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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
An illustrious wordsmith at 70 Yesterday, one of Nigeria’s most accomplished journalists and wordsmiths, Daniel Ochima Agbese, clocked 70. He was born on May 20, 1944 into Agila royalty in Okpowu Local Government of Benue State. It speaks volumes of the man’s character that few of his acquaintances, and proportionately fewer still of the millions of readers he must have gathered in his long - but hardly materially rewarding - career as a columnist, journalist and author, ever knew he was a prince. All his life he’d always referred to himself as simply Mister, apparently because he did not suffer from the superiority complex of your typical Nigerian Big Man.
Yet Dan, as those on a first name basis with him call him, had sufficient virtues to make him feel proud and superior to most Nigerians. To begin with, God gave him a good head and a way with words. This was obvious from his academic career which begun in earnest when he returned to the classroom in 1970 after a three-year teaching career followed by another year as a library assistant and ending with a four-year stint as a staff writer with the New Nigerian during its heydays in the late sixties. Before all this he had attended Government Teachers Training College, Keffi, between 1960 and 1962.
It was as a staff writer under the tutelage of Malam Adamu Ciroma, the first indigenous editor of the New Nigerian and the creator and principal author of the famous humour columnist, the anonymous Candido, that Dan left to pursue a degree in Journalism at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), the second university in the country after the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), to establish a degree course in the profession.
At UNILAG, Dan became a prize winning student and, upon graduation in 1973, earned himself a second class upper division. That, in combination with a three-year stint as the chief sub-editor of the Nigeria Standard, then published by the then Benue-Plateau State, must have earned him a place in 1976/77 to do a Masters degree at probably the best Journalism school in the world and custodian of the most prestigious journalism awards world-wide (The Pulitzer) - the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York City.
As with UNILAG so it was with Columbia; there he became the best of the 16 international students in the class and among the best of its entire 160 students.
Dan’s fascination with and love of the written word probably dated back to his days as a library assistance – possibly before. His move from there to the New Nigerian seemed then natural enough; after all, the written word is the principal commodity of both.
Once he returned to class to read journalism it seemed he had made up his mind to stick with it as his life-time career and forget about being a librarian. However, as the man himself said in an interview with the newsmagazine Verbatim (October 21, 2013) which looks like an offshoot of the defunct (?) Newswatch he co-founded in 1985 with the late Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed - all three of them among the country’s best and brightest journalists and columnists - he developed second thoughts about remaining a journalist after graduation while still a student at Columbia.
“Actually as far back as 1977, when I was in graduate school in the US,” he said, “I didn’t think I was returning to journalism, I thought I was going into book publishing. This was because I had had a long association with book publishing from the period of my youth service in 1973/1974. I was a reader for Heinemann educational books in Ibadan, and so I picked up a lot of interest in writing books. And I had hoped that if I returned I would set up a book publishing company, but it didn’t work out that way.”
As things turned out, Dan stuck to Journalism. However, even though he did not become a book publisher, he wrote several of them. Indeed he wrote enough to make him the most prolific author among Nigerian journalists since time.
So far the man has six books to his credit, three of them (The Reporter’s Companion, The Columnist’s Companion and Style: A Guide to Good Writing), practical guides to Journalism that should be compulsory reading in all our Journalism schools, one (Nigeria, Their Nigeria), a satirical dig at Nigerians and their country after the fashion of that famous evergreen, How to be a Nigerian, by Peter Enahoro whose editorship of a national newspaper at 26 in the early sixties remains unbeaten, and two (Fellow Nigerians: Turning Points in the Political History of Nigeria and IBRAHIM BABANGIDA: The Military, Politics and Power in Nigeria, to date, the most authoritative and most definitive biography of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, the man whose eight-year military rule has re-defined the country’s political economy like no other before and after him) on Nigeria’s politics.
Dan has also edited three books, Newswatch Conversation With Babangida, The Energy Crisis in Nigeria and In the Service of My Country: Selected Speeches of Abdullahi Adamu, the two-term civilian governor of Nasarawa State.
All books are a reader’s delight for their readability, insight, humour and precision. Take, for instance, his virtue of readability. Dan began Chapter Two of the book with a quote from Jim Rohn, the late American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker. “Learn to express, not to impress,” he quoted Rohn as saying. Dan kept faith with the motivational speaker in all his books and columns; he never wrote to impress anyone. Instead, he used everyday words, used concrete words instead of the abstract, used simple rather than convoluted sentence structure, etc. In short, the man was a stickler for all the rules in the manuals on how to write well.
Five years after Newswatch came out, the company decided to compile its house style. “I was,” he said, “assigned the task. I still don’t know why.” This wasn’t false modesty; all his three colleagues were good to write the house style. But then even the most casual reader of the man could see why; of all the magazine’s four co-founders, he was the most experienced, and arguably the most expressive, writer.
Take for another example, his virtue of humour, one of the several tools he listed in The Columnist’s Companion as useful, even necessary, for effective punditry. In his preface to The Reporter’s Companion which he dedicated to his first daughter, Aje-Ori, who had paid the ultimate tribute to her father by going one better in taking a doctorate degree in Mass Communication and teaching it at a university abroad, he said he had intended it to be a guide for sound editorial judgement for editors. “More or less midstream,” he said, “I changed horses – for the love of reporters. This book is evidence that you can change horses midstream.”
Obviously all those Peoples Democratic Party chieftains, most notably Chief Bode George and Dr Amadu Ali, who told Nigerians in the heat of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Third Term campaign in 2005 that it would be disastrous for Nigerians to change horses midstream never read Dan’s book.
Again in his introduction to Style which took him ten years to write, he said he missed several deadlines which he could not explain. “Several deadlines,” he said, “were given for the completion of the style book. All of them were breached...Well, if you wait long enough for a miracle it always happens. So there.” It’s hard to beat such self-deprecating sense of humour as a tool for effective writing.
Among Dan’s virtues were not only his good head and a way with the written word. The man also possessed the courage of his convictions and a diligence for accuracy, balance and fairness in pursuing news stories. I saw these and other virtues first hand as his deputy when he edited New Nigerian between 1982 and 1984.
Before him I had acted as the editor for 11 eleven months. I was denied confirmation because the management and chieftains of the ruling National Party of Nigeria said I was too headstrong. Instead, Dan was brought in as editor at the time he was the Director of Information in Benue State, then also ruled by the NPN.
Clearly there was politics in his appointment but it was an appointment no one, certainly not I, could quarrel with; Dan was older and much more experienced as a journalist than me by the time he was appointed.
Four years after his appointment, if those in authority thought they had a lapdog for an editor it became obvious to them that they made a great misjudgement. Day in day out Dan published stories and ran editorials that they found uncomfortable. When he was not running such awkward stories he was rejecting stories the authorities tried to foist on him that were clearly more public relations than news.
For example, when the late Chief M. K. O. Abiola resigned his membership of the NPN after his humiliation following his bid for its chairmanship against the favoured late Chief Adisa Akinloye, Dan ran it as the lead story, much to the great annoyance of the party. On another occasion he rejected a story based on a document allegedly signed by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo which purported that he was training people in a forest in the Western Region for a coup against the Federal Government. While the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria in Kaduna made hay with the story, Dan demanded incontrovertible proof that the document was genuine before he would publish the story. He never got the proof and he never published it. In the end it turned out that the document was fake and its source a big con artist.
Predictably, Dan’s editorship of the New Nigerian did not end on a happy note. Sensing the authorities had had enough of his unyielding insistence on professionalism and might push him out anytime, he decided to jump. Thus, his departure in 1984 to co-found Newswatch which eventually hit the streets in January 1985 as Nigeria’s first weekly newsmagazine to be owned principally by professional journalists themselves.
The rest, as they say, is History. Newswatch ran without missing a beat for 27 years, except for it ban by the authorities a couple of times, once for a period of six months, due to its hard-hitting stories and scoops.
Since its controversial take-over last year by Chief Jimoh Ibrahim, the controversial business mogul, Dan and his colleagues have established a book publishing company, May5Media, which has since published two book, one, Moving in Circles, a selection of their columns, and the other on the life and times of the rebel leader, the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu.
Shows you, doesn’t it, that old journalists and old writers, like old soldiers, never die.
Here’s many more returns of yesterday to one of Nigeria’s best writers, humourists, satirists and, above all, most professional and most courageous journalists. |