PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Bilkisu as a friend indeed
If
she were alive Hajiya Bilkisu
Bintube, mni, who was among
the hundreds of casualties in this year’s Hajj stampede on September 25 at Muna, would have been 63 today. In remembrance of her immense
contribution to Journalism, her advocacy of social justice, gender
equity and interfaith dialogue, Advocacy Nigeria, one of the many civil society
organizations to which she belonged, is organizing a public lecture today at
the ECOWAS Parliament, Abuja.
As
part of the event, ten of her friends and colleagues were invited to give
five-minute testimonials of her character and work. As her friend of over 40
years, I was invited to speak on her virtues as a friend. This is my testimony:
Friendship
is a relationship of mutual affection between two or more persons. Along with
mutual affection, it is also characterised by mutual trust, honesty,
understanding and altruism, among other virtues. Hajiya
Bilkisu Bintube possessed
each and every one of these virtues in abundance.
I
first met her in our undergraduate days. As a student in the second set of School
of Basic Studies, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in
1971, I got admitted in 1973 for a degree in Government, now Political Science,
in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, since split in two. Bilkisu got admitted for the same course in the same year
from the Higher School Certificate class of her alma mater, Government Girls
College, Dala, Kano.
Some
of us who regarded ourselves as studious types formed study groups to help each
other in our courses beyond the classroom and tutorials. Bilkisu
and I belonged to several of such groups.
By
sheer coincidence both of us were also in love with the same profession – Journalism
- even as undergraduates. Unlike me, however, she was too serious a student and
too decorous a person to indulge in the kind of junk journalism practiced on
university campuses in those good old days. Instead she waited till after her
graduation in 1975 and national service the following year to engage in the
real thing. Thus began one of the most illustrious careers in Journalism in post colonial Nigeria.
The
climax of that career was her editorship of New
Nigerian, arguably the country’s most literate and authoritative newspaper
in its heydays in the sixties and seventies. She became the Editor in 1987
after she had, among other things, worked as information officer in Kano
State’s Ministry of Information and had served as pioneer Editor of Sunday Triumph, its newspaper.
By
the time she became New Nigerian’s
editor I had been its managing director for over a year. During that period I
had a rather acrimonious relationship with her predecessor, Mr Innocent Oparadike. In the end I was able to persuade the Federal
authorities to replace him and was given the privilege of picking his
successor. I didn’t have to think twice about recommending Bilkisu.
First,
she had already made her mark as a fearless journalist, columnist and editor.
Second, for some rather personal reasons the authorities at Triumph had made her life miserable by
removing her as editor and getting her sent back to the Ministry of Information
with no particular job to do. I felt obliged as a friend to help end her
misery. Third, again as a friend, I knew she was honest, trustworthy,
compassionate and, above all, a person of the highest integrity. Last, I felt
she deserved to make history as the first Northern female editor of a truly
national newspaper.
Fortunately,
the Federal authorities agreed with me. However, not surprisingly, the same
people who did not want her at Triumph
in the first place attempted also to stop her move to New Nigerian by trying to convince the state authorities that her
services were still very much needed in her state after all. Military
president, General Ibrahim Babangida, had to
personally intercede at my request with the Kano State Governor, Group Captain Umaru Ndatsu, to secure her
release to New Nigerian.
As
managing director and editor, the two us got on very well like a house on fire,
as the saying goes. However, my tenure as her “boss” - as she always introduced
me to strangers - came to an abrupt end on February 13, 1989, when I was
sacked. Unfortunately, she got on very badly with her new boss, the late Alhaji Sidi Ali Sirajo, whose idea of journalism was totally at variance
with hers and with those of some of her colleagues, notably Adamu
Adamu, the deputy editor, and Mohammed Suleiman Bomoi, the News Editor.
It
was then only a question of time before the new managing director moved against
them, accusing them of being loyal to me. Adamu
jumped before he was pushed and all three of them, along with Kabiru Yusuf, joined me in 1990 to found Citizen, the first weekly newsmagazine
in the North. Bilkisu was my second in command.
The
magazine lasted all of only four years, but during that short period it made
its mark and, at a personal level, our bond of friendship as a team became ever
stronger. Indeed we became like one family.
If,
as they, a friend is someone who knows you very well and still loves you, then Bilkisu must be one of best friends anyone can have, as, I
am sure, virtually all of us gathered here today to honour her will testify. I,
for one, can testify to how she stood by me as a friend from our university
days through thick and thin.
She
stood by me when I was sacked from New
Nigerian, without, of course, being unfaithful to the ethics of her
profession. She stood by me when our magazine collapsed and on more than one
occasion she was approached with irresistible offers to start a new one. On
each occasion she insisted her potential benefactors invested in reviving Citizen if they sincerely meant well for
the public interest the magazine served.
And
when some people tried to come between the two of us by reminding her I’d built
my own comfortable house while she’d been only a tenant all those years in
spite of all her labours, she simply told them she was the one who encouraged
me to do so instead of investing everything I had in Citizen, as its single biggest owner. That shut them up. Not least
of all, she was always there to share what little she had with me and my wife,
to whom she became very close, any time we were broke, which was rather often.
I
can go on and on with examples of how faithful a friend she was, but the ones
I’ve mentioned above are more than sufficient proof that Bilkisu
is a friend indeed.
Ladies
and gentlemen, my invitation letter to this event asked me to talk about Bilkisu not just as a friend but also talk about her
capacity to network. While I can write a book about her qualities as a friend,
I am afraid I don’t have as much to say about the latter. Suffice it, however,
to observe that the variety of this gathering alone is enough evidence of her
immense capacity to reach out to all, regardless of their religion, region,
race and tongue.
In
that remarkable lady I lost a dear friend, someone I regarded as my twin sister,
on September 24, as she performed the last rites of this year’s Hajj. My
consolation, however, was that she could not have wished for a better way to
depart this world. May Allah grant her Aljanna Firdaus.
Amen.