I moved close to them and tried to explain to them about the Maman Daura I know. I knew Malam Mamman Daura when he joined the New Nigerian as the editor of the paper- sometime in 1969. Before then, the editor of the paper was a powerful writer and historian, Malam Adamu Ciroma, while the Managing Director was a British journalist, Mr Charles Sharp.

I had been at the New Nigerian for a number of years before Malam Mamman Daura came in, at which time I was the Personal Assistant to Malam Adamu Ciroma, who had just taken over from Mr Charles Sharp as the Managing Director.

I was moved from Malam Adamu Ciroma’s office back to the editorial department to work with Malam Mamman Daura, this time as a senior reporter. First, let me commend the decision of Malam Mamman Daura to leave the office of the Premier of Northern Nigeria, where he was an administrative officer to join the New Nigerian. Journalism at that time was not considered anything worth throwing away such a job to take up.

Malam Mamman Daura, (a Muslim) who attended the Trinity College (a Catholic University in Dublin, Ireland) had returned to Nigeria with two degrees; one in Economics and another in Public Administration. He could have gotten any job for the asking but rather decided to try his hands on newspaper reporting.

I recall that there were few university graduates at the newsroom of the New Nigerian, some of whom had come in only to see what it was like to be a journalist but left immediately after looking into the newsroom. Those of us who stayed on in the New Nigerian were indeed not university graduates at that time. I recall Dan Agbese, Clement Ende, Yakubu Abdul-Aziz, myself, just to mention a few.

Among the more experienced ones was Mr. Clement Isaiah, father of Sam Ndah Isaiah (founder and Chairman of Leadership Newspaper). It is noteworthy that although, young Isaiah initially trained as a pharmacist, but because the blood of journalism ran in the family he had to meander back to establish one of the most thriving newspapers in Nigeria today.

There was Malam Sani, father of Senator Shehu Sani, who was definitely an expert in composition. I must also mention Mr Rasaq Aremu who was the editor-in –chief and later succeeded by Mr Clement Isaiah and of course there was sub-editor guru, Mr Yakubu Ali.

Malam Mamman Daura, learnt the ropes of journalism very fast and before we could know, he took over the writing of daily editorial, the famous Candido column and very powerful feature articles. He was regarded at that time as one of the sharpest minds north of the River Niger and could very well be compared with others like Dr Jubril Aminu, Dr Mahmud Tukur, Dr Ibrahim Tahil, Professor Iya Abubakar and Dr Bala Usman, to mention a few. He was a key Nigerian patriot and contributed in no small way to prosecuting the Nigerian civil war behind his pen, in the same manner that other northern patriots like Adamu Ciroma, Baba-Gana Kingibe, Alhaji Abba Zoru, Patrick Iyoher and others did.

I was closely attached to Malam Mamman Daura; ethnicity and religion were not part of his life. He treated people based on their performance and character. Mamman Daura nominated me for training programmes among many Hausa, Fulani and Muslim reporters in the New Nigerian.

When the federal government bought over the shares of Daily Times of Nigeria, Malam Mamman Daura nominated me, a Christian minority, to serve as Director of the Daily Times under the Chairmanship of late Alhaji Magaji Dambatta, another detribalized northern Muslim journalist from Kano state. The job at Daily Times was one of my most challenging moments. This was one of my most challenging jobs.

In the cause of balancing the Daily Times, we had to relieve various good and hardworking journalists, like Olusegun Osoba, who later became the Governor of Ogun State, late Dale Giwa, Chief Tony Momoh and Chief Olu Onagoruwa, of their jobs. We also had to bring on board very unknown journalists like Ray Ekpu from the Chronicle Newspaper, Cross River state, who later became one of the most famous journalists in Nigeria, Felix Audu, from Benue State and quite a number of other journalists, into the stable of the Daily Times.

I recall that I was to travel to Makurdi on official duty during the civil war and Malam Daura insisted that because of the dangers of the civil war, I had to stay in the house of his nephew, then Col. Muhammadu Buhari who was the Commander of the Brigade in Makurdi. Col. Buhari, perhaps knowing the activities of a young reporter like me and considering the strict discipline that prevailed in his house, decided to hand me over to his adjutant, Major Dauda Suleiman, who took me to the officer’s mess but kept a keen eye on me, so no harm would come my way.

In order to complete his assignment of keeping me safe, Col. Buhari personally decided to drive me to Kaduna when my assignment was over. I must say that Buhari loved driving and would not allow his driver to drive from Makurdi to Kaduna. His driver was by his side while I sat behind with his younger brother Sani, then a student at the Government College Kaduna. As fate would have it, we had a ghastly motor accident somewhere between Keffi and Kachia.

But, what keeps lingering in my memory was that, when Buhari came out of the car, he called my name, ‘Simon, Simon, hope you are alright’ and he did not even mention his brother’s name Sani. This was all in a bid to accomplish the wish of his nephew, Malam Daura, to ensure that no harm comes to me. In the cause of my working as a reporter under Mamman Daura, I got into troubles; one was a result of a story I wrote on Zaria Tarpaulin Industry which insinuated that government officials had received bribe of Mercedes Benz cars from the proprietor, an Indian business man.

The then Governor in Kaduna, Col. Abba Kyari approached Mamman Daura that he should produce me for detention. Instead of producing me, Mamman Daura arranged for me to go to Port Harcourt to attend a meeting of Nigerian Union of Journalists and stay there until the trouble was over. Malam Adamu Ciroma and Malam Mamman Daura taught us honesty and probity while we were with the New Nigerian. Rumour has it that Malam Daura was forced to move from the Premier’s office because he would not wear Agbada or Babariga to work throughout his stay in the New Nigerian as was customary with old northern senior officers. He wore suit and we often referred to him as “Mamman Bature”. That Mamman Daura chose to pursue entrepreneurship in carpentry and thereby establishing a furniture factory KFCC, in Kaduna, was a great surprise to us. At that time people of Mamman Daura’s standing only needed to move to Abuja or Lagos and could make billions of naira as agents connecting people with government. That was the nature of hard work, Mamman Daura imbibed in us.

He later took over from the late Sultan Dasuki as the Chairman of African International Bank AIB, a completely unknown banking establishment and nurtured to become very profitable, employing hundreds of people. Rumour has it that when working capital of banks was moved to twenty five billion, Mamman Daura could not raise that capital because of his honesty; when banks with lesser pedigree crookedly raised that capital in no time.

Today, Mamman Daura is the same as he was yesterday. His residence in Malali, Kaduna State, is a simple bungalow and even though he produces furniture, the seats in the living room are ordinary and people waiting for him outside sit on the bench. Though his nephew is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, he lives in a bungalow outside the Villa with little security. Just like his Kaduna residence, visitors sit on the bench outside the house, while the inside has ordinary furniture like the one in Kaduna. Malam Mamman Daura is a sound economist and he ran the New Nigerian with sound prudence that made profit for the newspaper during his time.

While in the New Nigerian, he did not have a car of his own except the official 404. His official residence at then Dawaki road (now Isa Kaita road) was the same bungalow like that of any other senior staff even when he became the Managing Director of New Nigerian. I have no doubt that Malam Mamman Daura has brought sound economic advice to his nephew’s government that has added value to the quality of government. This is the Malam Mamman Daura I knew. I believe he is still the same today and will be the same tomorrow.

Simon Shango, a farmer in Pika, wrote in From Gboko Local Government Area of Benue State.

For the Ibrahim Babangida military government which was the first suspect in the killing, Giwa’s death demanded new methods of arresting critical journalists without slamming any chains around their feet. Babangida thereafter sent for Antonio Gramsci, Italian activists who taught world rulers on how to covertly manipulate and shape thoughts and ideas of the people, get critics to eat off rulers’ tables without the latter shedding a single pint of their blood.

Dele Giwa represented the finest brew of Nigerian journalism of the consequential post-Second Republic combat-of-the-military-class era. Born Sunmonu Oladele ‘Baines’ Giwa in 1947, he hailed from a very poor family of a father who was a hired hand in Oba Adesoji Aderemi, Ooni of Ife’s palace and rose to becoming a colossus of the written words. After earning a degree from Brooklyn College in 1975, Giwa worked for four years with The New York Times as a news assistant and thereafter came back home to work for the influential Daily Times. In 1984, he pulled his galaxy of media friends to establish the Newswatch magazine, a move that was said to equal Nnamdi Azikiwe’s unique and remarkable entry into newspaper press journalism in 1937 with his West African Pilot. It was colourful as well as embodying the critical ingredients of journalism at the time when military autocracy had dragged on for interminably long period and at a time when the verve for democratic renaissance was sweeping round the globe. It was thus not surprising that the hostile and investigate bents of the Newswatch, Giwa’s piercingly critical Parallax Snap column, as well as the unpardonably unsparing stings of his colleagues’ pens would lead to the fatal assassination that Giwa suffered in the hands of his traducers.

The thirty-third anniversary of Giwa’s assassination is however not a moment to engage in puerile revisionism, buck-passing on what was or was not responsible for his murder but an opportunity to critically look at current trends in journalism practice, the state of Giwa’s kind of journalism and the vanishing crop of Giwa-type journalists in the Nigeria of today. In other words, let us literally slice the flesh of this avant-garde journalism icon in a post-mortem, perhaps we could find what detains the practice of the profession for this long. More importantly, with Giwa’s gruesome murder, we should ask ourselves whether there has been a let in government/press hostile relationship and what is the fare of current civilian government in its interface with the press?

While not engaging in needless revisionism, it must be said that it is a colossal shame that, 33 years after Giwa’s murder, the Nigerian state has waffled in telling the world who actually murdered the journalist. Unresolved murders have unfolded into one another, its culmination being the murder of Nigeria’s Attorney General in 2001 without identified culprits till today.

Anyway, the Nigerian press has had a ding-dong history from the colonial period. With a remarkable pedigree as predating the Nigerian state, having been in existence since the establishment of the printing press in 1846, with the first printing press which was installed by the Presbyterian Church in Calabar and eight years after, precisely in 1854, the establishment by the Reverend Henry Townsend of the Church Missionary Society (CSM) who inaugurated a printing school in Abeokuta and four years later, founded the Iwe Irohin (Iwe Irohin fun awon ara Egba ati Yoruba), the Nigerian press is unarguably older than Nigeria which came into being in 1914, almost a decade after. The press acquitted itself very well in the fight against the sit-tight inclination of colonial overlords and fought colonial orthodoxy with a remarkable zeal and positioned the newspaper press on an enviable pedestal. It did this until it gradually became an important factor in colonial society and politics in West Africa. Galaxy of immortal stars of Nigerian press like Robert Campbell, a West Indian businessman who had settled in Lagos, through his publishing of the Anglo-African newspaper which he founded in 1863, down to a flurry of newspapers which came on the scene in subsequence, made the early press to constitute a formidable bulwark against colonialists. All in all, a total of fifty-one newspapers were established between Lagos Times newspaper of 1880 and 1937 when Azikiwe came on board with Pilot.

The First Republic became a downward slope for the newspaper press which had made such a promising landmark on the sand of time. Without any let, the Nigerian press mutated from the glory of the anti-colonial struggle into a battleground for power struggles among politicians. It was so bad that critical reviews of the press of the time hold the press of the time responsible for the collapse of that Republic.

After the collapse, the press went into its vanguard role again. From 1966 to 1979, the Nigerian newspaper press, which had now had a sprinkle of state-owned radio and television stations, held the military accountable to its promises. It was no coincidence that journalist Amachere had his head shaved by military administrator, Diette Spiff for standing up to the military top-brass. But immediately the military vacated the dais and politicians took over in 1979, the press morphed from being an avant-garde into a mouthpiece of political opportunism. Truth became multi-faceted, depending on which medium you held in your hands. The press only regained its composure when the military struck again in 1983, a battle it fought all through the Muhammadu Buhari/Babangida/Abacha years until the military returned into the barracks in 1999.

I have gone into this long history to show that the press has been oscillating from the noble, the selfish, the fissiparous, to the ambivalent since its establishment in 1854. A two-pronged estimation of the press of the Giwa era is available among analysts of the time. The Giwas emerged as the doyen of the crop that is pejoratively referred to as the Benz Editors. The “flotsam and jetsam” classification of the “press boys,” pioneered by Obafemi Awolowo, died with the advent of the Giwas in the 1980s. They were editors who held bachelor degrees from America, UK and Nigerian universities who could not settle for the fringe lifestyles of the journalists of the immediate past era. They drove Mercedez Benz cars, lived in big houses and could not be pushed around. Not only did they change the face of the newspaper press, they changed its tenor as well, bringing foreign inputs into the practice.

Journalism practice of the current Fourth Republic, from 1999 till now, is the lowest in content and form, since its advent. It has suffered serious bombshells from artillery fire of allied forces of economic downturn, gross incompetence of practitioners, manifest dissembling of the Nigeria that used to be an Eldorado in the eyes of forefather practitioners and other forces. The advent of the social media is the final nail on the coffin of a Nigerian press that was before now gasping for breath. As it is now, media practice is comatose, waiting for the pronouncement of its death by a fidgeting medic and its internment by the pallbearers.

The first major instigator of the death of the Nigerian media today is the absence of Nigeria or the death of Nigeria in the ears of Nigerians. Media practice in the immediate post-colony reckoned that there was one country called Nigeria that gummed her people together, to which the practitioners needed “to be faithful, loyal and honest.”

Today, practitioners have found out that that was the greatest scam of the century and indeed, there was no country that needed anybody’s faithfulness or loyalty. Rather than Nigeria to whom the early press and its practitioners paid obeisance, the god of the personal belly is the most recent god to which practitioners give propitiations. When they see how governments after governments preach the gospel of ethnic ascendancy, how looting of treasuries has become abiding credo of governance, media practitioners suddenly become apostates of those lofty dreams.

Second is that there is a consistent worship of mediocrity in Nigeria which is also becoming an abiding pattern. You do not need to strive for excellence in a Nigeria where governments appoint the worst of us to superintend over the best of us. A president or governor or minister could appoint his sexual liaison as minister – sorry, I remove that – as commissioner or adviser and we will live happily ever thereafter. We live in a Nigeria where sex symbols in BBNaija are rewarded with multiple of millions while First Class graduates get mere applauses. There are no scholarships from government as incentives to the remarkable among us any longer and falsifications rule the universities now like a panjandrum. It is this set of falsifiers, who exchange moans on top of lecturers for certificates, who are the reporters who write the stories in the Nigerian press that we hypocritically expect to benchmark the resilience pens of the Amachrees and the lush journalism of the Peter Enahoros. In other words, when you pick a copy of a Nigerian newspaper or you hear a radio/TV broadcaster talk, no one needs to tell you that a holocaust is afoot in the Nigerian press.

The parlous economy has brought a survival-of-the-fittest and elimination of the weakest into journalism. Media houses are gasping for breath, sparsely pay salaries and cannot afford refresher courses for practitioners. Mediocrity is ruling the airwaves of the newsroom. Governments after governments and the corporate world, aware of this emasculation, are exploring this to their advantage. Rather than the brown envelope malady, what I call corporate corruption is the rule rather than the exception in the media. Since he who pays the piper calls the tune, advertisers and governments who control huge advert bucks easily decree negative news from the list of materials to communicate to the public.

Except with its sudden resurgence in the Buhari era, physical emasculation of journalists by clamping them in detention had paled remarkably. Nor do we witness the assassination of the Giwa type. Government/press relations are no longer marked by constructive engagements but cat and mouse relationship. Perhaps, a reflection of the inability to process the depth of media involvement in policy decisions, this government has not only succeeded in dulling the robust, though adversarial, interface of government and the press, it has remarkably demystified the press, making any onlooker to wonder if the lofty roles of the press of yore were not hyped.

The most fatal blow to media practice in Nigeria, and I dare say, the world, is the social media. Unbeknown to it, the rest of the world envied the press’ art of purveying information messages through its media outlets.

Immediately the social media became activated, it became a fertile ground for all manner of persons to become press icons. Being an uncensored turf with licence for licit and illicit communication, the social media has become renowned for fake news, puerile murder of journalism rules and ultimately, the graveyard of the sacred and old journalism profession. It is so bad that traditional media is going extinct. That is the memory that Giwa’s death, 33 years after, spurns in the air.

Dr. Festus Adesayo is a Columnist with the Nigerian Tribune

Fayemi was offering his thoughts on the very wasteful size of our government. He believes that scrapping the senate would reduce the size of government and save the country the huge amount of money it now spends, or perhaps more correctly wastes, on the 109 senators who are constitutionally bound to make laws for the good governance of the country. There is a sense in that. For one, we would save the N13 million in monthly salaries and allowances for each of the 109 senators. From my calculation, the saving would be substantial. For another, we would save loads of Naira from official accommodation and official vehicles. The government could find some good use for what is saved, as in buy enough candles for those of us who are condemned to suffer the eternal trauma of epileptic power or no power at all in an oil giant in the 21st century.

Fayemi’s point is this: “We do need to look into the size of government in Nigeria and I am an advocate of a unicameral legislature. What we really need is the House of Representatives because that is what represents.” What irks him here is that the equality of states in which each state sends three people into the senate chambers promotes inequality of states. The states are neither equal in size nor in development nor in endowment.

I dare say that the governor cannot count on many, if any supporters, for his view. It comes more than 50 years too late in the day for us to even think about it. Our bicameral legislature is cast, not just in stone but on marble. Difficult to chip at it with a teaspoon. I suspect though that if he had suggested this when Dr Bukola Saraki was calling the shots in the fractious executive-legislative eighth senate, I know who would perk up his ears.

On the face of it, Fayemi’s suggestion does have that strange sound associated with outlandishness. Not to worry. I bet there must be some closet supporters for his suggestion. The larger than life living standard of the senators grates on many a nerve. But any attempts to scrap the senate would run smack into a stone wall. You cannot scrap the senate without asking the senate to decide its fate. It is its responsibility. It is no brainer that should the vote on such a bill be taken on the floor of the senate, the nays would have it resoundingly. The senate would survive and Fayemi would count on the displeasure of the 109 senators. I just hope that the senate would not be called upon soon to approve a request by the president to refund some money to Ekiti State. It would be stuck in the senate chambers – to teach Fayemi a good lesson in how not to mess with lawmakers.

It should be possible for us to be more charitable to Fayemi’s take on pruning the size of government at federal and even state levels. Ours is a lumbering giant, I suppose, because our government is a lumbering behemoth. The size of government has been a source of worry for all our leaders long before yesterday. The civil service is not just bloated; it is criminally over-bloated. Because of political patronage, between five and ten people are employed to do the same job that could or used to be done by only one man. My estimate here is conservative. There is no better evidence on the crushing burden of big government than that federal and state governments commit between 75 and 80 per cent of their annual budgets to recurrent expenditures, as in the payment of salaries, allowances and other juicy perks of their civil servants and political office holders. This budgetary inversion is one good reason why the discos are dancing disco while the rest of us grope in the dark. With less money in the capital vote, it is naïve to expect us to make a giant leap in our development.

To prune the size of government should be a task that must be done. But it is a task no president or governor would like to undertake. Belling the cat, as the rats knew long ago, carries with it some obvious personal and political risks. No one forgets that the next election looms on billboards in the near horizon, anyway.

I tried to look beyond Fayemi’s suggestion and arrived at this: there is too much fat in our governments. Despite the lingering economic difficulties going all the way to the Second Republic, we have refused to take steps towards making our governments leaner, relatively cheaper and more result oriented. Part of the blame lies on the constitution. That sacred document prescribes that the composition of the federal cabinet shall reflect the right of each state to be represented therein. No president has a choice in the matter. He is obliged to pack his cabinet with a large crowd as ministers, ministers of state and special advisers. Every state must chop. It is the path to national unity determined by the generals in the 1979 constitution.

This is known as tribal accommodation. A political system that accommodates the big tribes and the small tribes is a sure recipe for national unity. The late Major-General Shehu Yar’Adua told us at a Newswatch summit that in their constitution making in 1978/79, they considered five political power blocks: Hausa/Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, northern minorities and southern minorities. Political power would then be distributed among them as president or vice-president or senate president or deputy senate president or speaker of the house. Think of what a great beauty it would be for the three tribes and the two tribal blocks to be in the power loop.

In politics, nothing really is cast in stone. Unlike religion, fossilization is anathema to every form of government. Things must change with the changing mores, morals and contemporary demands of a new take on governance. Thus, the national assembly enjoys inherent powers to amend the constitution by deleting those provisions that no longer serve the national interests and substituting them with those that do in contemporary political thoughts. Although the bicameral legislature has been with us since independence, its longevity not necessarily self-evident truth that it is the best we could have for all time. I am sure there are merits too in a unicameral legislation beyond cutting the fat in the size of government.

I do not support scrapping the senate because I have good friends there who might be suddenly out of a job, but I do support our re-examining how we operate the bicameral legislature. If a system fails, it is often less the fault of the system itself but more the fault of how it is understood and operated by the operators. A serious national conversation could determine where the problems lies and the steps that must be taken to free the system from being held hostage by its own operators.

Law is expensive in making, expensive in disobeying and expensive in enforcement. But does law-making need be this expensive? Look at the sheer number of lawmakers in the country: 109 senators and 469 members of the house. Add the number of lawmakers in the state houses of assembly and you wonder: do we really need this large crowd to make laws for the good governance of our dear country and parts thereof?

Nothing says we cannot have fewer lawmakers and still have good laws. But the large crowd must remain as a tribute to tribal accommodation. If we are serious, we should be able to prune the number of our lawmakers and spend less on them and still get better results. I wonder though whether it is wise for a country that does not respect its own laws and court orders to continue to spend so much money keeping so many federal and state legislators in office under the fiction that they are making laws for the good governance of the country and parts thereof.