Broadcasters
While serving as an adjunct lecturer at the Mass Communication Department of the Fountain University, Osogbo about seven years ago, I had close interactions with students and fellow tutors, all of whom charmed me with their love for the profession but none of them saw what I saw and what I had passed through as an on-the-field media practitioner.
Introspectively, I should have suggested to the department leadership a need to introduce “Media Practice and Hazards” as a distinct course of study aimed principally at exposing students to sizes of potholes and traps laid ahead of them in the course of meeting their obligations as public watchdog and agenda setter. This course would prepare and guide students to chose whether to join the newsroom or public relations, advertising, marketing and other arms of the media.
On this job, I have dined with few unavoidable hazards including but not limited to security agents harrasment, detention, public embarrasment and killer auto-crashes occuring day and dusk. Yet, I have no regret because my being a journalist came from conviction rather than intuition. My choice followed the law of comparative advantage from the age I began to consciously listen to sound of texts on newsprint.
When about two weeks ago, I was alerted to a faceless character who nicknamed me a brown envelope journalist, I laughed heartily and pittied the fingers that typed those letters. This incident is an addition to the danger tied to the scrotum of my profession and its practice. So, regardless of that childish offensive against my person, life goes on; life must go on because I am unpertubed; and because of realisation that every journalist who is a journalist should not be carried away and rush to bed by thunderous ovation accompanying his exclusive reports on the front page cover. He/she should also anticipate fire and smoke, including that which suffocated the flourishing life of the pioneer Editor of the Sunday Concord in 1980 and founding Editor-In-Chief of the Newswatch in 1984, Mr Sunmonu Oladele Giwa 39 years ago precisely.
I have since ceased mourning Giwa the moment I realised that by his body of texts, by his nature of death and by spontanous events that followed his exit, including the new book–“Beyond Expectations”–just dropped by one of his colleagues, a co-founder of the radical newsmagazine, Mr Yakubu Mohammed, he is arguably immortal.
But I shall continue to remember his open acknowledgement of his self-confidence, energy and impatience on his job. Recalling his landmark reign as an ebbulient feature editor of the Daily Times in 1979, his very first job in Nigeria upon his return from the US where he had been trained, Giwa said something about his Editor, Mr Tony Momoh. What did he say on Momoh, who later became Minister of Information in the General Ibrahim Babangida regime, capacity of which he witnessed the burial of Giwa in his Ugbeke Ekperi hometown on November 8, 1986?
Giwa said,” Momoh (the then Editor of the Daily Times) was the only type of editor who could stomach my madness. I was a made young man then. I was only lucky the Concord came out.”
May his loving soul continue to rest in perfect peace.
