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Tag: Allah De

  • Adieu, Allah De

    Adieu, Allah De

    His nom de plume, ‘Allah De’, was as creative as it was revealing. It was not only an imaginative stylisation of his first name, Alade; it also gave a glimpse of the foundations of his moral platform, an aspect that perhaps informed his journalistic practice. This pen-name, a combination of the Islamic term for God and a Pidgin English word signifying existence, reflected his Muslim faith and his conviction about the place of the divine in human affairs. In the context of his work as journalist and conscience of society, it was a well chosen pseudonym that announced to power especially that a Higher Power was watching.

    It is sad that the man who branded himself with such captivating deliberateness, Alhaji Alade Idowu Odunewu, made a terminal exit in Lagos on July 25, at age 85. He belonged to a vanishing generation of journalists who, in professional terms, straddled the country’s colonial and post-independence eras. Furthermore, as a journalist he experienced both democratic rule and military dictatorship in the country’s political evolution.  This chronological framework and professional exposure meant that he was not only witness to the shifting landscape of journalism in the country; he also played important roles in advancing the value of the media.

    His career, which began in 1950 at the Daily Times where he worked as a reporter and sub-editor, turned out to be an odyssey that took him even to government positions. One of the earliest Nigerians formally trained in Journalism, he studied on a Federal Government scholarship at the Regent Street Polytechnic, London, (now University of Westminster), where he won the Commonwealth New Statesman Prize for the best all-round student.  His professional trajectory also took him to the Nigerian Tribune and the Allied Newspapers of Nigeria, before he became the Editor, Sunday Times, and later Daily Times. He also served as editor-in –chief at the well respected Daily Times, and CEO of the media empire’s publications division.

    However, it was as a columnist that Odunewu attained immortal celebrity, and his Allah De column was a must-read for legions of newspaper readers across the country. Indeed, he wrote his column well into his advanced years, and it is heart-warming that a collection of his writings spanning 1963 to 2000 has been published with the title Winner Takes All. Allah De, well rated for his masterly written insightful pieces and witty style, earned the flattering epithet “dean of satirical journalism”, a decoration inspired by the late political titan and orator,  Nnamdi Azikiwe.

    His place in the pantheon of journalistic greats is definitely assured, having been named among the icons of the practice in 140 years of Nigerian Journalism. Honours from industry institutions like the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) of which he was a president, the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN) and the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NUJ), cemented his status as a model. It is to his credit that Odunewu employed his undoubted sense of professionalism as chair of the Nigerian Press Council. Equally noteworthy is the fact that his acclaimed integrity earned him public service positions at different periods, including Commissioner for Information and Tourism in Lagos State (1973-1975), Lagos State Public Complaints Commissioner, and Federal Electoral Commissioner for the 1979 general elections.

    His love for Journalism and devotion to the finest standards of practice were evident, and his enthusiastic association with the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME) and the Nigerian Media Merit Awards (NMMA) till the end, were testimonies to his commitment. With his departure, it is hoped that, in his honour, the DAME Informed Commentary prize which he sponsored from 1992, and the NMMA Columnist of the Year prize which he sponsored from 2006, would not be allowed to die.

  • Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    Allah-De: A model, and a monument

    How time flies!

    It seems only a year or two ago – three at most — that a good many of Alade “Allah De” Odunewu’s contemporaries in his years at Kakawa and a host of his admirers gathered to honour him at ceremonies marking his 80th birthday.

    As befitted the occasion, reminiscences of the Man of the Day filled the air – his essential decency, his quiet dignity, his sardonic wit, his mastery of the art of satire, his unwavering professionalism, and the great mentoring skills he brought to bear on the grooming of a generation of Nigerian newspapermen and women.

    I found myself then thinking about Odunewu and two of his younger contemporaries at Kakawa — Peter Enahoro, who entered Nigerian journalism as “George Sharp” and is much better known as “Peter Pan,” and Sam Amuka who began his journalistic career as “Offbeat Sam,” and morphed later into “Sad Sam.” Though their Kakawa overlapped, each exercised editorial suzerainty at different times over the mighty journalism empire that the late Babatunde Jose built.

    Of the three, Odunewu was the most self-effacing.

    The boyishly handsome face of Enahoro, Odunewu’s star predecessor at the Daily Times adorned his column “Life with Peter Pan.” His bohemian lifestyle perfused it. Amuka signed his column with a sketch of his jaunty, hirsute self wearing a floppy hat and blowing a trumpet from the wrong end, and he lived up to that iconoclastic billing.

    Odunewu permitted only an outline sketch of his face to appear on the column, simply called Allah De. It showed him in a thoughtful, Byronic pose, wearing what looked like a French suit, and a skullcap.

    This depiction, it now seems in retrospect, was his way of signaling that though the “Allah De” column would inevitably be a projection of Alade Odunewu the columnist, it was not going to be extension of his person.

    That, after all, was the tradition at Fleet Street, then the mecca of journalism, a tradition in which he had been schooled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in London, where he won the highest accolade bestowed on students from the Commonwealth.

    From the first column he wrote for the Daily Times after crossing over from the Allied Newspapers group where he had risen through the ranks to the position of editor-in-chief, you knew you were in the hands of a different person – different in temperament, in style, and in his concerns.

    One of the defining attributes of professionalism, sociologists tell us, is the capacity to separate fact from feeling. On this score, Odunewu must be rated the consummate professional.

    He dissected the issues of the day clinically, based on what he judged to be their merits. You suspected that he had to have some affiliations, if only by virtue of his being human. But you could never guess just what those affiliations consisted in. He kept them discreetly, and I should add, decently, to himself.

    The closest he came to volunteering something about himself was during one of the religious upheavals that have now become endemic in Nigeria, when he revealed that his wife was a Catholic. His Hadj title gave away his identity as a devout Muslim, but you could not guess it from his writing.

    It is not for nothing that Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the finest newspapermen to emerge from these parts, canonised Odunewu as the dean of Nigerian satirical writing. Satire was the stuff of his work. Master of the well-placed innuendo, and of what the British call “damnation by feint praise,” Odunewu deftly laid bare the follies and foibles of his era without wounding the vanities of the men and women of the moment.

    Enahoro took great pride in being “controversial” and “hard-hitting.” Odunewu was self-effacing even when delivering those gentle jabs, those pin-pricks that in the end proved just as effective, even if not as dramatic, as a sensational knockout.

    Those were my reminiscences when Alade Odunewu turned 80, in 2007.

    He died six days ago, aged 85.

    Not much can be added to the tributes that poured forth on that epochal milestone and have been cascading since he drew his last breath.

    Odunewu knew no retirement or semi-retirement for that matter. Long after he quit active newspapering, he was an influential presence wherever journalism was being discussed, contributing insights and suggesting strategy and tactics, and generally helping to raise its professional and ethical tone.

    He steered the Nigerian Press Council for about a decade, monitoring performance, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and providing magisterial guidance for future conduct. The Council had won only grudging acceptance from the media at its inception and, with a person of lesser specific gravity than Odunewu as chair, it would have been marked for failure.

    For the better part a decade, he presided over the Nigeria Media Merit Awards recognising excellence in various aspects of print and broadcast journalism.

    It is a mark of his commitment to the pursuit of journalistic excellence that he personally endowed one of the most prestigious prizes in the business, the Alade Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary, administered by the premier industry journal, Lanre Idowu’s Media Review.

    Now was it an accident that when new titles entering the Nigerian newspaper market used his name and prestige as strong selling points. Thus it was with The Guardian at its launch in 1984, and much later, in 1999, with The Comet, now defunct, where managing director Lade “Ladbone” Bonuola proudly introduced him as “our leader.”

    Without question, he will be remembered as one of the greatest pillars of Nigerian journalism — pillar by force of personal example, by tireless exertion. In that respect, he was a model.

    He was also a monument – monument to an enduring commitment to the best practices in journalism, to “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” as the evocative motto of The New York Times has it.

    His public service also bore the stamp of distinction. As the Commissioner for Information and Tourism in Lagos State from 1973 through 1975, he helped nurture and consolidate the state’s communications infrastructure. His even temperament and innate sense of fairness and justice suited him especially for the post of Lagos State Public Complaints Commissioner, a remit he discharged with his accustomed distinction.

    As a member of the Federal Electoral Commission that midwifed Nigeria’s transition from military rule to republican democracy in 1979, he was a front-row witness in the manipulations, the opportunistic revisions and the desperate fudging that handed Shehu Shagari and the NPN victory at the first ballot during the presidential race. But you could never get him to discuss them even off the record.

    A man of the utmost discretion, he seemed to have resolved to take those secrets with him to the grave. That may explain, at least in part, why he never wrote his memoirs when he was so abundantly endowed for the task.

    In more than four decades at the front ranks of journalism and public service in a country where the next major scandal is just one news bulletin away, Alade Odunewu served and thrived without being tainted even by a whiff of impropriety.

    There is no greater tribute.

     

    Portions of this article first appeared in my December 11, 2007, column for this newspaper, titled “The Kakawa Triumvirate”.

     

  • A long farewell from Allah De

    A long farewell from Allah De

    This column this morning mourns the passing of a great mentor, senior friend, ardent fan and journalistic icon, Alhaji Alade Idowu Odunewu. Allah De, as he was famously known, was easily one of the greatest columnists anywhere in the world in the last century. An illustrious scion of an illustrious family, the great journalist was a master of elegant prose and a man of outstanding personal polish.

    To have known Allah De was to know a man of culture, civility, restraint and gentlemanly sensitivity to others. There was about him the urbane self-mastery that go with superior breeding. True eminence does not push its pre-eminence. Self-assured and assured of his place in the ranking order, Allah De was an old Lagosian in the classic sense of that word: a combination of the fabled English gentleman who wears his hat and distinction lightly and the Yoruba Omoluabi who knows that what is left unsaid is also the most profoundly eloquent.

    Anybody who has come across the likes of Chief Folarin Coker who recently turned ninety, Mr Akintola Williams who is in his nineties, Chief Chris Ogunbanjo, the departed Chief Justice Fatai Atanda-Williams, the late I.S Adewale a.k.a “the boy is good”, the legendary Mobolaji Bank-Anthony and many others still living will know what we mean. These inscrutable, wise, unflappable, unfailingly polite and courteous gentlemen represent the seamless meshing of the very best of two global civilizations with a hint of Islamic chivalry.

    But they are a vanishing breed in a vanishing world. Allah De represents the last of the titans and the very last of the Mohicans. With his passing, Nigeria is a poorer place indeed. It is the last snapshot of Edwardian Lagos. For a long time, the old man had been hinting that he felt like an alien in an alien and alienating society.

    He could no longer make sense of the terrible fate that has overtaken his beloved profession and even more so his country. Despite his quiet visionary rallying of the remaining faithful, the old ethos had come irreversibly unstuck in a brave new Nigeria. Journalists have become business men and business men have become journalists. Consequently, the Fourth Estate of the Realm has become the Fourth Realm of the Estate.

    The whole world has gone out of joints. This was not the country they fought for with their pen and moral authority. Pirates, predators and other social piranhas have taken over the country. Like a bewildered but wise statesman, Allah De took solace in stoic, studied silence and solitary meditation, quietly waiting for the green light of terminal exit. It came at 2pm on Thursday afternoon.

    Snooper had been trapped in an impossible traffic snafu on the Gbagada loop when the news came. The tangled web of belching trailers, smoking and hissing petrol tankers and assorted automotive psychotics reminded one of the Abagana Civil War inferno. But this was a most uncivil war. Darkness had suddenly descended. Chief Adeniyi, retired FRCN director and loyal junior friend of Allah De, had been trying to get in touch with the dismal network not availing. He finally sent a text. The great masquerade had departed.

    It took quite a while for the news to sink in. Alhaji Odunewu was by no stretch of the imagination a young man. He had lived to ripe old age and had fulfilled his mission in life. Rather than mourning, it should be a celebration of a great life of glittering achievements and personal fulfillment. But death is death and the horror of terminal exit often leads to a temporary disorientation and the loss of customary rotes and routines.

    As yours sincerely was trying to come to terms with death in the tormenting tortoise of traffic, the phone rang and it was Lanre Idowu, one of the remaining stars and exemplars of the old school of journalism. “Lanre, don’t try to break any bad news to me”, snooper admonished him. Ignoring snooper’s disquiet, the notable journalist had gone ahead to confirm the news of Allah De’s passing.

    It was after this that Chief Adeniyi finally came through. He informed that the old man left in his usual quiet, peaceful and dignified manner, without any self-important fuss or fancy. He had tidied his earthly affairs and had scrupulously made arrangements for his own burial. It would take place the following day in keeping with the simple rites of Islam somewhere off Gambari Street in the very bowels of old Lagos. And that was that.

    Our paths had first crossed in disarming circumstances in late 1982. It was a most fortuitous encounter. A man of amazing grace and courtesy, the old man had journeyed all the way from Lagos to the great citadel of learning and culture to show his gratitude to a friend and colleague of snooper who had been of great help to his daughter in his tutorial classes. But the old Lagosian had lost his way in the jungle of pristine beauty and had showed up at snooper’s door. Snooper instantly recognised the great journalist and volunteered to take him to his destination. It was the beginning of a long relationship marked by strategic distance, discretion and mutual admiration.

    Famously dubbed the Dean of satirical journalism in Nigeria by the great Zik in the course of their epic duel over diarchy in 1973, Allah De was as sharp as he was witty. His limpid, free flowing, uncluttered prose was an orgiastic delight and vintage Fleet Street. On top of his form, Allah De recalls Baron William Rees-Mogg, the aristocratic British journalist, politician, editor and statesman, who plied his trade as a reporter-columnist into his eighties until he succumbed to cancer last December.

    Forty years on, snooper recalls the historic journalistic affray between Zik and Allah De, particularly with the wily Fabian lion and magnificent former prize fighter baiting the journalistic tiger out of his corner with the offer of some preliminary skirmishes before the main tournament. It was Fabius Cuntactor, the great Roman general and owner of the brand, who had famously noted that preliminary skirmishes must not be fought with major artillery. Allah De rallied heroically and the result was a memorable intellectual slugfest that reverberates till date.

    Great statesman versus great journalist, they do not make them like that any more in Nigeria. Forty years after, as Nigeria lurches between violent and autocratic military rule and equally violent and despotic civilian rule the debate about diarchy continues to resonate. About a fortnight ago, the whole concept was dredged up once again by a forthright columnist on The Nation.

    It would appear that Nigeria’s origins and inauguration in colonial conquest and armed subjugation have continued to haunt it. A century after forcible amalgamation and almost half a century after the conclusion of the Civil War, arms and their bearers continue to assume a tragic centrality in the framing and possible unfurling of the nation. At the last count, the military are involved in internal security operations in twenty eight out of thirty six states. It doesn’t get more dire.

    While the northernmost fringes of the country have become a no-go area due to a combination of political and spiritual insurgency, significant swaths of the south are under the siege of economic and social insurgency occasioned by armed robbery, violent kidnapping, ritual killing, sea piracy and other deviancies.

    Meanwhile to complete the armed entrapment of the entire country, the federal government, under the strategically misguided notion that it is important to secure the presidential backyard, is seriously and furiously looking for trouble by adding the explosive Rivers state to its shopping list of self-inflicted political disasters. Even the original owners of the game of programmed anarchy are shouting that this is going to be a bridge too far, but the government is saying not to worry, that it is a little local difficulty.

    What would Allah De, a staunch opponent of diarchy, say about this unfolding political nonsense? In 1983 while the NPN rigging machine was in furious progress in Oyo state, a much puzzled and bewildered Allah De noted in his column that the NPN scoundrels were not just content with ousting Bola Ige, they were also bent on loading the Oyo State Assembly with a “Balarabe-type” majority. A few weeks later, the bubble burst and the landslide turned into a gun slide as General Danjuma would famously put it.

    Thirty years down the line Allah De would even have been more puzzled by recent developments in the country. When shall we learn? It is just as well that Allah De has chosen this time to make his grand exit. Let the dead bury the dead. It has been a long farewell from one of Nigeria’s greatest sons ever. May the noble soul of Alade Odunewu rest in peace.. .

  • The Doyen’s December

    The Doyen’s December

    Exactly five years ago this weekend this column paid a dutiful and devoted tribute to one of the all time greats of Nigerian journalism. It was on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Five years down life’s rolling and roiling avenue, snooper is happy to report that the great one is still very much around. Witty, urbane and ever debonair in carriage, Alhaji Alade Idowu Odunewu exudes the supreme forbearance and Olympian calm of a timeless sage.

    But if five years ago was the dean’s November, now it is the December of the doyen. It is the autumn of the golden patriarch. Even in normal societies, it is impossible for ripe old age not to be accompanied by its peculiar adversities. But when you live in a post-colonial hellhole, it is a different proposition altogether. The Yoruba have a saying that there is a choice between long life and its inevitable adversities or the abridged existence.

    In the past five years, Allah De has ridden the ugly bumps of life’s adversities with calm fortitude. A very private man, these personal adversities should not be for public consumption, lest it is mistaken for something else. Nevertheless, snooper must condole with the grand old man on the passing of his beloved wife and the gruesome death of his doting and devoted son-in-law at a Lekki police checkpoint a few years back.

    We must not wait for our few heroes to depart before heaping fulsome praises on them; or before scrambling for the condolence register to pen effusive panegyrics. That is the way of cynical and diseased societies. This morning, we republish the tribute to the old man on the occasion of his scaling the octogenarian bar. Once again, let us all rise in honour of a great man and the fathers that sired him. Many happy returns to the dean.

  • The Dean’s November

    The Dean’s November

    It has been a glorious week for journalism in Nigeria and for a scandal-fatigued nation by extension. There can be nothing more morally satisfying than watching good people finish first. In the ethical free trade zone that is Nigeria, this is immensely gratifying and a cause to be grateful to almighty. Allah de indeed.

    Watching the great man soak up all the accolades and encomiums , all the ringing ovations and rousing oratory at the Yoruba Tennis club last Monday, was like watching a king in autumnal splendour. It is the dean’s November. And all the men of timber and calibre came to pay their respects to the doyen.

    It was like an occult gathering of bi-centennial egunguns. The entire hall reeked of camphor cubes, organdi lace and other ancestral textiles. There were one or two double partings reminiscent of Edwardian dandies. Victorian Lagos came alive again.

    It was a Veterans’ Day, and as the reviewer of the collection, Dan Agbese, noted, it was perhaps the greatest collection of aging journalists that the nation has witnessed. Perhaps not since they founded Yaba Old People’s Home, snooper must caution. It was 17 years since snooper himself had a memorable breakfast of steaming Oturkpo yam porridge with Dan in company of the impossible Colonel Dickson Ovie-Itete. In the intervening years, the great Newswatch trailblazer himself has taken on a sage otherworldly hue.

    The man of the moment took it all in his stride. Not for once did the calm, impassive and Roman noble exterior betray any emotion. Like an all-seeing, all-knowing traditional deity, Allah De wore his usual mask of Olympian reticence. Only my master knew what my master was thinking about. Alhaji Alade Idowu Odunewu took in all the hype and hoopla with a regal forbearance that suggested good breeding and cultivated restraint. There is a stoic equanimity about the man that communicated deep wisdom and even deeper faith. When shall we see his like again?

    When Winston Churchill was told that Clement Atlee, his great rival and ultimate electoral conqueror, was a modest man, Churchill noted with caustic severity that Atlee had everything to be modest about. In our own Alade Odunewu we have a man who has everything not to be modest about but who has chosen the path of modesty and rectitude. There is something ultimately forbidding about Allah De’s simplicity and lack of airs. There is something about his casual, self-effacing mien that is a subtle indictment of the pompous self-importance of many of our contemporary rulers. Allah De is a different proposition altogether.

    There are great writers who are squalid human beings. There are great people who are squalid writers. There are people who are squalid human beings and squalid writers to the bargain. To be a great writer and a great person is a rare combination indeed. Alade Odunewu, by right and reputation, belongs to this special breed. Nigeria has produced greater writers and perhaps greater people in the realm of politics and entrepreneurial daring. But Allah De is in a class of his own as a great person and a great columnist.

    In their epic duel which was to earn Allah De the sobriquet of the dean of satirical journalism in Nigeria, Zik of Africa cautioned Odunewu about deploying major artillery to fight minor skirmishes. How about some preliminary skirmishes before the main tournament, Zik famously asked of his antagonist, trying to lure the wily journalist into a fatal clinch. Allah De did not decline. The result is a classic slugfest that has since become a benchmark for civilised discourse in post-colonial Nigeria.

    Zik, the apostle of Fabian socialism, the ardent disciple of Fabius Cunctator, the great Roman strategist of attrition, was drawing Allah De’s attention to one of the fabled tenets of delayed engagement and graduated violence as learnt from the master himself. Preliminary skirmishes must not be fought with major artillery. But the great Zik could have saved his breath. Allah De was never one to rush into political hostilities.

    In the end, it boils down to a question of style for great man and great columnist. The great riddle of Allah De’s life as a man and a prose stylist has to do with the complexity of simplicity. More often than not, it is not simple to be simple. Although Allah De’s style evinces a powerful simplicity, it is a simplicity that has been worked over several times by a profound and complex mind. It is not the simplicity of the Fleet Street journeyman, or the simplicity of the zealot of the American night school of journalism and ersatz fast food communication. It is a simplicity under-girded by a potent imagination.

    This is the point Dan Agbese seems to miss in his otherwise refreshing review. While praising Allah De for the simplicity and elegance of his writing, Agbese also betrays the mindset of the fundamentalist of the old school of journalism with its war cry of clarity and lucidity. By so doing, Agbese manages to skirt round the issue thus resurrecting an old stylistic ghost which dogged Newswatch at its inception and which provoked a memorable defence of stylistic complexity by one of its star columnists.

    It is true that the classical canons of modern mass communication are anchored on lucidity and simplicity of style. But such lucidity and simplicity of expression are often in collusion and complicity with ruling class agenda. They are tools of mass deception. The simplistic mind often hides under the mantra of simplicity to obscure and obfuscate complex issues.

    In the tortured and tormented labyrinth of the post-colonial state, with its state assisted crimes and ruling class delinquency, this kind of simplicity is going to be a tall order indeed. In a post-modernist world where writing about adventure is also the adventure of writing itself, this is like a relapse into stone- age verbal exchanges among hunter-gatherers of primitive information.

    At any rate, less is just less. Anybody who has something memorable to say must find a memorable way to say it, if they are to register with posterity. Poor Dan Agbese, journalism is too serious a business to be left to professional journalists. It is not by coincidence that the most remarkable journalists that Nigeria has produced are people who bring the fertile resources of other professions to bear on the trade.

    We are talking about the great Zik with his polyvalent potency, Awo with his classical erudition, Anthony Enahoro with his powerful intellect, Aiyekoto with his urbane and cosmopolitan swashbuckling, Allah De with his world-weary wisdom and superlative imagination, Sad Sam with his cynical perspicacity, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo with his polysyllabic virtuosity, Dele Giwa with his elaborate literary conceits, Stanley Macebuh with his mandarin ruminations and our own Olatunji Dare with the clinical clarity of an absconding scientist.

    While most of these men often return to their primary trade, while some of them would take a French leave from journalism, Allah De remains the quintessential journalist. Again, it is a question of style and taste. Allah De does not mix journalism with partisan politics. But this is not say that he was ever indifferent to the political fortunes of his beloved country. When affronted, Allah De roiled with quiet tempest. But he was wise and worldly enough to leave political rascality to the professional rascals. In such moments of sublime impotence, the great man would probably sigh: Allah De.

    The result is a body of writing that is at once penetratingly critical but also ruler-friendly. This is the man the entire nation celebrated last week. Since everybody seems to have an Allah De story, snooper might as well end with his own. Once upon a long time ago, Allah De missed his way in the jungle of primeval beauty that was one of the nation’s finest universities.

    Snooper snooping around as usual in the dense jungle recognised the great man and helped him on his way. The doyen was full of urbane gratitude. It turned out that in characteristic humility and fatherly affection the great man had come all the way from Lagos to thank one of his daughter’s teachers for his diligence and devotion.

    Last week the nation returned the full compliment to one of its most illustrious and noble sons. It was a moveable feast. Here is wishing the great dean many happy returns of the day, sir.