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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
JOSE: Death of a Titan
The news came to me through the multi-talented ace photographer, Sanmi Smart-Cole, last Saturday at precisely 11am. I had just switched on my MTN line when his terse text came through. “Alhaji BABATUNDE JOSE,” it said “died at (5.45am) this morning, aged 82. Burial at ATAN cemetery at 4pm.”
At that age, death is sad rather than shocking. I knew the old man had been ill for quite a while. Still his death came to me as a shock perhaps because the notification was what I received on my mobile phone first thing after waking up from my mid-morning nap on a cool, lazy Saturday.
I have decided to reproduce on these pages a tribute I paid to this titan of Nigerian, indeed African, journalism on his 75th birthday, seven years ago. Quite rightly the tribute focused on his contribution to Nigerian journalism which is without equal in the contemporary history of Nigeria.
Although he was himself not a man of letters, having started his journalism career when he was barely out of secondary school at the young age of 16, he contributed more than any contemporary journalist in changing the face – and substance – of journalism from that of a profession of school drop-outs, hard drinking, shabby looking never-do-wells to one of decent, self-confident, highly literate and respectable gentlemen. He did this by simply scouting for talents from the four walls of our universities and making them offers they could not refuse. He also identified talents already working in the organization and sent them out to good schools here and abroad to better themselves professionally and other wise. In other words, he achieved his objective by putting the company’s money into where its mouth was, rather than into his pocket as many a publisher does these days. Above all Jose led his company by example.
He attracted good and capable hands because by dint of hard work, integrity and foresight he built the Daily Times of Nigeria into one of the most influential and successful businesses in Africa. At its height the company’s flagship, the Daily Times, and its sister, the Sunday Times, were selling over 200,000 and 500,000 copies per edition respectively. On the commercial side, the company’s property, printing and packaging subsidiaries were bringing in money faster than they could be banked, if you catch my drift.
Naturally such success was bound to attract envy. The envy against Jose manifested in the wake of the July 1975 coup that ousted General Yakubu Gowon from power and brought in then Brigadier Murtala Mohammed as head of state and then Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo as his deputy.
The old man has given what I believe is a dispassionate account of events leading up to his premature departure from Daily Times in February 1976 in his 1987 book, WALKING A TIGHT ROPE: Power play in Daily Times. It is a book that should be required reading for all students and practitioners of journalism. It should also be recommended reading for all students of policy and even, indeed especially, for politicians.
His highly readable narrative of how he upheld the ethics of his chosen profession over many issues including the scandalous Mbadiwe Land Deal in Ijora, Lagos, in 1964, through the Daboh/Tarka fiasco that led to the forced resignation of Chief J.S. Tarka as a leading member of General Gowon’s cabinet in 1974, to his – Jose’s of course – vindication as an upright and fair-minded leader following an internal rebellion sparked by changes he had proposed in the publications division of the company in the aftermath of the July 76 coup; his story about all these contains lessons that we all can benefit from whatever our profession.
As I said earlier and as the reader can see, my tribute to the man on his 75th birthday focused on his journalism career. Jose was, however, more than just a great journalist and successful publisher. He was also a deeply religious man without being religionist. As he said in his book, he started out as a leading member of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a sect whose members orthodox Islam regarded as apostates because they believed in the prophethood of its founder, Gulam Ahmad, a Pakistani. It is a cardinal principle of Islam that Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is the seal of prophethood.
Three years after Jose became its president in 1967, he led a successful campaign to change the movement’s image and its belief in the prophethood of Ahmad. In 1973 its name was changed to Anwar-Ul Islam Movement of Nigeria. Some leading members objected to the change and went to court all the way to the top. They lost at every stage. So by the time Jose left as president of the movement in 1973, it had returned to orthodox Islam.
This, in brief, was the man who finally died last Saturday, having served God and touched the lives of millions of Nigerians for good. Jose, as his son, Babatunde Jose Jnr, said in last Sunday’s Thisday, truly “lived a good life and built a good name for himself and his family.” The trouble with today’s journalists and publishers – and politicians as their rich cousins – is that few have followed Jose’s exemplary life.
May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus. May He also grant those he has left behind the fortitude to bear his loss.
Jose and today’s journalism Last Wednesday December 13, Alhaji Babatunde Jose, probably the most accomplished post-independent journalist in this country, celebrated his 75th birthday. Starting as a cub-reporter in 1941, first at Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Daily Comet and then at the Daily Times, Jose rose through the ranks to become the most powerful newspaper chief executive this country has ever seen. It is significant that he did so with little formal education. The secret of his success obviously was his commitment to hard work and to professionalism in journalism and integrity in management. The Daily Times is today a sorry shadow of its days under Jose precisely because these three vital qualities were missing in most of the regimes that succeeded him, especially those from the eighties.
It is indeed a mark of his remarkable achievement at the Daily Times that nearly a quarter of a century after he quit journalism, he remains the foremost reference point of journalism in the country. This was somewhat foreseen by the New Nigerian which, in its heydays in the late sixties and seventies, rivaled the Daily Times in editorial integrity, courage and conviction. Its editorial on March 11, 1976 on Jose’s retirement which is as apt today as it was then and which was characteristically precise and to the point, is worthy reproducing in full. Titled Jose Quits, it ran thus:
The retirement of Alhaji Babatunde Jose, erstwhile Chairman and Managing Director of the Daily Times Group of Companies is sad news. For Alhaji Jose has been part of the industry for as long as most newspaper-men can remember. He has given a generation’s service to his beloved profession and reached the top by hard work and ruthless business drive.
A valedictory comment is probably an inopportune occasion to go into the inner details of a distinguished career. Suffice to say that Alhaji Jose was the moving force in transforming the Daily Times from a newspaper to a business. Jose appreciated earlier on that for a private independent newspaper to survive, it must be buttressed by money-making ventures.
As he built up the company so also he established his own primacy. The irony of his departure is that an error of judgement in the course of exercising his near absolute powers unleashed a process which in the end proved his undoing, for the senior staff accusations and counter-accusations which resulted in the massacre last week of the top management made it inadvisable for Alhaji Jose himself to stay on.
When a man is in difficulties, all sorts of accusations can be heard. It is true that purists would look the other way in (the) face of certain revelation in the Daily Times, but the organization was run as a private big business. We believe an investigation into the conduct of chief executives in indigenous or foreign private sector companies will show Alhaji Jose in good light by comparison.
He laid down certain standards and tried to maintain them. Above all, he ran an efficient and profitable business. How many private companies can boast of that? Alhaji Jose may be out but he is not by any means down for he is a formidable personality who may well re-emerge on the political arena before we are much older.
Jose did re-emerge after his unfortunate demise at Daily Times, but his re-emergence was in business rather than politics and even then in a laid back and somewhat hands-off fashion which was hardly surprising given his professional attitude of telling it as it is, an attitude which is a surefire guarantee for failure in partisan politics and the politics of business. It is a mark of his achievement in journalism that nearly 25 years after he quite the profession, he was considered among the nominees of the International Press Institute’s 50 symbols of courage in global journalism in the last 50 years. Jose barely missed the list because it had to be kept to 50 in number. All the same, he, along with several others from Britain, Switzerland, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Russia and United States, came for honourable mention.
In my fascination with journalism, I regarded a number of journalists as my models. Among them was Sam Amuka (Sad Sam) with his economy with words and entertaining humour. I also loved Peter Enahoro with his irreverent sense of humour and relentless logic. Later there was Haroun Adamu with his unsurpassed political insight and for whom the “Struggle Always Continues.” On top of them all, however, was Jose if only because he was able to cultivate the team that made the Daily Times, along with its Sunday stable mate, the most ubiquitous and, until the New Nigerian came along, the most respected and the most authoritative paper in the country.
In those days among the few journalists I had similar respect for was Alhaji Lateef Jakande, when he ruled the roost at the Nigerian Tribune. Like Jose, Jakande apparently detested sloth and lazy thinking. Because of that Tribune editorials, like those of the New Nigerian, became a must read for policy makers and ordinary readers alike. You could almost predict what Tribune would say on almost any issue but you still would not miss its editorial because of the way it would say it. You could fault the paper’s assumptions but it stated its position with utmost civility and with a logic that was hard to quarrel with.
The difference between Jose and Jakande was that Jose apparently lacked the stomach for partisan politics. Jakande, as we all know, was a politician first (albeit in the best sense of the word) and a journalist, a very close second. It is probably for that reason that Jose, more than Jakande, in spite of his continued interest in the practice of journalism (he remains a newspaper publisher to date), has come to symbolize modern Nigerian Journalism.
It is sad that as Jose celebrates his 75 years on earth, 35 of which he gave to journalism, the profession today is bereft of the qualities of hard work, editorial and managerial integrity which made him the journalism icon that he is today.
“News,” says Peter Hamill, one-time Editor-in-Chief of the News York Daily News “is a verb.” Jose was great because he subscribed to this creed. For today’s journalists news have since become an adjective. Thus reporters sit in the comfort of their office or home and fabricate stories and even Question an Answer interviews. When they do conduct such interviews, all too often the interviews are glorified as cover stories even in undeserving cases.
Whereas Jose approached his subjects with an open mind as is evident from his 1987 book, Walking a Tight Rope, today’s journalist, as a rule, approaches his subject with a closed mind. He forgets or chooses to forget that a journalist is always a prisoner of what he or she is told, and therefore needs to cross check and cross check and cross check with all sides involved in an issue. Because journalists today approach their subjects with closed minds, journalists have become divisive elements instead of bridge builders. They have become more malicious than politicians and worse in the use of foul language.
All this is not to say we do not have journalists today who practice their profession as it should be. There are. Unfortunately, such journalists are the exception rather than the rule. And this is true of even some of the most courageous journalists among us who have fought military dictatorship to a surrender. Courage, after all, is not merely defying those in authority, but it also involves the more difficult task of taking the moral high ground of editorial and professional integrity. It is because Nigerian pressmen have equated journalism with war, where all is said to be fair, that power-hungry politicians, in khaki or mufti, have found journalists easy to manipulate for the achievement of their hidden agenda.
For example, at a time when it was an open secret that retired Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar was staking his all for the actualization of Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s mandate, the editors of The News, a courageous lot if ever there were any, were manipulated by some intelligence operatives into publishing the cover story that said Umar wanted to stage his coup to prevent Abiola from become president!
It is this same deficient sense of courage which has led most journalists into dismissing Lt-Gen. Oladipo Diya’s 1997 coup as phantom merely on Diya’s say-so, because he dealt the ethnic card. Journalists forgot to ask him how many careers of promising Yoruba officers he terminated because he felt threatened by their presence in the army.
Jose in his career avoided these kinds of shoddy and blatantly partisan journalism like a plague. By avoiding such journalism, he became an icon not just for journalists but also for all Nigerians. It is sad that nearly 25 years after he quit journalism, today’s journalists are yet to re-create anything close to the house that Jose helped to build.
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