Twenty analog years ago, on February 1, 2003, or thereabout, I wrote for one of the newspapers a piece welcoming Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola, to my demographic neighborhood on her 60th birthday, little knowing that she had actually preceded me to the precinct.
The Lady (hereafter HDA) turned 80 a week ago.
Her status as the Grand Doyenne of the Nigerian Press (I use that old-fashioned term advisedly) was affirmed by President Muhammadu Buhari in a stirring birthday tribute. Asiwaju Bola and Senator Remi Tinubu called her a valued friend and associate in advancing progressive causes. Dele Alake and Tunji Bello, who had served as editors for the Concord Newspapers, called her reverentially “our Editor-in-Chief.”
It is in the latter category that HAD’s renown will reverberate across time.
Her last address was the sprawling Concord Newspaper Group where she presided as Editor-in-Chief and chief operating officer. At its height, the Group boasted six titles in its stable, and had on its staff some of the best-known Nigerian journalists.
Its distribution network was unsurpassed in its reach and efficiency. If just one newspaper was on the newsstand in the most far-flung corners of Nigeria on any given day, it had to be of the Group’s titles.
In a male-dominated industry, leading such a conglomerate was no mean task. But HDA played that role for years and carried along a team comprising members of perhaps the most querulous occupational group.
It helped that she was the wife of Concord publisher. Chief Moshood Abiola, but it took much more than that to stay at the top of the game. HDA did not just walk into the role. Long years of academic and professional immersion had prepared her for it.
Graduating from the University of Ibadan in the 1960s, HDA entered journalism by serving as a writer and columnist for the Daily Sketch, in Ibadan. From there she went on to the Daily Times as part of the pioneering graduate team that its visionary leader, Babatunde Jose, had recruited to raise its intellectual appeal to match the appetite of an audience that had grown much more sophisticated than the leading newspaper of the day.
It was in keeping with that programme that the Daily Times sponsored HDA for doctoral studies at the University of Buffalo, in upstate New York. Before that, she had earned a Master’s degree from the highly regarded journalism programme at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin.
With the doctorate, the first by a Nigerian woman, she returned to Nigeria and served on the Editorial Board of the Daily Times, which Dr Stanley Macebuh had transformed from a routine expedient to the newspaper’s cranium.
Then, Moshood Abiola and the Concord Newspapers happened, in the aftermath of the 1979 General Election. HDA relocated uptown from Kakawa, to Ikeja, the operating base of the Concord Group, shortly thereafter becoming editor of its flagship title, The National Concord.
The Concord Group unapologetically pulled for President Shehu Shagari and the ruling NPN, despite their unpopularity in places where Nigeria’s core newspaper readership resided. Abiola’s endorsement of sharia grated against the sensibilities of Christians, leading some church officials to order a boycott of the Concord titles.
Moshood Abiola was also widely regarded as an apologist for the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. That did little to enhance the standing of the Concord titles.
Through it all, HDA kept the newspapers in a stable, holding, pattern. She came into her own when Moshood Abiola severed his links with the ruling party and became a less strident proselytizer. The Concord newspapers grew in appeal and respect.
A far greater challenge lay ahead.
It came when Moshood Abiola entered the 1993 presidential race and won the presidential ticket of one that is “a little to the left” of the two official political parties, the Social Democratic Party, the other being the “little to the right” National Republican Convention.
The Concord Newspapers, like the rest of the private press, saw through the duplicity of Babangida’s political transition programme and took a leading role in exposing it. The price was heavy. A banning order put its weekly newsmagazine African Concord permanently out of circulation.
The Concord titles were handed a wider banning order during the debacle confected to prevent Moshood Abiola from being declared winner of the 1993 presidential election. When the ban was lifted after a year, the operating climate had become unsustainable. The titles limped on for a while, shadows of what they once were. Then, they expired.
Abiola’s struggle to claim his electoral mandate thrust HDA into a role for which nothing had prepared her: spouse of an embattled president-elect, fighting for his life, under a brutal military regime, and editor-in-chief and chief operating officer of a mass-circulation newspaper.
In the Abiola household, there was an unspoken but clear division of labour among the wives. Kudirat Abiola was the popular face of NADECO, the umbrella organization of progressive elements campaigning to retrieve Abiola’s mandate. Outgoing, outspoken, and defiant right up to the moment she was gunned down in broad daylight by government-sponsored assassins on her way to yet another strategy meeting.
The thoroughly a-political and sedate but engaging Adebisi Abiola kept the home front humming.
HDA was the intellectual face of the struggle, the discreet mobilizer who maintained and used effectively a network of influential persons in Nigeria and abroad. She brought to this task mastery of the emergent communication technology.
At the height of the annulment crisis, she prepared – full disclosure: I assisted in the effort – a fortnightly newsletter on the political situation in Nigeria she sent to key officials of the United Nations, the United States, the Organization of African Unity, and the Commonwealth. From the feedback, we were satisfied that the effort was not wasted.
The June 12 struggle took a heavy toll on HDA. In all its obscenity, Kudirat’s assassination was a clear signal that nothing and nobody was off-limit in General Sani Abacha’s plan to foist his brutish rule on the nation. They kept her under surveillance. They drew her into enervating mind games.
Not long after Kudirat’s assassination, a bullet issuing from an undetermined origin would have struck HDA on the head right in her living room at the Abiola Residence in Opebi had she not shifted her position some two minutes earlier.
The stakes were prohibitive. Yet HDA kept faith and helped keep the struggle alive, until the President-elect was done to death, very conveniently across the coffee table from a United States delegation visiting ostensibly to facilitate his release from the military regime’s custody.
She did not confine her exertions to the Boardroom or political networking. She imparted her knowledge, skills, and insights to journalism students at the University of Lagos, among other institutions. She used her resources and influence to promote worthy causes nationwide. A generation of Nigerian women count her as a role model.
HDA’s sacrifice in the epic struggle has not been acknowledged, much less honoured. Recognition has instead flowed to fringe actors, and even to some who did everything in their power to thwart the struggle, to subvert the electoral mandate of Nigeria’s sovereign electors.
Her entry into the eighth decade of her life provides an opportunity to redress this neglect. In the next National Honours List, or based on a Special Citation, the Grand Doyenne of the Nigerian Press deserves to take her earned place among Nigeria’s truly exceptional figures.
