PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Celebrating Magaji Danbatta at 80

ndajika@yahoo.com

Anyone old enough and literate enough to read newspapers in the late sixties and seventies knew the New Nigerian was the envy of all other Nigerian newspapers, including Daily Times, then the mother of all our newspapers; for literary quality, accuracy and courage of its convictions, the Kaduna based newspaper was simply nonpareil.

The newspaper was born – reborn is the more accurate word, for, it was established to take over from where the bi-weekly Nigerian Citizen, published in nearby Zaria, left off – on January 1, 1966, after the authorities in Kaduna, the Northern regional capital, had arrived at the painful conclusion that the Citizen was unequal to the task of countering the very bad press the region and its people had suffered from in the hands of the Southern, more specifically, Lagos, press.

Within months of its birth the newspaper established itself as second only to Daily Times in circulation, thanks in large measure to its well informed and accurate news, its trademark typically one inch editorial column that ran down its left hand side beneath its masthead, and, not least of all, its irreverent satirical Wednesday columnist, the anonymous Candido.

The newspaper achieved this feat through a combination of sheer luck and excellent leadership, but through more of the latter than the former. The sheer luck came through the country’s first military coup which came exactly two weeks after the newspaper’s birth. The excellent leadership came in the human shape of Mr. Charles Sharp, its first and only expatriate managing director, and Malams Adamu Ciroma, Mamman Daura and the late Turi Muhammadu, successors to Sharp in that order, after each had served as editor.

Malam Magaji Dambatta, veteran journalist, veteran civil servant, veteran politician, and a co-founder at youthful age of 19 of the radical political party in the First Republic, the Northern Element Progressive Union (NEPU) led by the late radical politician, Malam Aminu Kano, missed being at the centre of the remarkable story of the New Nigerian in the early sixties by sheer happenstance. At the time Malam Magaji was a youngish 35 year-old. He was born 80 years ago this year.

Mr. Sharp, who mid-wifed the rebirth of Citizen as New Nigerian, was a veteran of Citizen itself. He left the newspaper as editor in succession to Chief Bisi Onabanjo - subsequently a disciple of Chief Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) and first civilian governor of Ogun State - and returned to his country, the UK, before the Northern authorities had despaired of its lacklustre performance. But this was not before he had recruited Malam Magaji as a reporter for the newspaper in 1954. He had come to know Malam Magaji from his journalism as a reporter and Hausa editor of  Daily Comet, one of the newspapers in Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s (Zik) famed stable whose flagship was the Lagos based West African Pilot.

Comet, based in cosmopolitan Kano, became a mouthpiece of NEPU which was then in alliance with Zik’s National Congress of Nigeria and Cameroon, subsequently National Congress of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) after the 1960 plebiscite in which Northern Cameroon became part of Nigeria as Adamawa Province and Southern Cameroon joined the French Cameroon ahead of its independence from French rule.

As you can imagine, Comet proved a thorn in the flesh of the authorities in the region and was, at least in Kano, more than a match not only to Citizen. It was also more than a match to The Mail, the better printed mouthpiece of the ruling Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) published in Kano.

 Mr. Sharp recruited Malam Magaji apparently to give the opposition a voice in the regional newspaper for fairness and balance in its coverage of the region’s politics. Very likely Mr. Sharp’s action did not go down well with the authorities in Kaduna but in the end Malam Magaji survived their misgivings, thanks obviously to his ability to walk the tight rope of reporting for an Establishment newspaper as a radical journalist-politician.

His secret was his apparent possession of a huge dose of the virtues of a good reporter not least of which are a keen sense of observation, the ability to cultivate and keep sources and good old personal integrity. Throughout his journalism career at both the Comet and Citizen, and eventually at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (now FRCN) which he joined in 1957, Malam Magaji demonstrated these and other virtues to the great satisfaction of his employers.

In time, however, his stint at Citizen changed his radical politics and by the early sixties he had moved away from active journalism and joined the regional civil service as an information officer. He rose eventually to become the region’s Chief Information Officer.

It was in this position that he almost became the managing director of New Nigerian. As he himself told it in his highly readable 2010 autobiography, The Pull of Faith, barely two weeks after the Kaduna authorities had invited Mr. Sharp back to Nigeria to raise the New Nigerian, Phoenix-like from the ashes of Citizen in Zaria, he (Malam Magaji) was invited for a meeting by the late Alhaji Aliyu, Makaman Bida, the region’s Minister of Health and Deputy Premier, with Alhaji Ahman Pategi, the Minister of Agriculture and the Secretary-General of the NPC and Alhaji Ahmadu Fatika, the Minister of Information, both also late, in attendance.

During the meeting he was told a decision had been taken to sack Mr. Sharp for offending the sensibilities of the authorities so soon after the newspaper’s debut and he was to take over from the expatriate the following Monday, January 15. As we all now know the soldiers, led by Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu in Kaduna, struck in the wee hours of that day and killed Sir Ahmadu Bello, the region’s premier, in his residence and, in the process, burned it down.

Thus Malam Magaji never became New Nigerian’s boss and Mr. Sharp, who probably never even knew he’d been sacked on the eve of the coup, carried on with his job.

The newspaper’s location in Kaduna gave it the vantage position of breaking to the world in words and pictures what, at that time, was clearly the biggest story out of Africa’s most populous country. Mr. Sharp made a remarkable job of it gauging from the fact that from then on the supply of the newspaper never met its demand, edition after edition. And the rest became the story of what, once upon a time, was the country’s most literate, and arguably, most authoritative newspaper.

We can now only speculate on what would have been the fate of the newspaper under Malam Magaji if the tragic events of January 15, 1966 had not happened. And it would merely be idle speculation.

But whether or not he could have done as well as, or even better, than Mr Sharp and his successors, the fact is that his subsequent record of public service as bureaucrat and politician was ample evidence that the virtues of personal integrity, modesty and tolerance, among others, are not the reserve of any creed, political or otherwise.

His sense of tolerance was pretty obvious from his relationship with his late younger brother, Mustapha, who had followed his footstep as a journalist and politician but who had remained a radical politician till death. During the Second Republic Mustapha contested against him for Kano North-Central senatorial seat on the ticket of the Peoples Redemption Party, the successor to NEPU.  The younger Danbatta handily beat his elder brother by 133,490 votes to 38,234. Malam Magaji never showed any bitterness towards this somewhat upstart of a brother. Instead they retained their fondness for each other till death did them part.

As for his personal integrity and modesty the fact is that at 80, and in spite of the opportunities he has had to self-aggrandise himself as, among others, Counsellor of Information in the Nigerian High Commission in London during the civil war years between 1967 and 1970, as Chairman of Daily Times and the Federal Housing Authority during the Second Republic and as Chairman of the well-endowed Kano Forum, an independent foundation for the private funding of education in the state, Malam Magaji has remained a man of very modest means and lifestyle.

With no worries about maintaining a false lifestyle like several of his contemporaries who were once prepared to die for what they believed in when they were young but have ironically become political prostitutes at a time they should have no care for material things, is it any wonder that at 80 Malam Magaji is still strong enough to drive himself around town in his old banger and walk without a stick?

Two years ago, his mother died at a youthful age of 98. She lived long enough to see her son become an important player in the country’s journalism, bureaucracy and politics, receiving several honours along the way, including the Fellowship of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, a doctorate degree from Bayero University, Kano, an OON in 1982, and only last Monday, the higher CON.

Unlike several of his fellow honourees last Monday, Malam Magaji deserved each and every one of his honours. With 18 more years to equal his mother’s longevity, may he remain healthy and strong enough to continue to serve his community and his country at large with all the zeal and commitment with which he has served both all his adult life.