It all seems like yesterday. But it is a little over twenty years ago that Newswatch, Nigeria’s premier newsmagazine, hit the newsstand with aplomb and dazzling self-assurance. From the premier box of history, it has been a tangled web of turbulent events packed into the two memorable decades. That the magazine itself remains on the newsstand is a tribute to the resilience and dogged professionalism of its surviving founding fathers.
To say, then, that a lot of water has passed under the Oregun Bridge is a wry understatement. If journalism is indeed history in a hurry, the story of Newswatch also reads like the story of the country it has chosen to report and analyse: a gifted child buffeted by unremitting adversity but somehow managing to survive.
The magazine has had to contend with the assassination and martyrdom of its founding chief executive, the charismatic and visionary Oladele Sunmonu Giwa. Many members of the original team have left, some to greener economic pastures, others to become successful publishers in their own right, a few to take up political appointments, one or two to global journalistic distinctions, and a handful to lick their wounds in the punitive socio-economic abattoir of contemporary Nigeria. The magazine itself has survived proscription, declining credibility and relevance, and the clogged arteries of professional vitality. Yet pound for pound, it remains arguably the best produced magazine in Nigeria.
For yours sincerely, it is also a milestone of sorts. As the first contributing columnist of Newswatch, or to be precise, as the self-described fifth columnist after Dele, Ray, Dan and Yakubu, one has continuously held down a column in Newswatch and magazines directly or indirectly associated with it for the past twenty years. The first five years were with Newswatch itself, the next five with African Concord, Tempo and The News, and the last ten years as the founding columnist and editor at large of Africa Today.
This is not to mention countless affrays and sorties in other magazines and newspapers against the Nigerian post-colonial state in all its malevolence and intestinal putrefaction. It has been a great pleasure to be a ringside witness and combatant in what may yet turn out to be the defining epoch of post-colonial Nigeria.
To be sure, Newswatch was not the first newsmagazine published in Nigeria. Before it, there had been some faint-hearted and rather tentative beginnings. But these amateurish precursors cannot begin to match the heroic scale of planning and execution that went into making a sweet reality out of a lofty dream. Okotie’s Newbreed succumbed to military autocracy and perhaps its own chaotic managerial style.
The New Nation published by Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, one of the nation’s finest and most accomplished journalists, went under as a result of critical under-funding and manpower shortage. But with Newswatch, the men and the moment seemed to have meshed in perfect historic symmetry. Journalism in Nigeria would never be the same again.
The seventies were unarguably Nigeria’s golden years. With the horrific carnage of the civil war behind it, with the country awash with petro-dollars accruing from dramatically increased oil revenues, with what is in retrospect a benign and benevolent military dispensation in the saddle, and the rump of a political class yet to go berserk with greed and inanition, Nigeria appeared headed for the moon. To add to this embarrassment of riches was the sheer scale of human capital under-girded by an energetically aware public and a flourishing reading culture.
The week that Murtala Mohammed was murdered, the Sunday Times sold approximately half a million copies. Thirty years later, with the liberalization of press ownership factored in, the combined sales of all Sunday newspapers in Nigeria does not approach this epic benchmark. The Nigerian middle class has relocated— or evaporated as the case may be.
The buoyant reading culture and indigenous national intelligentsia of the seventies were the fruits and products of the great feats of social engineering of the fifties and pre-military sixties. During that period, the three regional governments, in healthy and dynamic competition, sought to outdo each other in a frantic march towards modernization and the development of human capital.
Education was the war-cry throughout the length and breadth of the country, particularly in the west and east which appeared to have been bitten by the bug of westernization and liberal democracy. Public and private schools were modeled on the great learning institutions that so dramatically transformed Victorian Britain from the mid-nineteenth century. It is no surprise that when the products of this great educational ferment arrived in the universities at the end of the sixties, they found themselves at the vanguard of a nation-wide revolt against burgeoning military autocracy.
Ironically enough, by the time Newswatch made it to the newsstand in early 1985, an irreversible decline had set in for the great Nigerian reading culture. With the regions gone and states substituted, healthy competition and the drive to excel also disappeared and a uniform mediocrity of vision and governance settled in with the central government resembling a huge economic almshouse.
Even then nothing prepared Nigerians for the shock of the Second Republic: a bazaar of bandits and a conclave of crooks. Virtually all the vital sectors had collapsed by the time the politicians finished with the nation. Education had taken a severe pounding culminating in protracted strikes in higher institutions.
About this time, a slow but hazily perceptible shift of cultural values began to take hold of the nation. The great tradition of learning and arduous self-education which had produced some of modern Nigeria’s titanic personalities began to give way to the glorification of materialism and economic brigands and the lionization of crooks who had come by easy money. If this development cannot be divorced from the logic of military ascendancy with its distaste and disdain for rarefied convolutions, the ascendant political class, in its eagerness to please its new masters and buy into military “culture”, could also not be absolved.
While this was going on, while the dominant musical class acquired new patrons and objects of giddy adulation, a major geo-political shift was also rumbling its way through Nigeria’s tectonic plates. Newswatch was born into a national paradox. If its elegant song of freedom was a liberating tonic, if its arrival spoke to the majestic empowerment of journalists and of the dramatic transformation of Kakawa Street grubbers into arriviste entrepreneurs, this advent also coincided with the advent of a far more ruthless and sophisticated military dispensation bent on totally dominating the Nigerian environment and imposing its will on the political landscape. Compared with the tentative and temporizing gentlemanliness of the Gowon era, the architects of politics as war manoeuvres had arrived, hardened and probably unhinged by the pathologies of a brutal civil war.
This new military prefecture consisted of officers who had been the military backbone of the Obasanjo interregnum. They had developed a historic contempt for the civilian faction of the political class and justifiably so, given the larcenous fiasco of the Second Republic. They were also privy to the historic weaknesses and resentments of the nation’s dominant intellectual class and had perfected how to convert these to achieve their own objective. In the event, Newswatch was to become an early casualty in the crystallization of this reality of perpetual military domination of Nigeria. The editors were plucked from the giddy clouds of instant success to the ugly reality of violent and fatal collision.
If Newswatch had been an ordinary, garden-variety magazine, it might have been spared the brutal confrontation with reality. But immediate success also portends imminent tragedy. After some minor boardroom skirmishes, the magazine struck gold in its choice of chief executive. Blessed indeed is the magazine or newspaper whose chief executive is also a talented writer. Still more blessed if the helmsman were to combine this with sound managerial skills.
But when a chief executive of a magazine is an exceptional writer, a great administrator and a visionary recruiter and manager of human resources, it is the winning ticket in the sweepstakes. Without showing any hint of a personality disorder, Giwa distilled several contending and occasionally countervailing personas. If his writing skills hinted of the Bohemian artist, his administrative thoroughness echoed the dour Prussian burgher; If his personal flamboyance and exquisite taste recalled the cheeky élan of the French, his entrepreneurial bravura suggested the Yankee “New Deal” wheeler-dealer.
It was not surprising then that the magazine took off like a rocket. By July 1985, it had become a national sensation. By September of the same year, it had become an essential commodity. Its brilliant edition of the Babangida palace coup quickly sold out, and photocopies were stapled together and sold by intrepid vendors. By the hundredth day of the regime, Newswatch had assumed an iconic status with the editors and the new military establishment viewing each other with the wary respect of superpowers immensely aware of the meaning of nuclear deterrence.
The chief executive of the magazine was already on first-name terms with the chief executive of the nation, and clearly relished this. There were astonishing and alarming indiscretions. Unlike the famous friendship between Gamel Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Heykal, the revered editor of the authoritative Al-Ahram, this one was not based on any political commonality or ideological congruency. It was rather like the concluding chess game in Bound to Violence.
Behind the glitz and the glamour, the acutely aware and politically discerning must have felt a sense of foreboding . It was all too good to be true. Newswatch was collecting laurels as well as formidable and powerful enemies. Its major weapon was an uncanny ability to pry into the Byzantine maze of intrigues of the military administration and prise open for the public the malign secrets of unaccountable power .
It was a profoundly democratizing ploy. But for a military regime that relies on stealth and surprise, that thrives on habitual and often malignant opacity, this was the equivalent of enemy action. Indeed, the soldiers were not alone. To many members of the larger political establishment, the frantic disclosures of shady business deals and their sordid collaborations with the military oligarchy induced panic and fright.
And since men are killed not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen, the tormentor in chief had to go, with maximum collateral damage and in such a spectacular fashion calculated to drive the fear of the lord into the most stubborn of infidels. Almost twenty years after, the act still resonates in all its daring and chilling homophobic novelty. In retrospect, it is a miracle how the staff of the magazine, particularly the remaining editors, survived the disorienting trauma of the first four weeks. But survived it they did, and without missing a single edition, too.
There were those who maintained at that point that the damage had already been done, that the point had been made and Newswatch would never be the same again. Teenagers who have witnessed the ravages of a firestorm would never toy with thunder. A slackening of pace and cooling of investigative ardor might have surfaced. But as if to prove its traducers wrong, Newswatch was back with a bang six months later with a sensational scoop of the report of the Political Bureau .A prompt proscription that was later converted to a six-month ban was the instant reply. A dark cloud enveloped Oregun.
For many, the publication of the report was an act of futile and perverse bravado. But in retrospect, it was a singular act of courage which extended the frontiers of freedom, particularly against a repressive military autocracy bent on imposing its will on the nation. Others were to build on this in the final phase of the struggle against military dictatorship.
By then, a chastened Newswatch appeared to have reached a tense truce and uneasy accommodation with the military oligarchy. But as it is always the case with history and the cult of heroic example, they had already inspired others by their example and the martyrdom of their founding chief executive. All in all, it has been an eventful and worthy outing for Newswatch and its staff.
Such then is the cunning of history that in the murky ambience of contemporary Nigerian journalism, the surviving founding fathers, whatever their foibles and human failings, are beginning to look like secular saints. Dele Giwa must be smiling.
