A quarter of a century a journalist 

The Nigerian media should be doing far better than we are doing given the advantages of technology and development. Journalists deserve to be treated like kings and not dregs. Only then will the media take its pride of place in the heart of the people and only then will the society be truly served.

 

If I were a Yoruba Nollywood veteran, this would have been a good time to roll out the drums. I could make money selling asoebi to friends and admirers to attend an event to mark twenty-five years of a fruitful career as a journalist. I could also invite Pasuma to serenade these guests. I could do many a thing, a thousand things.

But, journalists don’t roll that way. We’re not meant to be celebrities, we’re not meant to be seen but heard, we are supposed to be doing some form of public service and our rewards, like teachers, are supposed to be in heaven.

The conservative nature of our job is actually changing. Many have defied the odds; they’ve become celebrities, they have been seen and heard, they have received their rewards here on earth because heaven can wait.

For me, it’s been a very eventful quarter of a century. It all started with an internship at The Source magazine in 1999. Back then at The Source, interns took the same tests as reporter-researchers. If you failed the tests, the magazine would deploy you to its library. If you passed, you stayed in the newsroom. I passed and worked under Victor Ogene, then General Editor (now member of the House of Representatives). Ogene was so impressed with my performance that he asked if I had written for a newspaper before. I had only done campus journalism.

Within months, Maik Nwosu, who was Executive Editor (now a Professor of English in America) and Comfort Obi, the publisher, felt there was something in me and I got employed as an Editorial Assistant, a position I held for just a few months before I became a reporter-researcher.

In my early years at The Source, I was nominated for the Nigerian Media Merit Awards (NMMA). Two years later, I got two NMMA nominations for aviation reporting and banking and finance reporting. I won the aviation reporting category with a story of how the Nigerian Airways was raped to death under Gen. Sani Abacha while Alhaji Jani Ibrahim was Managing Director. It was a report that almost didn’t come out. Pressure was mounted on my publisher to kill the story, a request she told me she was unwilling to grant. I was glad Madam, as we fondly called her, didn’t kill my story, a story whose success eventually made Adegbenro Adebanjo, then Head of Newsroom at Tell, got me to leave The Source, the magazine where I moved from being a shy reporter who couldn’t talk at the first editorial meeting to a superstar who Ogene as the General Editor used the whole Editorial Suite section to celebrate after the NMMA win.

Tell was where I pitched my tent for four years after The Source and in those four years, I got nominated for Journalist of the Year at the NMMA for a report I co-authored with my friend, Adejuwon Soyinka, who the Department of State recently arrested for no discernible reason on arrival in Lagos from the United Kingdom.

Four years soon ran out and to The Nation I headed and have spent the better part of my career. At The Nation, trips outside of Nigeria started falling on my lap, many of them influenced by Adeola Akinremi, Akinbode Oluwafemi and Seun Akioye. South Africa, Singapore, Tanzania, Ghana, United States, United Kingdom and China are places I have seen in my years in The Nation, some of them more than once.

At The Nation, I got the bragging right as a multiple award-winning journalist, including winning the NMMA Columnist of the Year named after a profound first-generation Columnist, Alade Odunewu (Allah De).

Also at The Nation, I published ‘In The Name of Our Father’, a novel I wrote as a 24-year-old working with The Source. At The Nation, this novel was nominated for The Nigeria Prize for Literature. Equally at The Nation, I published ‘Vaults of Secrets’, a collection of short stories.

This year, Masobe Books released ‘After The End’, my second novel, which I began working on around my 20th anniversary as a reporter.

Enough of me. Now, I need to zero-in on this industry, which has given me so much than it has taken from me.

What I have seen between 1999 and now shows that the Nigerian media has come a long way from Henry Townsend’s ‘Iwe Iroyin’.

For years, the media houses in Nigeria have been struggling, with majority on some form of ventilator, a situation that has been further worsened with Naira’s unenviable crash. For the majority, salaries are either not paid or terribly delayed. There are times journalists go for months without pay. As you read this, hunger virus has plagued many a colleague.

Only a few publishers constantly pay what can truly be described as a take-home package. I can count them on my fingertips. They are that small. The majority do not pay well and, sadly, they struggle to pay these peanuts. Even those who get paid can achieve little or nothing with this pay because the dwindled value of Naira has made their salaries senseless.

It’s not surprising that the industry regularly loses its best brains. Go to the banks, the oil and gas sector and telecoms, you will see several players who will describe themselves as former journalists. Ask them why they quit and the answer is not going to have any link outside of poor welfare. These guys were good reporters and writers, some of those who made the industry tick but had to jump ship to be able to give their families decent living.

Now the situation in the industry, which has not seen any major investment in the last few years, has gone gaga. No thanks to a combination of Coronavirus pandemic and the  Naira clash. For the media, sales and advertising are at all time low and getting up on its own without external help is a task I doubt our comatose industry is capable of. Print-runs keep being reduced because circulation and marketing have been affected. We need help.

Media houses’ balance sheets are in red and this makes it difficult to foot the bills which before now were Herculean tasks.

Significantly, getting to bring in newsprints and other consumables for their production has been hampered and, sadly, online and e-paper versions are yet to live up to expectations.

My final take: The Nigerian media should be doing far better than we are doing given the advantages of technology and development. Journalists deserve to be treated like kings and not dregs. Only then will the media take its pride of place in the heart of the people and only then will the society be truly served.

 

 

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