In the 90s, a magazine called TELL became the medium of record for all that went on during General Sani Abacha’s five horrible years. The travails of the intrepid journalists and writers who fearlessly chronicled the story of Abacha’s rapacious half decade in Aso Rock became the stuff of legend when detailing just how much journalists can be mistreated and dehumanised. There were beatings. There was torture. There were suspicious accidents and disappearances. Family members and friends suffered mysterious misfortunes. It was a dark time for all concerned.
Growing up aware of all this because of a compulsive reading habit, I certainly had no desire whatsoever to be a journalist. The profession seemed to be all tribulation and zero reward, and I could not see why anybody would ever want to put themselves through any of that. Even after the interval of twenty odd years, having found myself inevitably drawn to the space because that was where the universe had deposited my unique set of talents, I focused my energies on American European-centred journalism which offered significantly more respect, money and job satisfaction.
And then that all changed.
Journalism is dead?
At the end of the Abacha era, when a strategically administered apple from the belly of a comely Indian damsel allegedly put an end to the military’s reign of terror, the profession of journalism in Nigeria had been mortally wounded. Once a respected pursuit alongside the likes of Law, Medicine and Engineering, it was now a pale simulacrum of what it once was, having been literally beaten to within an inch of its life. TELL, which took most of said beating never truly recovered.
If we want to maintain our full personhood as individuals and as a collective, there must always be a group of chroniclers who document the stories that will become history tomorrow
Even after Abacha’s demise, we then got the “democracy” that we are familiar with today, where journalists get insulted live on camera by politicians and thrown into jail by Little Napoleon state governors, and people get yanked off the radio midair and fined 7-digit sums for talking about factual historical events. The minority of journalists who do manage to keep up something roughly approximate to the work of their state-persecuted forebears only do so out of a mixture of economic independence – whereby Nigerian journalism is practically their passion project as against their full time job – and fearlessness bordering on fatalism.
It would seem as if despite the best efforts of the good men and women at TELL, Newswatch and other similar publications of their time, the military successfully defeated journalism in Nigeria. Which then begs the question – why do some of us even bother? Why do we continue to practise a profession that to all intents and purposes has been comprehensively destroyed and gutted of its intellectual core? Why do we keep putting our own well-being on the line to tell stories about a hostile establishment to an ignorant – if not equally hostile – audience? What is the point?
Long live journalism
The answer to this question lies in the fact that TELL and its co-travelers are still spoken about almost 30 years later. The brave documentation, reporting and storytelling from 1995 is the valuable archive resource of 2020. Yesterday’s journalism is today’s history. Were it not for the work of our older colleagues who bore the brunt of facing down a brutally hostile military establishment, we would simply have no information about certain aspects of Abacha’s government or life under him. Indeed the Oputa Panel made repeated reference to the work of these journalists while trying the likes of Barnabas Mshelia, aka “Sergeant Rogers.”
If someone did not report a story in 1995, it would have disappeared forever into a black hole of Nigeria’s traditional lack of historicity, condemned to become the historical equivalent of the hypothetical falling tree that some would argue makes no noise because nobody hears it.
The important things to note are that a.) regardless of how dark the night is, the morning has to come, because those trying to distort our ability to perceive reality itself cannot live forever – at some point, their mortality will be the ultimate decider of things, and a generational power shift WILL inevitably happen; and b.) Yesterday’s news stories are today’s history lessons.
In other words, if we want to maintain our full personhood as individuals and as a collective, there must always be a group of chroniclers who document the stories that will become history tomorrow. It may not necessarily be at the scale and audacity of a TELL, and of course we do not work for free, but at risk of invoking the supernatural, I believe that some of us are seemingly ordained to carry out this task – whether it is appreciated or not. It is the documentation of our daily existence for posterity which is itself our task, not necessarily getting anything to change.
My belief is that regardless of how plainly unmoved and intransigent the Nigerian people and their government are in the face of documentation, facts and figures, the rare creature that is a “true believer” in the profession of Nigerian journalism must keep on speaking out and telling stories, because that is how we indicate our presence permanently on the record of humanity.
Like the TELL and Newswatch catalogue, which are now priceless detailing an entire decade of a country’s national story, someday our work – however reviled and underappreciated – will speak to future generations and tell them “We were here.”
