The Peter Enahoro I Knew Still Lives
Mudiaga Ofuoku
A recent visit from Fred Ohwahwa, who was vacationing in the US did the unexpected thing of popping what I had assumed was an impermeable membrane shielding me from the awful news coming from Nigeria since the last elections. Among other subjects, we found a perfect opportunity to recall, with fond nostalgia and a pained sense of irretrievable loss, the good old days of Nigerian journalism as compared to what has become of it today.
As we had dinner that night, I began to tell him my summer vacation plans to the UK and the mainland European countries of France, Germany and Austria. I told him a visit to the UK would be incomplete without going to Leeds, a city where I’d lived more than 23 years ago as a postgraduate student on British Chevening Scholarship. I also said I purposed to see Olorogun Aghwarianovwe Ikie, brother and friend both, who adroitly combines a successful legal practice in London and a deep, passionate involvement in the hazardous ecosystem that is called Nigerian politics. For someone seeking an occasional escape from the somnolence of Leeds to the bustling, partying atmosphere of metropolitan London, his residence was home for me 23 years ago after taking a four-hour coach ride from Leeds.
And how could I omit to see, also in London, the incomparable Peter Enahoro, who had been laid low with illness for quite a while? A writer with an aura after his name, Enahoro became an aspirational model for succeeding generations of Nigerian journalists attracted by the bewitching brilliance of his prose. I said I’d get a copy of Enahoro’s memoir, Then Spoke the Thunder, and get him to inscribe it for me. Fred, who was eating, paused momentarily and began to stare at me, his face a picture of incredulity. “But the man is already dead. How could you not have known about that? He died about a month ago,” he said. I was slack-jawed at the news, saddened by the death of a man whose goodwill and kindness had enriched my journalistic career in Nigeria as a young man adventuring for a place in the sun. In a related vein, I was also awkwardly embarrassed that he had died for weeks and I wasn’t even aware of it until just now. Enahoro was buried on June 7 in London. He was 88.
Enahoro’s death inspired a flurry of tributes from so many people, among them fellow journalists who cried him up for his priceless service to journalism in Nigeria and Africa. He started out his career as a sub-editor at the Daily Times, rising rapidly to become its youngest editor at 23. But I am just as interested, if not more so, in the things said about him while he walked the earth and plied his pen. Such words of appreciation, offered while a man still lives, are oftentimes more substantive measures of his value than the saccharine chorus of eulogy rendered so loudly when he is gone.
Long before his death, at the height of his career, he had received superlative praise from Frank Barton in his (Barton’s) book, The Press in Africa, as “arguably Africa’s best journalist writing in the English Language.” In his autobiography, Walking a Tight Rope: Power Play in Daily Times, and published in 1987, Babatunde Jose, Enahoro’s former boss and the man unanimously credited with building the newspaper into a publishing behemoth in Africa, named Enahoro “the best so far in the history of journalism in Nigeria.”
Dan Agbese, my chief mentor in journalism and a world-class humourist in the league of William Connor of the Daily Mirror, had this to say of the late journalist while he was alive: “Enahoro was a brilliant writer and a columnist. His capacity for vivid verbal pictures remains unequalled by any other writer or columnist in the country.” Agbese rendered that judgement in The Columnist’s Companion: The Art and Craft of Column Writing. Published in 2012, the book comes highly recommended as the essential text for all those interested in writing columns for newspapers and magazines. “Enahoro,” wrote Mohammed Haruna, the well-known Nigerian journalist and publisher of the now rested Citizen magazine, “is, however, not only justly famous for his way with the written word – and with the spoken word as well, to which anyone who has met him will testify – he could also be too plain-speaking.” That powerful assessment by Haruna in a tribute to Enahoro on his 80th birthday in 2015, is as accurate a portrait of the man as you can ever get from anyone who knew him very well. What I am doing here, therefore, is a fleshed-out representation of that portrait.
In the meantime, I should note that few of the tributes that came on the heels of his death bothered to lay stress on the fact that Enahoro’s towering accomplishments were the product of only a high school education acquired at the famous Government College, Ughelli. He hadn’t gone to university, in other words. Not that there weren’t others like him who entered journalism with no more than a high school education in his day. In Enahoro’s case, his talents were of different orders of magnitude.
A highly gifted raconteur with a sponge-like memory for granular specificity, Enahoro could recall the smallest, distinct detail of a long-forgotten encounter as he shared it with his audience. A typical story-telling style of his involved one or two divergent threads from the main story line, leaving his audience impatient with anticipation about their outcomes. Just when you thought he’d probably lost control of his narrative, Enahoro would suddenly circle back, take each thread forward to intersect with the main thread before finally picking up from where he left off. His wit was razor-sharp, his sense of humour terrific.
The animal magnetism of his presence which drew friends into his orbit, was hard to miss. Blessed with a deep instinct for language, Enahoro, as I already said, was a prose stylist of great virtuosity. And he was a supremely confident man, an attribute which enabled him to take command of conversations in a gathering of friends and guests, many of them knowledgeable men with diverse range of perspectives on the issues.
As does a great intellect, an equally great talent can take you to the top. It is in that light, I suppose, that we might more meaningfully contextualize, and appreciate, his impressive career accomplishments. As he once said when I asked him what “intellectual” and “social” values shaped his journalistic career, “I am just a guy who has been lucky to have a certain facility for words, and who spent a great deal of his time studying the ills of his surroundings and feels strongly about certain issues that he puts his thoughts down on paper as truthfully as he sees them, risking offending people, and saying to himself: ‘I have no choice.’ That is how I feel. I am a journalist who feels strongly about issues.” But he distanced himself from the word “intellectual,” because, according to him, “if my image of an intellectual is correct, I am not an intellectual.”
I pressed him to explain his own image of the word. “Well, an intellectual,” the dazzling conversationalist replied, “is a very brainy fellow who sees things in slightly abstract terms, and then is able to crystalize them in fairly abstract words, which then you are now supposed to sit down, think and think until you yourself arrive at some slightly abstract conclusion.”
Enahoro did indeed offend a lot of folks with his strong views on things. His defence (“A Time to Ponder”, Sunday Times, July 4, 1993) of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election by the military administration of Ibrahim Babangida, a contest in which the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola was the unannounced winner, left his admirers shocked with disbelief and his critics incandescent with rage. It was a mind-bending mystery to them that a man who had long enjoyed the reputation of a tribune of the people, for, among other things, being an implacable foe of military dictatorship in Africa, could decide to undermine that enviable image by applauding the annulment of a national election universally judged to be free and fair. Wringing their hands in despair and utter disappointment, many of his admirers sailed viciously into him. A well-known columnist on The Guardian at the time dismissed him as a compliant “toady” of the military administration, a characterization that stuck in Enahoro’s craw and which he scoffed at in personal conversations with me.
His position on that election, and almost certainly his subsequent attack (“A Failed Politician, His Bosses and a Barmy Idea”) on Walter Carrington, the American Ambassador to Nigeria, in which he revealed a ferocious instinct for the jugular, also poisoned the once cordial relationship between him and Wole Soyinka. I recall once drawing Enahoro’s attention to a remark by Soyinka in Tell magazine in which the Nobel Laureate had made a barely disguised reference to Enahoro when he said, “… there are several kinds of journalists, there are the safe journalists.
You find many of them at the Daily Times firing from both guns on behalf of Abacha. But once upon a time, they were risk takers, now see what happened to them.” Enahoro might have first aggravated Soyinka when he lobbed something of a rhetorical grenade at the famous playwright during an interview with West Africa magazine. Enahoro took aim at Soyinka for being a member of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), a pro-democracy organization opposed to General Sani Abacha, and led by Anthony Enahoro, his elder brother, for refusing to hand over power to Abiola. In his “‘Peter Pan’ at 80” piece, which he published in newsdairyonlinline.com on January 20, 2015, to celebrate Enahoro’s life and career, Haruna reported him as having said Soyinka was “given to staging melodramas… Remember the toy pistol incident? The escalation from that prank is that, with the Nobel Prize in hand, he is playing out the fantasy of being a politician of weight in Nigeria. He is not,” said Enahoro.
I wasn’t trying to gin up a fight between the two titans of the pen to generate a good copy. As a journalist, I thought it fell to me to ask Enahoro if he thought he was the one Soyinka was referring to in that barbed comment of his. The challenge thrilled Enahoro, for I could tell he was in his element as he joined battle with Soyinka. “Perhaps, Wole Soyinka should be asked,” he said, his face wreathed in a joyous smile. “They say whom the cap fits. I will not wear this cap because it doesn’t fit me. Well, there are risk takers in all professions, and non-risk takers. Not only in journalism, nor is it only at the Daily Times… there are mature men who are not mature. There are famous people who have not yet grown out of being eternal students. Are they risk takers?” he wondered. “Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize winner in literature, is quite capable of expanding and identifying those he says are firing blanks from double barrel guns or not firing at all. I can say nobody, underline nobody, can lecture me on taking risks or not taking risks. I’m not being immodest, but I have my credentials. Indeed, if I were asked to produce witnesses, I would not be too far wrong if I invited Soyinka to speak on my behalf, because when I was in Germany, he was my guest on more than one occasion. And I am sure he will recall that I was not working for any government or firing blanks.”
Now were there labels he might be willing to accept as true from his critics? I gave him an example. But first, some context. Several of his editors, I just found out during a most recent visit to the newsroom, resentfully called him a “dictator” – scarcely a word of compliment. They were mad that Enahoro was usurping their functions by rewriting page one stories and headlines. Enahoro said he was willing to wear that pejorative label as a badge of honour. “We may write about democracy, but I’m a dictator when it comes to newspaper. I take exception to the occasional bad English I find in the paper. I’m tyrannical in the quest for excellence,” he said.
Again, he was right about himself. He had railed publicly against what he termed “Nigerian English” in news stories. Enahoro set great store by excellent writing, a standard he applied fastidiously to himself. As someone who read and observed him closely like a temple acolyte, I should note that there was Enahoro the speaker, and there was Enahoro the writer. While the former spoke the language effortlessly in unceasing eloquence, a prowess that partly led to his being called “The Black Englishman” by a former Nigerian leader, the latter was a much more punctilious user of the language, probably for style and clarity of thought. Enahoro cut and buffed his prose until it attained its lapidary essence.
Twice, I saw him do a rewrite of his original drafts and, on another occasion, a retouch of a piece he had just dictated to his secretary. Each of those efforts could have stood as originally composed, but he subjected the pages to severe editorial expurgations. When they were finally retyped, the pieces became leaner and shone like diamonds polished to a sparkling finish.
An astute observer of human affairs, Enahoro’s gift of irony was also evident in his writing. Notice, for example, how he seized on the death of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire to offer a character portrait of Zaireans. “Zaire is the kind of country that God may have made in anger,” he wrote in a rare return to the page of the Daily Times in November, 1997. “First, He blessed it with diamonds and other rich minerals. Then He cursed it with its people. More than 35 years ago, it was my mistaken excitement to set out with eager anticipation for Congo-Leopoldville as the country was then known before it became Congo-Kinshasa and subsequently Zaire. Nothing in my then young life had prepared me for a place quite so pleasant to visit but inhabited by a people quite so mutinous and slaughterous. The bands sang like angels, the women danced like goddesses, and the men raped nuns.”
It would be impossible for me not to add my voice to the story of this extraordinary figure in journalism. Failure to do so would amount to a malpractice of sorts on my part, in fact, an act of ingratitude of the most deplorable kind for which an elaborate act of expiation would surely be required. For I had a ringside seat in much of what happened during his tenure at the Daily Times of Nigeria, Plc, which I had been covering as a Newswatch reporter before his appointment as sole administrator by the late General Sani Abacha. It wasn’t a long period, maybe three years, maybe a little under that; all the same, it was a time chock-full of so much experience for me, enough to benefit my life professionally in the months and years that followed and, more importantly in this case, to inspire this tribute so many years after. For that reason, an endeavour such as this should take more than a cursory look at his time at the DTN, a place which later came to threaten his legacy after it had first made him.
It began as a reporter-source relationship one September evening in 1996 after I was led by Dapo Aderinola, general manager, Times Publication Division, into his Agidingbi, Lagos, office for a brief interview. There was something indescribably unique about that first encounter with Enahoro, which also happened to be his first press interview with an outside reporter since his arrival to preside over the destiny of what was once the highest circulating daily newspaper in Africa. In its day of triumph and glory, he had worked there as Peter Pan, arguably the most important journalist in the land. Every aspiring journalist sought to be like him. He was monarch.
Today, this fabled, larger-than-life figure about whom my father had told me stories long before, was right in front of me at his desk: there he was radiating an aura of majesty, waiting for my first question after gesturing me to a chair. In a literal sense, Enahoro, 61, was a large man, for his bulk filled his chair to overflowing. The fluorescent light shone from the ceiling with a brightness that brought out his features clearly for the eyes to see. I beheld tiny beads of perspiration forming on his forehead as he lowered his head to stir his tea. Earlier, there had been a handful of other journalists desperate to see him, to be in the chair I was occupying this moment, including three from several daily newspapers with wider reach than Newswatch. I had no idea why I was chosen to come in, but I suspected my ongoing reports on the DTN, including two rare scoops so far, had argued my case for me.
The interview lasted no more than fifteen minutes because of his crowded schedule that evening. But in that short time span, as my micro-cassette recorder taped our conversation, Enahoro successfully laid out his vision for, and mission at, the DTN in bold, precise terms. “I have a very strong sentimental attachment to this place… You feel you owe it a duty … to help put things right,” he said to me during the interview. I wanted to see him succeed. You could tell he was pained by what had become of a newspaper he fondly called his “only university.” I was pained, too. The Daily Times and its stablemate, Sunday Times, had meant a lot to me. As a young high school graduate living in the hospital town of Eku in the early eighties, I had developed an instinctive reverence for the printed word, and the Sunday Times in which I read Ray Ekpu with something approaching a religious awe and fanaticism, provided the source to feed my ravenous hunger for words, words, words, like a hog sniffing and nuzzling for more acorns.
After the interview, I thanked him and left to speak to some members of the editorial staff in the newsroom to gauge their mood. Within a week or so of his arrival as sole administrator, Enahoro had transformed the apathy and despair that had suffused the newsroom into one of faith and high optimism. The staff were enthused about his Second Coming, a messiah sent from on high to save what was once the greatest newspaper empire in Africa from total collapse. Through Enahoro, they saw the plenitude of greater possibilities not only for the DTN, but also for themselves. The world, it seemed, was their oyster.
Fast forward three years. That sad, hopeless climate of old which had evaporated upon Enahoro’s arrival, was now back in the newsroom, this time on steroids. Staff salaries were owed for months. During another visit to the mammoth newsroom, I found that the journalists’ assessment of the situation was peppered with adjectives of bitter contempt and insult. Enahoro, they thought, talked a good game but failed to deliver on his vision. Something did indeed happen to that vision, that faith; or to put it in stark terms, Enahoro failed and failing dashed the hopes and aspirations of those who had blissfully hopped on the bandwagon of his vision of a renascent DTN.
More than two years before, while he was just a few months into his job, I had written my first cover story assignment for Newswatch titled “Troubled Times at the Times” (June 30, 1997), in which I noted: “Today, the DTN stands as a ridiculous antithesis of its once sublime status. Its problems are legion. They could give Hercules a nervous breakdown.” The story would go on to win me several international and local awards, including “The Editor-in-Chief’s Prize” awarded by Agbese. I went over to Enahoro’s Ikoyi home to speak to him to have a sense of how things had gone, and why they had gone that way almost three years later.
Enahoro, now 64, had shed a lot of weight and looked like someone who had worked beyond the limits of exhaustion. He spoke mostly in that resigned tone of a fatalist, an attitude I could not associate with that optimist of former days, the man I knew to have a robust zest for life, for his firm belief in the infinite promise of the morrow. But his failure was not for lack of trying, nor was it his fault. Now as to why we should be obliged to draw that conclusion, I shall speak shortly. Suffice it to say that that first encounter became the architecture, the foundation upon which the sage and the pupil built a relationship.
On several occasions when he had something urgent for me in those days when the ordinary man could not afford a cell phone, he would contact Ekpu, Newswatch’s CEO, who would then have a note sent to my newsroom mailbox informing me Enahoro wanted to see me as soon as possible. I stumbled on one of the notes, written boldly in green ink, recently while rummaging through piles of documents I just brought back from Leeds after more than two decades. Gradually, seamlessly, the reporter-source connection between us morphed into a mentor-mentee relationship, something verging on a father-son rapport. He had come to like my work personally, and he would offer me both fatherly and professional advice. He twice emphasized to me, first in Lagos and later in London, that style, as much as substance, mattered in writing, and that I should continue what I was doing.
He had unbelievably kind words to say about me in reference letters, and to his circle of friends who congregated often in his No. 15 Cooper Road, Ikoyi, residence, mostly legendary names in journalism and literature I never would have dreamt of meeting at the time. And when Okey Ndibe, the novelist and a gifted raconteur himself, sent me a kind letter of invitation to visit him in the US (I must mention, despite reserving the story for another day, that it was also the said Okey, who kindly made it possible for me to become a US citizen when he sent me $350 in Tampa from West Hartford, CT, at a time I couldn’t get help to process my immigration application in 2000), Enahoro and Moffat Ekoriko, publishers of Africa Now and New African, respectively, bookended my good fortune with equally kind letters introducing me as a contributor to those publications. I didn’t have to leave Leeds to attend a visa interview at the American Embassy then at 24 Grosvenor Square, London. I mailed out my application to the Embassy. In less than two weeks, I received my Nigerian passport back with a multiple entry visa to the United States. I recall I was one of several students who were lucky at the time with their applications, out of so many who had applied.
Enahoro’s mission at the DTN was to restore the independence of the newspaper, once enjoyed under private hands, by freeing it from government control, often exercised through the information and culture ministry. Over the course of many years, the ministry came to regard the Daily Times, together with its sister publications, as little more than its own official gazette. Dr. Walter Ofonagoro, the information and culture minister at the time, had just fired Innocent Oparadike, an affable, soft-spoken man, over the sale by Oparadike of No. 13 Cooper Road, a prime property long owned by the company. Slightly more than twelve months earlier, the minister had kicked out Tunji Oseni over some type disagreement between him and Oseni. Towards his mission, Enahoro would convince the federal government, then led by Abacha, to relinquish its 60% majority shares acquired in September 1975 through the National Insurance Corporation of Nigeria (NICON), and return them to private owners. Enahoro envisioned an atmosphere of untrammelled freedom and credibility under which the newspaper could thrive by competing fiercely in a marketplace already dominated by privately owned publications.
The company’s debt stood at a staggering N526m. At the summit of its reign, the daily edition had a print run of 225,000 copies. By the time Enahoro took over as sole administrator, it had plunged to 5,000 copies. Enahoro approached NICON for recapitalization, but NICON said it was willing to help if the information and culture ministry stayed out of the DTN’s business. Ofonagoro would not let go. Time after time, NICON was set back on its heels by Ofonagoro’s public remarks about the DTN being an arm of his ministry each time the body resolved to help the ailing company. What to do? Unlike some of his predecessors who were hectored into doing the minister’s bidding to keep their jobs, Enahoro wasn’t going to fold like a wet rag in front of Ofonagoro. Suited in body armour by way of the protection he enjoyed from the highest echelon of government, Enahoro went to battle against Ofonagoro, all guns blazing. In public remarks, and in a private letter addressed to the minister, a copy of which he showed to me in confidence, Enahoro warned Ofonagoro to back off. As the late man told me one day, their quarrel degenerated into something close to a shouting match at an Abuja event, prompting mediators to come between them.
As their feud continued, Enahoro embarked on other bold moves and daring executions at the DTN. To streamline operations, he reduced its cumbrous workforce by nearly half its original strength to howls of protest from affected employees. Next, he scrapped the newspaper’s editorial board. Imported into the newspaper in 1977 by Dr Patrick Dele Cole, managing director, the American concept would later spread to other Nigerian newspapers. Enahoro, for long, disdained the tradition. Under the concept, editorial opinions once written by the editor were now ceded to the editorial board staffed with eggheads, men and women of erudition and cultivation hired away from ivory tower institutions to act as think-tank for the newspaper’s editorial division.
Enahoro thought the concept was wrong because it stole the editor’s mantle from him. Seeking to restore that usurped editorial prerogative for the editor, Enahoro finally axed the board. He introduced a new-look front page for the daily edition consisting of a masthead in black cursive and a front-page design with a kicker, headline and a rider, a style he termed “continental”. Whatever he thought of the new-look front page, it was greeted by a torrent of blistering criticism from fellow journalists who thought the front page was too crowded. He later modified the design. Despite the many setbacks, however, Enahoro seemed to be making headway with his reforms. Circulation of the daily edition had gone up to 30,000. In the meantime, Abacha had directed NICON to take over control of the DTN, a move guaranteed to unlock the cords of steel with which the information and culture ministry had successfully shackled the newspaper and its conglomerates to itself for years.
But nothing is certain in this world except three things: death, taxes and Ofonagoro’s continued meddlesomeness in the affairs of the DTN. A brilliant intellectual, Ofonagoro was also a wily politician who outgunned Enahoro by virtue of his proximity to Abacha as minister. He used that access to sow doubts about Enahoro in Abacha’s mind. Ofonagoro was also committed to his goal of throwing a monkey wrench into NICON’s interest in the DTN, and he understood that the only way to achieve that was by making frequent invidious public remarks indicating the DTN was still under the ministry’s control and/or that its financial woes were so apocalyptically severe it was impossible to recapitalize it.
Such remarks often achieved his intended goal: NICON continued to pull back. Worse, banks that had begun to show interest in financing the DTN, started to back away. Frustrated, Enahoro financed some of the problems of the company with his own money hoping to be paid reimbursed later. He told me he managed to have audience with the man who had appointed him twice or so, during which he broached the problems of the company to the late dictator. Although Abacha listened somewhat sympathetically, he did nothing to help the financial situation of the DTN.
Abacha did later fire Ofonagoro in a cabinet reshuffle, a signal that seemed to give a flicker of hope to the future of the DTN. As it turned out, Abacha’s decision was all hat and no cattle. Chief Ike Obasi Mokelu, the man he appointed to replace Ofonagoro, was just as intrusive in the affairs of the company, if not more so. If Enahoro’s quarrel with Ofonagoro was mostly public, the one he had with Mokelu was quieter. When Abacha died, Chief John Nwodo was appointed to replace Mokelu by General Abdulsalami Abubakir, who succeeded Abacha as head of state.
Enahoro modified his approach by ingratiating himself with Nwodo who was once a federal minister in the government of then President Shehu Shagari. As I wrote in the Newswatch edition of May 10, 1999, “Without having the independence of the Daily Times undermined, Enahoro sought to move closer to Nwodo… He organized a press conference for Nwodo in his residence and invited media chiefs. He wanted to boost the relationship between him and the media.” Enahoro got no mileage out of that approach as nothing changed. Worse than that, Nwodo made a public remark similar to the types made by Ofonagoro about the serious insolvency of the DTN. Enahoro was shocked and utterly discouraged by the minister’s comment. Raising his head, looking further down the road, all he could see was a dead end.
All exertions by Enahoro having failed, he felt like a man who had frittered away his energy and precious time, and his own money, in pursuit of a phantom. Since I knew him, he had voiced only one regret of his life to me: his arthritis, which was making it increasingly difficult for him to continue to play his beloved golf as much as he wanted to. Next to journalism which he loved with a passion, golf gave him sweet and joy. He was a member of three golf clubs in Nigeria, one in Abuja, and two in Lagos. He also belonged to several in London.
Now Enahoro had a second regret: he rued the day he accepted the offer to leave London to preside over the affairs of the Daily Times as chief executive. He wanted no part of the job when it first came from Abacha for several reasons, including the complex relationship between the DTN and the information ministry, his having relocated back to London after his recent tour of duty in Nigeria, and the fact that he was just about to resume the publication of Africa Now after years of absence from the newsstands. Chief Tom Ikimi, Abacha’s Foreign Affairs minister, who clearly arranged the offer, tried to persuade Enahoro to accept the job.
He and Enahoro hailed from Uromi, and were close friends. The legendary journalist was in his London home one night when he received a long-distance call from Nigeria. On the line was Augustus Aikhomu, former vice president under the military rule of Ibrahim Babangida. Aikhomu was also his friend and a fellow Esan from Irrua. The retired Admiral made an appeal to Enahoro to come back home to save his former paper from death. Later, one of Enahoro’s brothers followed up on that challenge when he said to him, “You have to decide whether you want to be remembered as Peter Pan who wrote How to be a Nigerian, or as Peter Enahoro, the man who saved the DTN.”
Stirred by those words, Enahoro boarded a flight to Nigeria to rescue the oldest newspaper group the country once knew until it became clear that Abacha had other intentions when he offered Enahoro the job. All he needed was the aura and reputation of Enahoro the Younger as a counterweight to Enahoro the Elder, the NADECO chieftain leading a political guerrilla warfare against him. But Peter Pan was nobody’s errand man, certainly not a cat’s paw for the military’s dirty job. As he said to me, “There is the time and place for everything. But there is no time and place for becoming a tool of anyone in my book.” He was no politician but a journalist who concentrated all the energies of his mind and spirit on saving the DTN until his efforts failed. Worn to a frazzle, Enahoro waited to be fired from his job. He could have resigned but he chose to be let go instead.
His ouster, when it finally came, appeared to have been orchestrated for maximum shock value by newly elected President Olusegun Obasanjo, who disliked Enahoro with a vengeance anyway. Alongside Enahoro, Obasanjo fired the heads of four other government-owned media organizations, including Patrick Ityohegh, director-general of the Nigerian Television Authority, and Tom Adaba, who held the same position at the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC). The word “retired”, a term loaded with the sinister implication of an out-of-pasture civil servant thrown out of a job, was particularly used for Enahoro. In a story titled, “Tornado in Five Media Houses”, which I wrote for Newswatch of August 9, 1999, less than two months before my departure for England, I reported that Olatunji Dare, former columnist and editorial board chairman of The Guardian, was named to replace Enahoro by Obasanjo. A seasoned columnist known for his satires and excellently turned prose, Dare was among those in the foremost ranks of Enahoro’s admirers until he soured on him over his position on “June 12” and his subsequent drubbing of Carrington. But Dare, who had a teaching gig at Bradley University in the US at the time, turned down the offer. Was he embarrassed that Dare rejected a job he had gladly left London to accept? “Yes and no, “Enahoro said. “Yes, I feel embarrassed. I read Dr Dare’s explanations. I think the sum total is that he said he was not informed. And that when he tried to reach the presidency, he couldn’t reach anybody. I have to accept that’s why he refused. But it seems to me I did not have his wisdom, because I came rushing down,” he said self-deprecatingly.
Enahoro did not go quietly into the night. Like an Old Testament prophet taking his message boldly to the face of kings, he laid into Obasanjo in a piece he told me he’d just published in Vanguard, a typewritten copy of which he sent to me in Leeds, alongside a letter dated “22-12-99”. In that opinion piece, titled “A Mission for Obasanjo” Enahoro wrote: “I’d seen quite a bit of Obasanjo in the past, at close quarters too. But I had not seen him after his release from jail until the two occasions when as President-elect he dined and lunched with the Press. I was struck by the transformation in his body language. It was not, as we had been led to expect, that of a newly delivered ‘Born Again Christian’, more the confident swagger of a celebrant prison graduate scarcely concealing a cocky vindication. As he spoke to us, he fidgeted, turned from side to side, dug his hand in his garments and appeared to scratch his back. I think he wanted us to know he didn’t give a damn. It was a most irritating performance to watch.”
Although Enahoro loathed Obasanjo as much as the latter did him, his Vanguard piece was clearly a fair-minded censure of Obasanjo for allowing the cultures of militarism and scores-settling to creep into his new administration. “Fate has handed Obasanjo a second chance to make himself a great leader of his country,” he stated. “It is a rare privilege. He must not squander it on pettiness… The country needs a man with the right mix of compassion and probity around which the nation can rally to foment a catchy atmosphere of reconciliation. Does Obasanjo have it in him? This must be his great mission,” Enahoro concluded.
Attached to the copy were more than six pages of online responses to his write-up, most of them dripping with virulent anger and scathing insults at Enahoro for going to bat for Maryam Abacha, widow of the late head of state whom Enahoro thought was being harassed by the Obasanjo administration for the sins of her late husband. “I do not know Mrs Maryam Abacha personally. Indeed, I do not know any members of the family personally,” Enahoro had written. “My one-on-one contacts with her late husband were official only; they numbered three in all and the longest of them lasted forty minutes. He invited me to return from London to run the Daily Times. We both made a mistake: he in asking me, I, in accepting. The mission failed and I have reasons to be upset with the experiences I was forced to endure… But I refuse to join the bandwagon of the shameless hordes that were much higher up the ladder: people who benefited immensely from his patronage but who now are notable for their deafening silence, refusing to speak up for his widow. My intervention is purely humane.” Amused by the blistering blowback against his piece, Enahoro wondered in his letter, “Why can’t Nigerians bring themselves to debate issues instead of being abusive?!”
I had already finished writing this tribute when, finally, I got my hands on a copy of his memoir. Fred, who had since returned to Nigeria, had the kindness to send me a copy in London where I was just beginning the initial phase of my vacation. If ever any book earned the right to be called a tome, that book was Then Spoke the Thunder, especially when compared to his earlier books, How to be a Nigerian, You Got to Cry to Laugh! and The Complete Nigerian, published respectively in 1966, 1972 and 1992. All the same, the memoir is quite an absorbing read, a book to delight as well as to inform. Curious to see if my account of things at the DTN tracks with Enahoro’s in Thunder, I cut to the chase by first reading portions of the book relevant to this piece. I found nothing out of sync.
With his DTN days in the rearview mirror, Enahoro turned his attention to other things when he returned home to London. He wrote a column for West Africa, a collection of which he sent to me for my reading pleasure. Such a nice man! One day, he spoke to me on the phone about his plans to restart Africa Now magazine which he had suspended more than three years earlier when he took up the job to revive the DTN. He mailed me a complimentary copy of the “restructured” (as he described it) magazine a month later, together with a handwritten letter carrying his customary felicity of language, in which he said the new magazine would be “my retirement”. He asked for a contribution from me which he published in the very next edition. But the publication did not survive beyond a few more editions. The death of Africa Now seemed to mark the end of his active years in journalism. We exchanged correspondence via email for several more years after I left the UK for the US.
And then the long radio silence between us.
Thanks to Dr Reuben Abati, I “met” the great man again more than 18 years after our last encounter by mail, not in the physical sense of that one-on-one interaction as of old, but in some vicarious fashion, when Abati interviewed him on Arise News. I saw a substantial portion of the video several months before his death, and Enahoro, that zestful, human dynamo of former times, was taking Abati’s questions from what appeared to be his sickbed. I could tell that much had changed in him, a sobering reminder of the frailty of human existence. His vocalizations, pitch and delivery had been slowed under the combined strain of illness and old age. Despite that, his recollections, as sharp as a tack, still had something of that digital clarity to them.
Fortunately, that is not the image of him that endures in my memory; instead, it is that of the legendary figure I often observed at his Ikoyi residence as he held court before a gathering of old journalists, friends and intellectuals, including John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo professor of English and Enahoro’s classmate at GCU, and Chinweizu, poet, critic and journalist. On some nights, his home was like a debating society. Once, Tony Awe, the sartorial controller of finance at Newswatch, was keen on owning Enahoro’s acquaintance and asked me to introduce him to him. Awe showed me kind favours at Newswatch by always making money available for my out-of-town editorial assignments.
I was too glad to get in his car for the trip to Enahoro’s residence one evening. As we drove back home from Ikoyi that late night, Awe, impressed by the sheer witchery of Enahoro’s eloquence, went on and on about how effortlessly words came to him, a fact not denied by Joseph Ode, a senior editorial staff of Newswatch, who had been at a Newswatch Summit where Enahoro was the guest. In a tribute celebrating Enahoro on his 80th birthday eight years ago, and published in This Day, I referenced that fact when I wrote thus: “Hosted by the excellent team of Agbese, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed, all doyens of modern Nigerian journalism, Enahoro, without prepared notes, and with only a glass of water sitting on the conference table in front of him, fielded questions for several hours on a catholic range of subjects. I had the distinct privilege of being asked by Agbese to join the interviewing team on account of my sustained reporting on the DTN. And on display throughout the session, was Enahoro the raconteur, the man with the remarkable gift of language who can talk an owl out of a tree. At the end of the Summit, Joseph Ode, who was then the general editor of the magazine, said to me as he nodded approvingly, “He’s something else. His thoughts flow like a river.”
Being in the same room with Ekpu, Agbese, and Yakubu Mohammed, three outstanding Eminences of Nigerian journalism who fired my ambition to be a journalist, and Peter Pan, a man of nearly Cosmic proportions in Nigerian and African journalism, was almost too much to process those initial minutes of the Summit. I had a dizzying sensation, a vertigo of sorts. Perhaps, more than the job Agbese had offered me after having first challenged me eight years earlier to acquire higher education, more than the award and the promotion he just gave me months earlier, his decision to have me attend that Summit was the best thing that ever happened to me at the time, next, of course, to the heroic figure he is for me in journalism.
For Peter Osajele Aizegbeobor Enahoro, a man whose type is vanishingly rare, if not altogether non-existent these days, no words of praise are too strong. At 88, he lived long, and he lived very well, too. But he lives on – in my mind. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living,” said Cicero, that most gifted Roman orator and writer of his day. For the opportunity to have met him in life, I remain eternally thankful to God. For the kindness he showed me, including his encouragement of my work and those invaluable words of advice, I have no words adequate enough to express my gratitude to him. But of one thing I’m certain: memories of him will remain with me in the remainder of my natural existence. That, at least, is one way to tend the flame on his behalf.
Mudiaga Ofuoku lives in the US.
