correct. And so, every day the newspaper had something special that you wanted to read.
And that is the difference… This is one of the things I repeat often to journalists of today, “Then, we wrote for the reader, but today, it looks like we write for the State House, for the people in power, for bankers, not writing for the man on the street.”
Because it was paying you. You see, the managing director of Volkswagen, one Mr. Wolfgang, told me that they were going to phase out the Beetle. I knew that journalists needed transport and many of them didn’t have money, so I bought over 30 of the last ones they were making, for 1000/1300 Naira only. For the first time, Daily Times people then had what they needed. I secured land everywhere in Nigeria, given to Daily Times.
We then started building houses for staff; so, for the first time, if you worked in Daily Times, you could own a house. And I believe that some of them are still living in those houses. So, for the first time, you had a journalist who could own a car, own a house and who could retire; so those things which the journalists were afraid of were taken care of. Now, if you don’t give him the hope that he would be able to build or own his own house, after a while, his wife at home is going to ask him, “Oga, what is going to happen, if we lose our jobs today, how about rent?”
He becomes disillusioned.
But those are the things which the profession has to get back in because there is enough money in it to do that.
Andy Akporugo was also part of that Daily Times team.
Yes. What kind of a person was he? Andy, an incredible manager. I think Daily Times was the first to have. correspondents in East and South Africa. We sent him.
Yes, Daily Times sent him to Zimbabwe?
…to be in East Africa. So when we launched The African Guardian. All of us as civil servants had contributed money for the same South African relief fund, so Zimbabwe was the natural place for us to be in. And Guardian had some houses bought in Zimbabwe; we in Daily Times could have bought some houses in East Africa, but we didn’t.
Well, you had a string of successors who had other things in mind.
I don’t know…
What was your relationship with Jose like after he left?
I didn’t see much of him. I had a great deal of respect for him and his achievements. But in Nigeria, we seem to be congenitally revisionist and praise-peddlers. Many people from Daily Times went to tell him stories about what I did or did not do. He however had the good sense to hear them out without interfering. I did not see much of him after he left Daily Times.
Was that deliberate?
No, I think our paths simply did not cross. My attitude is very simple: here is a legend that had done for Daily Times a monumental work. He laid the foundation. I always knew that my time in Daily Times was limited to those objectives which I had mentioned earlier; I had a lot of work to do and I buckled down to do it. There was a strong tribalistic thing going on in Daily Times which I didn’t want to be a part of. I was partially saved because for quite a while, many people didn’t know really where I came from.
Yes, that is true.
So, you couldn’t insult me for being non-Yoruba, because you didn’t know whether I was or not. I think I didn’t also want to repeat history. I knew that if I continued a strong relationship with Jose, we would end up discussing matters in Daily Times, about his so-called boys, and those who were not his boys. And I didn’t really want that. I knew that he had people watching me.
Why did I have to worry if you had some people inside? Why did I need to cultivate you since I would eventually hear what you were thinking?
I understand.
On the board level, we were lucky. We had Namme, Jaja, Fabusoye… So, to a large extent, Jose had done whatever he’d done, my vision as you well know was totally different from his. I didn’t need to be a legend; I could not. I didn’t believe in this personality cult or personality praise or aggrandisement. My motto was: “Just your job. Do it well. Let that job speak for you.”
No matter how much anybody may dislike you, once you have put this thing down on paper, it is there. So, they go and come back several times, they still read it. And they’d say, “Oga, you say this man no good, this man try, oh.”
Daily Times of Nigeria, as stated earlier, was the mother lode of nearly all the newspapers in Nigeria. Many MDs and other top executives went to Herald, Sketch, The Observer, and New Nigerian, from its stables. We sent personnel who became press secretaries to nearly all government houses. One of the ironies of the period is that a number of people found my going to The Daily Times, a public limited company, uncomfortable, yet had perennial fear of government interference in a free press tradition, but we found no such similar unease when Daily Times journalists were seconded to wholly government-owned newspapers, where government interference may presumably be the higher.
While I was at Daily Times, the company enjoyed the highest expansion in its history: The Daily Times Training Centre was revamped and adhered to a strict training schedule for all journalists. We moved the training school to a new site at Eric Moore; this site also contained the new mechanical workshop for the maintenance of vehicles and the press. Daily Times had a 10 hectare site next to Cadbury, Agidingbi. At the site we developed, we installed the largest newspaper presses in Africa, and the whole of Daily Times operations moved there – both editorial and operations. Towards 1979, new challenges, like the rise of new publications, arose against The Daily Times, but the paper maintained and increased its market share, with a daily production of nearly 400,000 copies and over 500,000 on Sundays. We once hit a record of 630,000 on Sunday. The political debates on federation and political moves and news on the return to civil rule provided an ever-increasing vista and impetus for growth.
Daily Times diversified and established Niger Pak and Times Press, both organisations grew between 1976 and 1979. The Daily Times built several distribution centres throughout Nigeria, notably the large one in Onitsha. The company had one of the best logistic records in Nigeria and was able to distribute all the copies throughout by road daily. In fact, so good was the logistics that, for some time, we were distributing letters for the post offices throughout Nigeria. I have already mentioned the housing scheme. We bought 24 flats at GRA Ikeja.
I am most proud of the contributions of Daily Times to the construction, with collaboration from City Bank, of the Stock Exchange House – a project started by Alhaji Babatunde Jose but completed during my tenure. There were plans to knock down the premises at Kakawa Street, to build a 34 storey office, which would have been one of the tallest buildings in Lagos. Daily Times also owned a London office, a house for Daily Times’ representatives. We also acquired controlling shares in the iconic West Africa magazine.
How did these roles prepare you for Brazil?
By 1979, when I left, I was a seasoned administrator; I had been a university teacher.
Daily Times opened my eyes to politicians, their wiles and twists, some idea about the fickleness of human nature, a good grounding in foreign affairs, and a healthy dose of cynicism about people, politics and state. While at Daily Times, I met hoards of people – ministers, heads of state, foreign diplomats; I also attended OAU, UNESCO, UN, etc meetings. These were invaluable experiences before going to Brazil.
But I still had a lot to learn about business into which I threw myself from 1980 to 1987, because I needed to get into the business sector, and Nigerian business, as you well know as at that time, was basically hamstrung by the issuers of licenses.
A lot of people had to spend a lot of time trying to get licenses for whatever company. If you were a director of a company, part of your job was to get the license. No other organization could have given me that kind of exposure Daily Times gave me. And you needed that as a background in going into international relations, international politics. Brazil was then emerging as our major economic and trading partner, because they were the first ones to do batter trade with us. To that extent, we were important to Brazil, in a way in which Brazil was important to us. That job was like a very senior appointment in Brazil itself, as we were one of their closest partners. Then, of course, there was the airline, Varig, that was doing two or three flights a week, from here to Rio and Sao Paulo.
The Brazilians gave scholarships to every Nigerian who could get himself into a university in Brazil. There was a lot of going to and fro, and every experience is relevant to an ambassador.
With the experience of press relations here, it was easier to establish good press with Brazil, and if you had a good press with them, it means that things which you do would appear in their own newspapers and appear also here. And the Brazilian ambassador here was also enjoying the same thing. So, it was pretty good. I was glad I went.
Let’s end with your time in government. 1991, the…
Second coming
The second.
Or third coming.
You left at a time when it was almost as if you were the last man standing. All the people you came in together to advise the president (Chief O. Obasanjo) left one after the other. I think Asiodu was there at that beginning…
Yes
And he left and others. The reports say you were about the only last person who was still telling him the truth. What happened?
Power is a funny thing. Having the role of telling Mr. President “the truth” has the danger of people all around him suspecting that you are likely to rat on them. So, your first enemies are your own colleagues, who think you are too close to the president, that is, closeness to power is highly coveted. It is an indication of how powerful you are or how powerful your colleagues think you are. It is a precious commodity that must be protected against all who will ceaselessly try to undermine you. Bad powerbrokers or power-seekers are forever blocking their colleagues’ access to the power source—Mr. President.
Mr. President himself was, at first, naïve about this; he did not understand the dynamics of resistance, more and more people perpetually struggled to be near the president. I went everywhere with him, he had gone on television to one of the Saturday informal shows, and somebody asked him, “What does Dele Cole do?” and he turned round in his usual characteristic brusque way and said, “What doesn’t he do?”
You could see other ministers being upset by that kind of a throw-off remark. I don’t think that he meant what they thought he meant.
Yes?
But, long before he got home from that interview, the place was full already. And then the phone calls started ringing, and he said, “Ah, what is wrong with an innocent remark like that? But whatever you write, he reads it, I wasn’t lying.”
And of course that got them a little more upset.
His personality is such that he doesn’t mind confrontation. And in fact he believes sometimes that it is the only way in which he would get the truth out of you. He is one of the few people I know, who did not get into gossip; if you tell him a story that someone did or said something, while you are there, he would take the telephone and call the person, maybe while you are still talking. The other person walks in, and he says, “Ehen, Richard, what did you just tell me about Dele?” and then some people get totally blown off, and say, “No, but I didn’t say anything.” And Obasanjo says, “No, no. This is what you said.
You just said it.” Then the person knows who his enemy is because it is obvious. And maybe the guy is one of the competitors for some contracts which are on the other person’s desk. So, he’ll say, “Ah, ah, oga don’t mind this one oh. He came here to give me some money last week, I told him no, that his bid was not good enough and that we are going to give it to someone else.” So, OBJ would turn to this man and say, “Alakori, stupid man. You have come here to lie because of contract. Get out!” Sometimes, it gets really bitter that it takes a fourth person in the room to try and mediate, and to at least get the truth.
And get him to the reality of the situation.
So that this guy can leave, without feeling that he has actually finished him. Lying is a political tool which many use. The OBJ I know is a no-nonsense, no-gossip man; because someone may have gone to tell him that someone else asked him for bribe and he didn’t give him, and that is why he didn’t get his contract.
Sometimes, I would say, “Mr. President, it is alright sir, I will look into this whole thing. Let me check.” He’d say, “You will check? Alright. All of una, go.” They are two powerful people: One is a minister; the other one might be a contractor who has his tail between his legs. I’m asking them for some explanations and I have to go back to OBJ, to try and save their bacon, as it were, where necessary. I made another set of enemies. My office was in his house, when we started. Nothing frightened or annoyed people more than the fact that I had no office. They would say it was okay in the morning when everybody was around, but what happens when everybody had gone to the office? I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have an office, hangers-on too were around me.
It got everybody upset. Then the governors had gone through a learning curve, a very steep one.
Many of them came in penniless, with no money, a picture of abject poverty. Those of us who were running the political party had nominated these governors for election, mainly because many of us did not want to be governor, others might have failed to be governors had they contested.
The political leadership under Solomon Lar came in and nominated people we thought were fit to be ministers. OBJ came in, and then we called him, “Mr. President,” he said, “Okay, this is our list of those who actually worked for you,” because he didn’t know too much about the PDP battle for his election. And he took the list, put it in his pocket and walked out.
This was the first problem of the PDP that had elected Mr. President: the party was unable to deliver jobs and preferment to those who had worked hard and been in the process. Mr. President turned to the governors to give him ministerial nominees. The governors said, “Why?” It is like the governor going to local government chairmen, and saying “Give me nominees for commissioners.” It would never happen. It would never happen because the LG chairmen had never been that strong.
And they were not even expecting it.
So the governors all of a sudden found out they didn’t need the political party machine and the party’s grandees. Moreover, it did not take long before the governors found that the state parties lacked funds and could not be funded by the national party. The governors funded the party at the state level and pocketed them.
They needed the man at the centre.
They could go to Mr. President. The machine had to rearrange itself to make sure that the governors were sending the same names as the political leadership was sending. Of course, it wouldn’t happen. The governors that didn’t have money were soon given money by the presidency at that time. The party itself didn’t have money and the party was being funded by the vice president. So, it wasn’t that the vice president was asking the party, “Okay, let’s sit down and list the same name.”
The vice president was on the side of the president. So it wasn’t very long before the vice president stopped financing the party, as you know. You may have noticed that it didn’t take long before many left the party. Ideally, the leadership of the party should have kept a dual role. We should have kept to a role in the party and then a role as in government. Making Asiodu, Aminu Wali, Prof. Nwosu, Mahmud Waziri, Liyel Imoke and I advisers was perhaps because the list that was coming didn’t include our names. But they did.
It was a classic case of keeping your enemies closer and also counter-balancing the influence of the party grandees. “Let me make this governor my man, rather than this man, who is already working here.” So the governors became more important. The south-south was a problem to him, and I had been the national vice chairman of south-south, so I knew all the governors in the south-south. I was listening in on meetings while still holding my job. My position was impossible and sufferable because, not only did I have to be with him all the time when I was around, I had to go also with or even before him (in some of the important travels) to make sure things were okay on ground. So a combination of jealousy and other unfathomable reasons just overwhelmed him. Moreover, I think there was a major policy shift. There were things which I could do, that I picked up, and he realized that if he was to continue, then there were things which he had to do.
In 1998/1999, OBJ never had the intention of running in 2003. If he had, then he didn’t tell us. If he didn’t tell us, it was because we would not have agreed. Throughout that time, I was in every delegation that went to ask him to run. And it was quite clear in his mind that he didn’t think he was going to do this thing more than four years. In fact, he said two because there was an earlier proposal to have a two-year transitional government which would then hand over. So by the time I left, the forces that were for his continuation had gathered, and as far as I was concerned, my own attitude was very simple. There was no way Atiku Abubakar could have been putting up posters around the country unless he and the man had agreed that he, Atiku, should run.
Was he a different man from the man you worked with in the ‘70s?
Oh yes. Yes. I think the quintessential change was in 2001. Once it became clear to him that he hadn’t prepared himself for leaving in 2003—because it takes preparation—then he had to stay beyond 2003. Staying after 2003 would mean Atiku had been persuaded to step down or been sacrificed. So he had to convince Atiku to run with him for 2003. So far as I was concerned, there was little point staying, because politics would dominate. So as you well know, the last two years, 2002 and 2003, was all about politics.
The indefatigable, no-nonsense political leader with a clear vision, the leader who by 1979 achieved for Nigeria all that was necessary for the country to take off changed his garb for the political garment. Atiku was the one who made the decision, and he should live with the consequences.
Was OBJ a different man? No, I don’t think he was a different man. I just thought that he got to know Nigeria a little better, and I don’t think that he liked what he saw of Nigerians. I think Obasanjo was a better person from ’76 to ’79, even from 1999 to 2000. Africa needed a successor to Mandela. That mantle would have fitted OBJ most admirably if he did not win in 2003. He would have continued to set examples of good governance, curb the excesses of the National Assembly, and give Africa a beacon of hope.
Let’s end on the note with which we started, the media. When in the beginning you talked about the role that the media played back in the late 1850s into the 1900 and amalgamation, Herbert Macaulay, Zik, and roles they played. So if you look ahead, given this background, do you see the media helping to build, reunite and give hope to this nation at all?
Well, yes. I see the media being called upon more and more along the line that you just stated, to bring this home because the activist press, which characterized pre-independence, is still with a lot of people who are still in the south. The north, to me, hasn’t tried enough to bridge the gap. As a reality, they have accepted the fact that we are in one Nigeria, but every issue that comes up, in the last few months/years, gets the press cuddling into two areas. And the reason is not superficially about the allocation of resources… It is not the allocation of resources. That is the mirage. That is what it looks like.
In reality, Nigerians have not come to understand (this is what I said in the beginning) the necessity to exploit their own resources for their own benefit. They eat and drink the things that sustain us, food, which is mainly from the north. But by the way we behave in the south, it is as if it doesn’t really matter whether we eat or we don’t. But were you to take food technology as an important industry, then most of that technology would be in the north. So, you would be canning your tomatoes, your yams and your yam flour there. You would then be able to get into the main food chain of the world, where you are exporting munch to peas, and carrots and flours to Europe thus enhancing the finance of the region.
That is at the economic level.
Yes. In other words, the north has the potential to survive a lot better than the south, because of the food which they now produce. In the things we do in the south, we’ve reached the top. You can’t cut too many trees in the south, so, your timber is gone. Yet we are not planting new palm trees, new rubber plantations, trees for forestry.
We have oil, but its ability to change the economic fortune of the south is limited. But then in the south, you have to divide into two also; in the west where entrepreneurial, administrative and professional heights have been attained with skills which keep them, they are the ones who can sell, they are managers, and architects, professionals and so on. And you don’t have the same in the east.
The spending power of the east has come from their own initiative and inventiveness in going out to sell spare parts, invest, keep their buses moving around the country, be in all the market, etc. The originality of drive to sell, innovate, create is strong in the east – Onitsha market, the largest in Africa; Nnewi, the industrial capital of Nigeria; Alaba, largest electronics market in Africa. They have shown the light and others are following; the energy produced by all Nigerians should be harnessed under superior leadership and no one would be able to catch us.
Together a denouement of greatness. Instead they seem to be fighting each other.
…Well, the press has done well but must do more, in the area of reporting things as they unfold. But I don’t think there has been much depth in looking at all our problems; shallow thinking and prejudiced or tendentious reporting continues but this should be counter-balanced by more robust and purposeful reporting. Unfortunately, the continued growth of extremely shallow radio journalism, a TV press that is out to the highest bidder, and the spread of social media all tend to make the work of the press more difficult, if no less important.
DR COLE WAS INTERVIEWED BY RICHARD IKIEBE IN LAGOS ON 17TH MAY 2013
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