Friendship, like its flashier cousin, love, can be wildly chemical and, like love, can happen in an instant – Victor Lodato
Muritala Sule has in his memoir, A Lifetime of Friendships, given to us a celebration of friendship and love. He is celebrating what most of us in life take for granted – friendship. We most times think to be a friend is simple and ordinary. However, when some things happen – trials, disappointment etc. – we come to realise that friendship is such a simple word but laden with layers of meanings, responsibilities and deepness.
Muritala, a graduate of Mass Communication from the University of Nigeria Nsukka, the famous Jackson School of Journalism, had one day walked out of a certain career as an Information Officer at the Federal Ministry of Information to embrace the life of a ‘vagrant’ writer, television presenter and scriptwriter. The path he charted was not a well laid one because he had left a job which could have put food on his table but may not satisfy his craving to be a creative person. He had an unusual accomplice in this adventure, his mother. How could a mother encourage his son to leave salaried job, which was certain and had a future, to embrace the dream world of writing film scripts at a time when Nollywood was still a nascent industry?
However, Muritala’s mother, Alhaja Raliat Sunmbola Kareem, was a pillar of support. Which mother would today encourage a son to leave a job to pursue a dream? Although by the time he turned his back on a paying job, his novel Shadows of Hunger had been published to rave reviews by the international publisher Longman in 1987. But who feeds on rave reviews? When he left the Ministry of Information, it was not as if he already had a job in the then fledging video/film industry waiting for him.
In A Lifetime of Friendships, Muritala has succeeded in documenting for this generation and those to come the how and why the rave of the 90s Lagbo Video came to being on the NTA Channel 7. Many would remember that that programme was the one to kick-start many careers and fortunes of actor, screenwriters, directors and many in what has come today to be called Nollywood or Kannywood, as the northern counterparts prefer to call theirs.
It was just an idea that occurred to Muritala perhaps the same way in which the legendary Archimedes hit on his theory. That Monday, September 5, 1994, while idling at home he hit on the idea to start Lagbo Video and he dropped the idea on the lap on his friend and flatmate Godwin Igharo and without wasting time the duo headed towards the office of another friend, Mahmood Ali-Balogun, a respected film maker. The troika were to change the face of television production in the country by the time their programme was to hit the screen. It became a toast of the station and all forms of artistes longed to be featured.
The memoir is laced with anecdotes and events that dogged the tortuous path of realising the dream of having it on air. It was later to face stiff competitions with programmes like Minijojo on Africa Independent Television (AIT), Tunde Kelani’s Arambada on Lagos Television (LTV). However, Lagbo Video held the ace till it ran its course. However, it was not easy for it to survive for as long as it did because of the lots of intrigues it faced from some of the NTA staff who felt such a good programme should not be handled by external hands. A programme they didn’t originate in the first place! The external production crew, however, had the full support of the manager of the station, Bode Alalade, who felt they were doing great and was not interested in interfering with a winning team. The writer also salutes the ingenuity of NTA engineers who literally squeezed water out of stone. He told the story of one Engineer Olajide of NTA Minna who was commended by an expatriate who was invited from the United Kingdom to come and fix a transmitter. The expatriate had to confess to the management: “Your engineer is wonderful. I couldn’t even understand how he has kept this transmitter going. Please let him continue dealing with it. You don’t need me.” This was because the transmitter Mr Olajide had kept working had been manufactured long before the expatriate engineer was born! A clear display of Nigerian ingenuity and ‘can-do’ spirit.
Muritala’s memoir is a rich trove of people, events and places that a reader would not forget and those who lived in Lagos of the time he wrote about would identify with it. For those who didn’t they can learn about how Lagos was in the writer’s youth. He writes with a simple and elegant language. It is not a story about friends alone but about notorious felons and Mushin (which the writer in the spirit of the new etymology prefers to spell as Musin), street gangs and the famous armed robber Mighty Joe and his former Miss Nigeria girlfriend; a story of the beauty and the beast!.
It is published by MS Global Productions Limited. MS, as the writer is fondly called, has thrown a challenge to our universities to take a second look at the way some courses are taught in our higher institutions today. It is a good book many readers would find interesting and full of insights into how Lagbo Video became the rave of the airwaves in the 90s.
