STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: In our last conversation, I stopped you from telling us about a great number of historical characters. I know you fear to be labelled as a 'name-dropper,' but why is that so? The world is full of interesting people, some of whom are more interesting than others. If your work as a journalist has enabled you to meet some of the more famous – or even notorious – fellows, why shouldn't you feel free to tell others about them?

ME: If you understood that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You see, some of us were trained to be modest. We are not like something called ‘Stream of Consciousness’ which was trained in the school of ‘Let it all hang out!’

SOC: Ouch! That was below the belt. Now, now – let's move on quickly, if you please, shall we? Before we get trapped into total recall re your first pair of shorts and the plastic belt that was so fragile that it couldn't hold the shorts up and how you had to pull them up after every five or six steps – ha! ha! Oh school days in the bush! How delicious! But do tell me – did you actually meet General Sani Abacha, 'A-butcher of Abuja'?

ME: No. But I did breathe the same air as him once. I was in Lagos doing a story for The London Sunday Times Magazine and Haroun Adamu, Political Editor of the Lagos Daily Times….

SOC: Very interesting chap in his own right, no?

ME: Yes. Haroun was one of the most erudite political writers of the Daily Times at the time (1974). Although Nigeria was still under military rule, Haroun Adamu and other members of a band of amazingly irrepressible Daily Times journalists – Femi Ogunsanwo, Effiong Essien and Segun Osoba among them – refused to recognise that Nigeria had become a military dictatorship like say, neighbouring Ghana and they wrote as if they were living in the vibrant democracy that Nigeria had been before the January 1966 military coup.

Going there from Ghana – where the media were so docile that even the arrest – or dismissal – of their own journalists by the military government could be suppressed by the very newspaper or organ on which they worked (because reporting the arrest would be deemed ‘embarrassing’ to the government that had victimised them) I felt as if I had been liberated into journalistic heaven.

Apparently, most of the Nigerian military officers respected good journalists. Nigeria is such a huge country – and political interests there are of such a multifarious nature – that it was dangerous for journalists to become sycophantic to any political ‘faction’ they adopted. Journalists could not tell with exactitude whether a government measure had been opposed in the ruling Supreme Military Council or not, and by whom, and how powerful those dissidents were. So if they presumed to play a guessing game and blindly supported any measure, they might find that they had rather offended some very powerful people who had opposed the measure in council and lost out. In fact, playing a guessing game was an exercise in futility. So the best thing for everyone was for the journalists to write precisely what they thought, as objectively as they could.

SOC: And you couldn't do that in Ghana?

ME: Do me a favour! Of course, not every powerful solder in Nigeria could agree with everything written by every journalist all the time, and indeed, some journalists were jailed. One was even whipped brutally by the orderlies of a military governor. But such acts were publicised and condemned by the rest of the media, and eventually the bright people in the military came to accept that it would be in everybody’s interest if the journalists were left free to write what they really thought. They couldn't possibly write against everyone's interests all of the time, so the truth would shine out in the long run to the benefit of everyone.

The biggest newspaper, the Daily Times, was lucky to have as its chairman and managing director Alhaji Babatunde Jose. I met him in 1993 in the London home of Chief M K O Abiola....

SOC: Here we go again. If you start on Abiola, we shall be here for six days, right? Very big colourful man with loads of stories about him, no? But could we just return to Abacha please?

ME: Ok, ok! Now, Alhaji Babatunde Jose had been with the paper almost since it was founded by the Daily Mirror group in London in the late 1940s and regarded it as his personal baby, which he tried to nourish with the unadulterated milk of pure intellect. (It was the same company that had founded the Daily Graphic in Ghana, but alas, the Graphic was not blessed with anyone as visionary as Alhaji Jose, and was always a soft option).

Jose courted and recruited young university graduates who had a good turn of phrase, trained them at the paper's own journalists' training school (which he'd set up with the help of the London Daily Mirror), and then set them loose on Nigerian society. He also paid the young journalists very well, so that they carried no inferiority complex whatsoever when they met the ogas [chieftains"> of Nigerian politics and business. Indeed, some of his ‘boys’ were later to become prominent in Nigeria politics themselves. (For instance, the former governor of Ogun State, Segun Osoba, was the paper’s social affairs editor when I first met him in 1974); Effiong Essien was economics editor but later worked in a high capacity for the government of his state. And Femi Ogunsanwo, was a political correspondent who knew everybody in Lagos (it was through his friendship with Chief Awolowo’s secretary, Odia Ofeimun, that I met the chief one day, flanked by his famous lieutenants, Bola Ige and Lateef Jakande) and later became a sort of king-maker himself in Lagos state. It was Femi who took me to witness how elections were rigged in Nigeria. In a local council poll at Ekpe, a town on Lagos mainland, I saw people voting for a rich Otunba (traditional 'chief') the night BEFORE voting was due to take place officially! They each pocketed a sum of money after casting their votes. Election officials in the chief's pocket were to stuff the ballots into ballot boxes and smuggle them into the polling centres the next day, when official voting took place. Because he had bought all the election officials and the police, as well as the polling agents of his rivals, he won the election hands down.

SOC: Wasn’t Bola Ige, whom you say you met, the man who became Federal Attorney-General and was murdered by unknown assailants on 23 December 2001at his home in Ibadan? How could a very powerful federal minister have such a weak system of personal security that he could be murdered like any commoner? Was he not supposed to be so clever that he was called ‘The Socrates of Esaoke?’

ME: Ahah! That's Nigeria for you! Now you're beginning to understand that big but puzzling country. You can only understand a country through what happens to its people. The Bola Ige murder case was never resolved satisfactorily – though it was a political murder of the most blatant type.

SOC: Lateef Jakande became a relatively successful governor of Lagos, didn't he?

ME: Haha! It is now you who wants to divert my attention to people you would like to know about? Yes, he was known for building a lot of schools in Lagos. Many of his teachers were imported from Ghana. Femi once – but I'd better not go there!

SOC: Hey, cut it out! How many people can truthfully say they have shaken the hand of people of this type, who fill the pages of their country's history? I mean you just mentioned three people whom everyone in Yorubaland –and beyond – would like to hear something about first-hand!

ME: Well, I ….

SOC: No ifs and buts, my friend. You were saying that you met Awolowo, Jakande and Ige at one sitting, and you want to gloss over it?

ME: Yes – I greeted them and was surprised to find that they all knew my name. Nigerian politicians, unlike some others, do read. I asked Chief Awolowo what he thought of General Gowon's decision, announced on 1 October 1974, that he was postponing ‘indefinitely’ the programme by which he had promised to hand over power to a civilian government. Awolowo was quite intransigent: he wouldn't comment publicly on the issue. In fact he discomfited me, somewhat, by recalling that ‘I told you on the phone that I would not comment on it. And you are asking me again?’ I shot back, ‘But the situation has changed, sir. And I thought you might have had a change of plan.’ He would still not be moved, however.
I should have known better than to press him. For serious conspiracy was afoot in the land, and no politician worth his salt would show his hand to a journalist. In just over six months, General Gowon had been overthrown by a junta headed by General Murtala Muhammed. Gowon's charge? That he had disgraced the Nigerian army by pledging publicly to hand over power and then peremptorily breaking the pledge. I saw him at Accra airport, when he arrived there to catch a plane to London. I was with Bridget Bloom the Financial Times correspondent who knew everyone who was anyone in Nigeria. She had a confidential conversation with Gowon, which I overheard, but...

SOC: I see you're checking your appointments? You're not leaving?

Me: Yes, alas – time and tide and all that – you know? But God willing.....!

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