Twenty-two analogue years ago, on February 1, 2003, or thereabouts, I wrote for one of the newspapers a piece welcoming Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola (HDA, hereafter) to my demographic neighbourhood on her 60th birthday, little knowing that she had actually preceded me to the precinct.
When she turned 80 some three years ago, her status as the 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 under her as editors for the Concord newspapers, called her, reverentially, “our Editor-in-Chief.”
It is in the latter category that HDA’s renown will reverberate down the ages.
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.
In its reach and efficiency, its distribution network was unsurpassed. If just one newspaper was on the newsstand in the most far-flung corners of Nigeria on any given day, it had to be one 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 in Nigeria.
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 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 State University of New York, in 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 communication doctorate under her belt, 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 Elections. 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. 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 of the two officially recognized political parties, the Social Democratic Party, SDP.
Like the rest of the private press, the Concord newspapers saw through the duplicity of Babangida’s political transition programme and took a leading role in exposing it. The regime exacted a heavy price. A banning order put its weekly newsmagazine African Concord out of circulation permanently.
The Concord titles were handed a separate banning order along with The Guardian and the Punch 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 Concord 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 her husband’s 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 on how to retrieve the June 12 mandate.
The thoroughly apolitical 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 acute political intelligence, a cosmopolitan outlook, a steely disposition, and mastery of the emerging communication technology.
At the height of the annulment crisis, she prepared — full disclosure: I assisted in the effort — a monthly 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 fearsome toll on HDA. Kudirat’s assassination was a clear signal that nothing and nobody was off-limits in General Sani Abacha’s desperate plot to foist his brutish rule on the nation. The regime’s officials kept her under suffocating 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.
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The stakes were prohibitive. HDA was as vulnerable as a sitting duck. Yet her resolve was unshaken. She 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.
Nor did HDA 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 deployed her resources and her influence to promote worthy causes nationwide. A generation of Nigerian women counted her as a role model.
HDA’s sacrifice in the epic struggle for democracy has not been officially acknowledged, much less honoured. Recognition has instead flowed to fringe actors, and even to some who did everything in their power to subvert the will of Nigeria’s sovereign electors. Her entry into the eighth decade of her life provided an opportunity to redress this neglect. They fluffed it.
I feared that something was amiss when I heard nothing from her after my tribute on her 80th birthday, on which I drew for this piece, was published. My anxiety deepened when my phone calls to her Lagos and London coordinates went unanswered, time and again. It was so unlike the punctilious doyenne, an embodiment of the social graces.
Dr Hamidat Doyinsola Abiola died two weeks ago following a protracted illness, her life fulfilled and her place in Nigeria’s intellectual history assured.
Hail and farewell.
It remains for the Federal Government to honour her immense contributions to the struggle for the restoration of democracy in Nigeria, the advancement of women’s rights and media professionalism, not forgetting her discreet philanthropy, with the posthumous conferment of the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) or a higher distinction
