Every time I saw Innocent Okparadike, he reminded me of Gabriel, an Ibo man and our village photographer. I never get tired of telling the tragic story of Gabriel, who was consumed by the national crisis of 1966.
I never told Innocent Okparadike this story; maybe he read the many newspaper accounts I have given of Gabriel. If he did, we never discussed it. Innocent Okparadike like Gabriel were embodiments of the contradictions of our postcolonial history.
I grew up knowing Gabriel as an Ibo man in the midst of predominantly Tiv speaking people in the middle belt of Nigeria. He spoke Tiv fluently, like any Tiv man. Born in the north to a photographer father, he inherited his father’s trade. If his father taught him the art of photography, he never showed him the way to their village in eastern Nigeria. By the time of the 1966 crisis, his father was long dead and Gabriel was left on his own.
My maternal grandfather, a reverend gentleman, working with two American missionaries – Reverend Ralph Baker and Eugene Rubing – tried his best, ferrying Gabriel through Takum into Cameroon, like he did with many other Ibo men who sought refuge in our home. While the other Ibo men successfully made the trip to the east through Cameroon, Gabriel always found his way back to our village with a cock and bull story to tell. On one of such ill-advised trips to the north at the heat of the crisis, he ran into a prowling mob of murderers who were in search of Ibo men to kill. Of course they did not waste a minute in hacking him to death.
I first met Okparadike in 1983 at the Press Center in Kaduna. It was a popular spot for journalist to unwind in those days. I joined the table he sat with some other friends. As I was introduced, he asked whether I was the columnist at the New Nigerian. I said yes, expressing surprise that he could know a relatively junior journalist like me. He replied that those of them in the south take the New Nigerian and it’s writers rather seriously. Okparadike – then with the Concord newspapers – was already a big name in the Nigerian media at the time.
But it was at the News Agency of Nigeria I first heard of him. He and some other journalists were the foundation staff of the News Agency. By the time I joined NAN a few years after its take off, he had already left but he was always a reference point at in-house discussions at NAN. At the Concord, he was a big gun, one of the leading columnists in the paper who displayed incisive minds.
From the Concord, he moved over as Editor to the Democrat which made its debut in Kaduna in 1983. But the Democrat itself was faced with a heavy storm after the military capsized democracy in the evening hours of 1983. He bailed himself over to the New Nigerian as Deputy Editor. By his body language and movement, Okparadike was clearly offering a handshake across the Niger – to paraphrase OdumegwuOjukwu.
Then the big surprise: President Ibrahim Babangida in one of his great Maradonic moves appointed Innocent Okparadike as Editor of the New Nigerian. Very few expected the appointment. The New Nigerian was a paper set up by the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, for the Northern Region when he was its Premier. He made it clear from inception that it was a newspaper for the north. Even when the military forcefully appropriated it in 1975 and made it a Federal Government newspaper, the traditions and conventions of the newspaper were left intact. Positions like that of Editor were a natural preserve for northerners. The appointment of Okparadike, a southerner as Editor was novel, out of convention and historic.
By the time he came to the New Nigerian, I had moved on. When in 1987 Group Captain David Jang appointed me into his government in Gongola State, he sent me a moving congratulatory letter in his own hand writing. I was so moved by the contents of that letter that on a visit to Kaduna, I went to his office to thank him for his kind words and prayers for me. I still keep that letter to date.
But the contradictions of a southerner editing a newspaper set up to fight for the north soon caught up with him. The forces ranged against him were formidable. Whatever were his good intentions were soon neutralized by those who did not want him in that office in the first instance and went the extra mile to sabotage his tenure as Editor of the newspaper. His fall was only a question of time and when it came, it was no surprise at all. But the military government conscious of the fact that he was a victim of circumstances found a soft landing for him; taking him to MAMSER and then to the Daily Times.
The last time I saw him was in Kaduna after he left the Daily Times as MD. I saw him standing by the road in the scorching sun, waiting to pick a taxi. I stopped immediately and offered him a ride to wherever he was going. He was happy to meet me, only regretting that he searched for me all over Nigeria in vain when he was the MD of Daily Times and wanted me there as an editor. He sounded real and I have never doubted him.
We became friends on one of the social media networks last year. When I sent him a message that the Nigerian media missed him, he said he still wished to come back. “I hope to come back very soon as an editorial board member and columnist” he wrote to me last year. Alas, this will never be.
Innocent Okparadike lived a remarkable life as a Nigeria journalist. His strides as a journalism scholar and practitioner will be a reference point for a long, long time. He was not an innocent man though his first name proclaimed him so. Those who worked with him and were closer to him than me know his shortcomings. None of us is an angel anyway. Still, he will certainly be remembered as a man who tried to break away from his tribal cocoon and join hands with Nigerians of different backgrounds to make our country work. [myad]
