A master-reporter on top of his game

By Tatalo Alamu

 

In Born into Journalism: Memoir of a Newspaper Reporter, Kayode Soyinka has penned a memorable and unforgettable memoir, destined to become a classic of its genre. The great memoir requires three vital ingredients: excellent writing skills, a vivid imagination and fantastic memory. This memoir boasts of all the three qualities. Arguably Nigeria’s best known and best-connected international journalist, Soyinka can now be said to have joined its pantheon of remarkable writers.

Written in crisp, lucid prose and with the fastidious elegance of a man who cannot afford to make mistakes, this is the moving story of growing up and maturing in full public glare. Having started out as a boy-reporter, barely eighteen years of age, Soyinka has become an elder-statesman of Nigerian journalism and himself a grandfather to boot.

How time flies, we may say. But flying time also carries storms and biting dunes. The journey has not been easy. It requires hard work, persistence and integrity. Soyinka is an epitome of all these. Despite his perpetual boyish looks and spontaneous affability, he can be as tough and hard as a palm kernel. At the appropriate time, the hardy no-nonsense Owu man in him always comes to the fore hinting the unwary that this is not a person to needlessly or heedlessly toy or tangle with.

The road to excellence and human distinction always requires hard work and unremitting toil. From humble beginnings, Soyinka has clawed his way up to the summit of his profession. He has collected a few scars along the way. But then, the road to stardom and distinction is not for the weak, the feeble and the faint-hearted. As this rich memoir unfolds, you have a sense of destiny and inexorable fate and of a career guided by providence.

So racy is the pace of this book, so riveting are the revelations of the intrigue-soaked nature of contemporary Nigerian journalism, and such is the remarkable clarity of exposition, that it was after a first reading that a reader drew the this writer’s attention to the copious praises of admiration and appreciation heaped upon him by the author.

Soyinka was not born with a golden spoon. Although his parents could not be described as dirt poor, they were far from affluent. Life began in a room and parlour apartment of a garrison-like block belonging to Alhaja Humani Alaga, the famed Ibadan women leader and staunch Action Group supporter. The occupants of each apartment were identified by the number. The Soyinkas were known to the co-denizens as No2.

Even when they moved to their own buildings at the low-keyed suburbs of Odo Ona, things were far from rosy. The father was mid-ranking storekeeper at the Nigerian Tobacco Company while the mother was a dutiful and devoted seamstress.

Like many members of the southern educated class thrown up by colonial intervention, the Soyinka parents subsumed their own ambition in the ambition of their children selflessly giving up whatever aspirations they had for the sustenance and upbringing of their offspring. Soyinka’s mother made sure that her children stood out from the crowd and were always elegantly turned out while the father made sure they never lacked anything within what his meagre resources could afford.

It was a childhood of happiness and contentment. An extant picture of the time shows a swankily suited Kayode and his older brother, Adesina, flanking their equally comely mother. Another shows the two brothers finely attired like royal princes peering at the outside world in satisfaction and unruffled delight.

It was a confidence and capacity-boosting upbringing. Kayode grew up a confident and self-assured person. This began to show right from primary school. It was as if the young boy was marked by a star quality. In 1967 at the age of nine he was chosen to lead the entire Western state’s troops of the Boys’ Scout to welcome to their camp the military governor of the state,   the then Brigadier-General Adeyinka Adebayo.

He had followed up on this star performance at the Primary School with an equally impressive string of laurels in Secondary School. The famous Baptist Boys High School was his father’s alma mater and he felt very much at home in the Egba ambience. Soyinka was an organist, a soprano and a champion debater for the school. At this point, any lingering doubt that the young man was marked out for greater things would have been dispelled.

But no one knew where and how the pendulum would swing. The young Soyinka had wanted to be a lawyer, a journalist or a political scientist. In the event, a combination of totally unforeseen developments conspired to push him in the direction of journalism.  A friend of his uncle and a power broker in the old Sketch establishment had come visiting and had encouraged him to apply to the organization whenever they advertised for the job of a reporter.

One thing led to another and shortly afterwards, Soyinka found himself ensconced as a cub reporter at the head office of the Sketch Publishing Company in Ibadan. As usual, he proved himself a fast and diligent learner. His courtroom reports from Iyaganku soon attracted the attention of the authorities and he was celebrated as a young man of great promise. Some of the lowly staff began hailing him as editor in the making.

There can be no doubt that given the remarkable flair he had shown for the job within a short period and his outstanding competence, Kayode would eventually have made the editorship cadre of the newspaper. But that was only if things had remained stable and events had remained constant and unchanging.

But in human affairs the only constant thing is the sheer inconstancy of events and the random contingencies of life itself. What seemed like an open door could lead to a cul de sac while a cul de sac could suddenly become a wide thoroughfare. Impressed by Soyinka’s star performance, the authorities at Sketch Publishing Company decided to send him for further training at the famous Fleet Street College of Journalism in London.

The deal was that after his training, the budding journalist would be bonded to the company for the number of years. To cap it all, soon after he arrived in London, Soyinka was appointed as the London correspondent of the newspaper. In effect, he had become the overall head of the London Bureau of the newspaper, a very big post for a young man of twenty three.

For the young man what appeared to be a glittering entrée into the powerful world of global opinion brokers actually turned out to be a gruelling rite of initiation into the often paranoid, cloak and dagger milieu of journalism .Six months before he could finish his course both his appointment as London correspondent and his sponsorship got the big boot.

After the installation of the new civilian administrator in Oyo state and the emergence of Segun Osoba, the veteran journalist and administrator, as the new helmsman, a gale of furious recriminations and terminations of appointment swept through the newspaper. According to his memoir, Osoba himself had been at the receiving end of the intrigues and high-wire politics even before his appointment.

But now that he was in charge, it was obvious that he was not going to allow people of unsure and divided loyalty to sabotage his efforts at rebuilding and repositioning the paper. Despite his excellent performance on the job, Soyinka must have been fingered as a protégé and beneficiary of Dayo Duyile who was Osoba’s principal rival for the job and a known sympathiser of the NPN, a party that had been resoundingly trounced at the polls.

All entreaties that Soyinka was a neutral and independent player fell on deaf ears. Even the hint that the Sketch Publishing Company was legally bound to fulfil its side of the contract to sponsor the young journalist cut no ice with the authorities.  Rather than going back to Sketch in an atmosphere of hostility and humiliation, Soyinka was faced with no alternative than to resign his position and seek his fortunes elsewhere.

His next port of call was the Concord Group under Henry Odukomaiya who appointed him as the London correspondent of the newspaper owned by the business magnate, MKO Abiola. It was a very rewarding time professionally for the young journalist. He was to serve under the tutelage of some of the best editors the country had thrown up as at that time: Doyin Abiola, Yakubu Mohammed, Ray Ekpu, Duro Onabule and Dele Giwa who took to the young journalist as if he was a blood relation.

But MKO Abiola’s management style was as eccentric as it was unpredictable. He could hire and fire with remorseless alacrity, depending on which side of the bed he had woken up. He once ordered Kayode through a phone call from Lagos to fire his own blood brother as Financial Director of the company. Sule Abiola was on holiday in London and was staying with the newly wedded Soyinkas.

It was an unmistakable sign of inevitable mishap and it came sooner than later. What began as a chummy father and son relationship in which Abiola ceded to Kayode the right to sign cheques on his behalf and the authority to disburse enormous sums of money without any clearance eventually degenerated into a traumatic tiff with the young foreign correspondent shortly after his wedding.

When Abiola could not get any of his top management team to fire Soyinka, he undertook to write and sign the letter of dismissal himself. This was after a tense faceoff. The newly wedded journalist whose wife was expecting their first baby had appeared tardy and reluctant to comply with an earlier instruction to report forthwith to the Lagos Headquarters on the legitimate ground that he was not recruited from Nigeria.

After a brief stint with Peter Enahoro’s  Africa Now, Soyinka was appointed the founding London Bureau Chief of the newly established trendsetting Newswatch magazine. It was a reunion of professional soul mates. The trio of Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed finally got their own comeuppance from the implacable business mogul after a celebrated public spat.

It was at Newswatch that fate played its cruellest joke on Soyinka. On the morning of October 19, 1986, Dele Giwa was blown out of existence after a huge envelope which turned out to be a parcel bomb was handed over to him in his study by Soyinka having been delivered by some mysterious people who were said to have come on a motor bike.  It was a novel and daring method of elimination which sent shock waves through the nation.

Soyinka was in Lagos on routine consultation with his bosses at Newswatch. As anybody who knew him well enough would attest, Dele Giwa lived virtually in his study where he loved to have his meals and hold intense intellectual conversations while showing off his rich collections of books, records and other memorabilia. As the first non-staff columnist of Newswatch, had yours sincerely been in Lagos on one of those trips, he would certainly have been in the study.

In order to obliterate traces of the heinous crime and fob off genuine investigations, Soyinka became a victim of a cruel and vicious game of disinformation so beloved of the intelligence community. Despite the fact that he lay critically wounded with concussions and perforated eardrums next room to where Dele Giwa’s shattered body was laid out, he was fingered as a prime suspect in the dastardly murder.

As Soyinka himself puts the absurdity of the development in this gripping memoir: “This could only have happened if I was a suicide bomber. Otherwise, how could anyone explain someone carrying a parcel bomb and knowingly detonating it in his own presence?” (p296)  Yet this notwithstanding,  a rogue organization actually took him to court on the ground of being the principal suspect and for years his name was fed into all entry and exit points as an assassin on the loose. Nigeria had become an Orwellian nightmare.

After being smuggled out of Nigeria in a disoriented and dishevelled heap, Kayode Soyinka was to give the country a wide berth for six years until the Babangida military junta fell in utter disgrace and terminal disorientation as a result of the annulment of the June 12 1993 presidential election emphatically won by MKO Abiola, Soyinka’s old boss. Soyinka was later to team up with Abiola in London in the battle to reverse the annulment of the election.

For Soyinka, it was the hour of gold as well as the hour of lead. While the spectacular success of Newswatch magazine brought him considerable international attention, the even more spectacular despatch of its charismatic founding editor in his presence brought him global name recognition. Fate had once again played a cruel card. This was not the kind of immortality anyone would crave and it concentrated his mind about securing his own lasting legacy.

After almost two decades of tumultuous apprenticeship, Soyinka decided to strike out on his own. In May, 1995, the international magazine, Africa Today, debuted with Soyinka as publisher and editor in chief to much hoopla and considerable attention. It had carried a rare full interview with the iconic Nelson Mandela who also graced the cover. The boy from Odo Ona has come into his own.

This was where fate conjoined the two of us once again. Yours sincerely was designated columnist and editor at large, a relationship which subsists till the moment. Our first piece was an October 1st survey of Nigeria, titled: A Giant Toddler At Thirty Five. It is left to morbid anatomists to conclude whether twenty six years after Nigeria remains a toddler or a monster man-child.

It is a tribute to Soyinka’s courage and audacity that Africa Today is still standing where many others have faltered and fallen. The magazine has weathered some severe storms including two seizures by the Abacha junta over articles written by yours sincerely. At a point, the exasperated dark goggled tyrant was known to have exploded: “Who is …..?” (Name withheld)  But that is a story for another day.

This is a moving story of quiet heroism and dignified generosity of spirit. At every turn, Soyinka heaps effusive praises on his comely and personable wife, Titilope. Born into Journalism is the work of a master journalist at the very summit of his trade. Kayode Soyinka has come a long way indeed.

 

from Latest Nigeria News, Nigerian Newspapers, Politics https://ift.tt/3bKd7Ah
via IFTTT