On May 20, Dan Agbese, renowed journalist, columnist and media administrator and former Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine was 70. In this interview with Deputy Editor Olayinka Oyegbile, Correspondent Gboyega Alaka, he talks about politics, media and the state of the nation. Excerpts.
How does it feel to be 70?
It doesn’t feel differently from when I was 69. I haven’t noticed any difference yet. I know that the wrinkles will eventually surface, but at least for now they have not surfaced. But I feel good. I feel quite good.
Now, when you view this business of journalism today from when you started, how do you feel?
I feel very happy because people of my generation who entered journalism in 1967 would appreciate the leap that we have made in terms of the development of the industry. At the time I ventured into journalism, there were very few graduates. Actually, I suspect that Mallam Adamu Ciroma, who was the editor of the New Nigerian Newspaper, was about the first graduate to have ventured into journalism. The entire newsroom was made up of mostly school-leavers and people who’d done short courses in British-run journalism schools and stuffs like that. By the time we set up Newswatch, the least qualification we asked for a reporter/researcher was a first degree. So, we’ve made a great leap as far as I am concerned. I am happy about the fact that people still regard this profession for what it is. Without the press, you can’t even really exercise the freedom of expression provided for in the constitution. So I’m proud of the level that we have attained.
Do you really feel the place of the media is well appreciated or that people just use the media and see them as ‘press boys’ and all that?
In every society people tend to see the role of the media as purely antagonistic, there is nowhere in the world where the news media is worshipped, either by the government or private individuals or business concerns; and therefore you do not expect a pat on the back all the time. Because the business of exposing people is not a business that those who are likely to be exposed will welcome, there is no way they can be pleased with you. Secondly it is important to bear in mind that the press is a social institution providing social services and because of this, everybody believes they could use it and they use it when it suits them. If it were not so, rich people would not invest in the press; the power of the press is massive. If a businessman has the power of the press behind him, he is far and above his business rivals. And so as a social institution, it is open to manipulations by the society itself, without anybody necessarily saying ‘thank you very much, well done.’
With the advent of graduates, doctoral degree holders and co working in the media, would you say the media has benefitted in any way? Has the level of discourse been raised?
Yes it has, because today, the average newspaper reader is also a graduate; is also an experienced person and probably widely travelled. And he doesn’t read only Nigerian newspapers; he also listens to news on radio and television from other countries and he can compare and contrast and tell when a Nigerian is doing well or at par with others from other parts of the world, or not. Secondly, in my time, the newsroom was divided to almost about three. The reporters were different from features writers. And then of course you have the sub-editors. Now, they have merged. The role of the feature writer of the time was to go behind the big news and write feature articles. The reporter was not allowed to do any analysis. All he had to do was write and report stories. Today, the features writing aspect has merged with the news reporting aspect; and there is a greater tendency to analyse. So you’re not just reading a story that’s telling you: who, where, how, why and the rest. So that merging of these functions has elevated reporting. It means that there is greater in-depth reporting than it used to be, and anybody going into the profession today will have to equip himself, not only in terms of being a reporter, because journalism now is a total thing. You’re a features writer; you’re an editorial writer; you’re a reporter. The only aspect of it that I regret – if that is the right word – is that the pupilage system is no longer there. Even as late as 1984/85, when we started Newswatch, our reporters/researchers were required to do only reporting. They had to report and give to senior editors who would then write the stories. They were also not allowed to have by-lines until they had gone through the process and the management was confident that they could earn their by-lines. That was the kind of training that we had in those days. The process inculcates in the reporter a very vital aspect of journalism, which is editorial judgment. Editorial judgment is not a function of education; it’s a function of experience and you can only have that experience if you have gone through it. What I see today is that a man is editor of a news publication and virtually all the people working under him would have the same level of qualification and experience. And so that pupilage system is non-existent.
The internet has democratized journalism, such that events happening are being reported instantly in the social media. For instance, if Shekau is arrested this morning and a newspaper comes out tomorrow morning with a headline like “Shekau arrested”, we all know the kind of reception it will get from the readers. This surely is a dilemma for the media. What is the way out?
No, no, no; it’s not a matter of way out. It is something that we should welcome, because you see in my younger days in the profession, the problem of spontaneity rested with the radio; because before you go to press, the radio would have carried it. But it didn’t make any difference because the radio couldn’t provide the background information; it couldn’t analyse and all that. And so people still had to wait till the following day to read the full details. It’s the same thing that is unfolding in the social media today. Part of it is that its reach; it is low-level, in the sense that you only have to have a computer and be computer-literate. Of course you can get most of that on your phones now, but you still have to be computer savvy. And so what it does today is that it gives the reporter an advanced notice of what is happening and challenge him to provide the real reasons, the analysis, the full details to what has happened.
What you’ve just said now is tantamount to giving hope to those who have come to believe that the online media is like a death knell on traditional print media. But you just talked about the radio being as instant as the online media and yet the print survived. Are you saying that indeed there is a future for print journalism?
Yes. You see, the printed word will never die out in the human society. What you are saying is also being said about book publishing, because people now do e-publishing and self-publishing and you don’t have to go to bookshops to buy books. So you can download books and your iPad can have up to ten thousand books, but how do you build a library. If I rely totally on social media and read e-newspapers and need to do a reference, where do I get the materials for the reference?
But you can still do that on-line.
Yes you can do it online, because there is a whole lot of information provided online. But when news is presented, it is gone, because they have to publish on a daily basis. I’m not talking about going to Google and all that now. What that aspect has done is that it has made research much easier, because you can sit by your desk and do all your researches and you don’t have to go to the library. But the news presentation, the news consumption will never be affected by the social media. That is my view. What I feel we should do is to recognise the immense challenges inherent in the social media and take advantage of it, instead of fearing that it’s going to affect the industry. There will be other inventions going forward. I mean, you don’t expect us to remain in those stone ages, when everybody had to use manual typewriters, and some people couldn’t use the typewriter and they had to write long-hand and have typists type it for them. All that is gone now.
You had the privilege to practice under the military and the civilian regimes, both in the first, second republic and now; so under which of the two systems would you say the press has blossomed better and has performed its functions more freely?
The most wonderful thing that can happen to the press anywhere in the world is to have an enemy. The press performs better under a situation of enmity. In other words, under the military regime, the military men were seen as usurpers and so they were our enemies, they were an army of occupation if you like; like our second colonial masters; so just as the press was used during colonial administration to fight the second colonial masters, so it was also used to fight the military regimes. What it did for the press was that it strengthened the press because the harsher the environment, the stronger the press becomes, because the more it struggled to assert itself. If you have a situation whereby nobody is saying anything, nobody cares what you’re writing, it’s not good. It gives the feeling of being ignored, and that is the worst thing that can happen to the press. The military will always care because they are on their toes. They knew the civilian politicians were fighting them, and so whatever measures they took to repress the press gave the press the impetus to fight back, to play its constitutional role. So if you look at it from the angle that the press tends to perform better in the face of adversity, then I would say under the military, we performed better. One problem with the civilian regime is that politicians, like the military, have no patience with the press. They believe that with the military gone, the media has no business attacking the government; which is what I keep hearing. ‘Oh you are criticising the president? You want to destroy democracy’. I don’t buy into that; as a matter of fact, it is criticism that strengthens democracy. Democracy is only a form of government; there is nothing sacrosanct about it and the press as an institution must respond accordingly. This is not to say that I’ll love the military to always be in power, but given the experience that we had, it definitely helped the press develop. Don’t forget that it was still the military that liberalised the electronic media, because under the constitution, the right to own radio and television was vested solely in the government. So aren’t we happy today to have all these independent radio and television stations? Aren’t we happy that we have these privately-owned newspapers and magazines? So things have changed a great deal. I began my rise in journalism during the military regime. I went through several phases during the Shagari administration, which was the first civilian regime that I worked under and I saw a lot of differences between the attitude of the military politicians and the civilian politicians. They had different attitudes towards the press. Part of the problem with the civilian politicians is their tendency to believe that every reporter has a price and therefore has to do their biddings. That is a problem.
Newswatch was generally seen as a breath of fresh air; bringing on investigative journalism into Nigerian journalism for the first time; why did you (Newswatch team) decided to chart a new course at the time, because you could easily have gone the familiar route?.
You see it boils down to what we said earlier about the social media and all that. We tried to do something new, which was a news magazine. All the magazines before then were features magazines, and were mainly monthly or quarterly. News magazine has a different bent, it is a cross between a monthly magazine and a daily newspaper. It takes from the monthly and the daily newspaper. Also, at the time we decided on a news magazine, Time and Newsweek were the only news magazines that were read in Nigeria, and they were having problems in getting here. More importantly we wanted to do something that had not been done before.
Looking back now, the idea of giving up the Newswatch franchise do you think it was the best thing?
As at the time we did we did our best and thought it was the best. We had put together in a basket a lot of ambitious projects. We wanted to move the magazine to the next level, we knew at that time that the company could not survive on the magazine alone. We have before that tried to publish other magazines, we had published Quality magazine. We wanted to do a woman’s magazine, but too our total shock, the women rejected the magazine. So it didn’t do as well as we thought it should. And then we tried to do provincial journalism, we floated Eko Weekly Newspaper, which we wanted to be sold only in Lagos, and report all the news about Lagos; but again, we didn’t seem to get it right because the people only understood morning and evening newspapers. In 2008 or 2009, we now decided to expand and see what we could do to shore up the magazine itself, so we decided we were going to have a radio station; and that we were going to publish a daily newspaper, we were also going to have a printing press. As a matter of fact, the issue of a printing press had been with us from the very first day of Newswatch publication. And we put all these things together and it came to a whole lot of money. We approached the banks, but what they were offering us was paltry amount of money. So we decided to look out to see if we could have private investors who would be interested. That was Jimoh Ibrahim came in. We thought he shared our vision and shared our concerns. We had a lot of plans for Newswatch and you’d agree with me that except for the Tribune, all the newspapers that came at the time Chief Obafemi Awolowo set up the Tribune are all gone. Even the biggest of them, the Daily Times is gone. And we thought we could make the difference and that Newswatch will be there. We did it with the best intentions. But you see, my intentions may not be the same as someone else’s intentions. So what happened is regrettable. It is something that we’re going to live with for the rest of our lives. It affected the whole Newswatch family.
The big news around the world now is Chibok. Do you think the Nigerian media has justified its role in the reportage of what is happening?
My answer to that is a very loud ‘No’. The shame of it all is that we get news about Chibok from foreign media, foreign television reporters going to Chibok to report to us exactly what is happening there. True, going to Chibok is a risky business, but if you take away the risk from journalism, it looses its entire integrity and honour. Sometimes, it is the risk that attracts people to the profession, because the aspiring journalists want to see how these things are done. So I expected to see a better approach. When for instance the Ministry of Defence came out with the story that most of the girls had been rescued, when they knew that they had not been rescued, we just went on publishing the story, with nobody saying ‘OK, they’ve been rescued, where are they?” This is a basic question. A whole school was burnt down; we have a principal in that school, we have teachers in that school; and we are talking of over 200 girls abducted, who have parents. And nobody except the foreign media could go to this place and talk to the principals, teachers and parents! This is something that we ought to be able to do ourselves. In fact, I received a mail from one of our former editors, who said she was pinning for Newswatch and that she was sure that in those days, Newswatch would have piled up a file on Chibok, the people that are there, the military operations, the Ministry of Defence and all that. But today, nobody is doing that. One of our general editors at Newswatch, spent nearly a week riding in the creeks with the militants at the height of their operations. All she wanted was to be able to meet with their leaders and have an interview. And she did. Not once but twice. We sent a reporter, an editor all the way to Afghanistan. When they dumped toxic waste in Koko, we sent a reporter all the way to the source in Amsterdam. When we heard about Nigerian girls being taken to Italy for prostitution, we sent a reporter. So maybe that kind of fire is not burning in the newsroom anymore.
Could this be a matter of funding or lack of commitment, because with the newsrooms is filled with graduates of different backgrounds and experiences, it surely would not be for a lack of ideas?
This is not even an idea, it is a running story. Maybe the editors are looking at it differently. I don’t believe it has to be as a result of funding. The integrity of a publication is based on how daring it can be. And the more daring you are, the more popular you become and the more seriously you’d be taken and therefore get returns on your investments.
Could this also be the typical the Nigerian mentality? Because the situation is that if a reporter goes to the Ministry of Defence to apply to go to Chibok, he is likely to be scorned or refused a pass, but a reporter comes from abroad they are ready to escort and guide him or her.
Well in a way it is. That’s what I talked about a while ago. If you allow the politicians look down on you, they will. If you let them treat you like a boy, they will. In my experience, at no time did we ask for permission to go anywhere to do our job. We simply went. And once you can do that, they will respect your daring and support you. What you’re talking about is not just happening today. In past administrations for as long as I can remember, it has always been easier for a foreign reporter to come and obtain information here than our own indigenous reporters.
The biography on former military president, Ibrahim Babangida raised a bit of dust. Here was a man who practically brought Newswatch to its knees at a time. And then there were other persecutions on the team and the industry, yet you turn around to write a book on him to kind of ‘deify’ him.
Well, I’d say that is an unfortunate conclusion. You have to read the book to know whether or not I in anyway ‘deified’ him. Doing a book on him is not an endorsement of whatever he did or stood for. Doing a book on him was a way of looking at the military politics in the country, hence the title, Ibrahim Babangida, the Military politics and power. In my second book, Fellow Nigerias; I began from Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s coup of 1966 and took each coup’s speech, whether successful or otherwise and analysed it against the background of the prevailing socio-economic situation of the time in order to make those who were not around at the time look back and understand exactly where we were and what happened. It was the same approach I took to the Babangida book, and I believe that we’ll benefit a great deal if more people can write on our former leaders and bring out the essential things about them; the circumstances that brought them up, because you see, when Babangida entered the military in 1962, it was not exactly his own decision. The dynamics of Nigerian politics got him and eight of his classmates into the military. So it is something that you ought to look at, in terms of the dynamics of our national politics. There must have been a reason for this. Remember Ojukwu saying that when he wanted to go into the military, his father kicked against and all that; and he said to him: the future of Africa belongs to the military. And it is true to some extent, because at a time, three-quarters of African countries were being ruled by the military. It is in the same way that when Babangida was voted Man of the Year in 1990 by Newswatch, the criticism was ‘why should you do that?’ But it was essentially a news judgment. Remember Time Magazine put Adolf Hitler on its cover, but he didn’t do anything positive. He simply caused the World War. But he shook the world anyway. There you are. And then whatever you say; the fact is that we are reaping the seed that Babangida sowed. Supposing he had prosecuted the transition programme to a logical end and handed over the government to the winner, the entire architecture of our national politics would have changed. So it is an action that he took that has ramifications beyond his time and will continue to affect the history of this country.
If you look back, whether as a reporter, editor or publisher, are there some decisions you took that you think you shouldn’t have been taken? What are the highest points of your professional life and the lowest?
When you become an editor is your highest point in the profession and I became an editor in 1978, when I was appointed editor of the Nigerian Standard in Jos. And for me, I thought that was the highest I was going to go. And then later on I became editor of the New Nigerian; and Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine. Before then, I was General Manager of Radio Benue before I took up appointment as director of information, which was a political appointment. So I rose to the top of my career and I’m grateful to God for it and grateful to those who made it possible. I don’t look at the low points in my life because everybody has series of low points. But as journalism is concerned, I can’t remember a single decision that I took that I every regretted. I have always tried to do my job professionally. You may not agree with me, but in my view, it was always not easy to disagree with the reasons for which I took certain decisions.
