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The Missing Plane
Related to country: Nigeria

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Fellow Nigerians,

Human life in Nigeria is so cheap these days and a lot of things are taken for granted. People witness horrifying spectacles, just shrug it off and move on. Our sense of shock has been numbed and our sense of outrage too has been blunted.

Are these really the end times? A Beer craft plane with four or five Nigerians on board has been missing for some days now. The people on board more likely than not are dead. It grieves my heart to think about their children, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, fathers mothers. I can picture a family of one of the missing people, sitting with hopes forlorn by their radio sets, TVs, or phones anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones.

They will clutch to hopes however unfounded that by some miracle their precious ones could be alive.
Pray what is our dear country doing to find these people? What are the agencies responsible for things like this doing? How well equipped are they for the task at hand?

We have had a rash of air disasters in the recent past which ought to have made us alive to our responsibilities and duties as a serious nation. Honestly, this highlights our colossal failure at nationhood...

However, I know just how these people feel having recently lost someone dear to me. I am overwhelmed with grief for the families.

2 hours ago, I woke up from a troubling dream. In the dream I was in Ikeja, Lagos Nigeria and was looking up into a strange sky. It was very dark and tumultuous, but there seemed to be many planes taking off, and in the sky at once. It was as if people were fleeing on International flights out of Nigeria. These planes as they took off headed in different directions, as if any heading will suffice.

If you have an idea of what this dream might mean, please share with us. Meanwhile, I shall meditate on it and request that the Lord reveals and clarifies on the dream.



March 27, 2008 | 3:22 PM Comments  1 comments

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US appoints Nigerian scientist to head research centre
Related to country: Nigeria

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The US government has announced the establishment of a new Centre for Genomics and Health Disparities to be headed by a Nigerian-born US-based scholar, scientist and researcher, Dr. Charles Rotimi, Empowered Newswire, a US-based Nigerian news agency has reported.

The announcement, made last week by the US-government owned National Institutes of Health in a statement, said the centre would be known as the NIH Intramural Centre for Genomics and Health Disparities. It said ti would be a venue for research about the way populations were impacted by diseases, including obesity, diabetes and hypertension.”

NIH is the US government‘s major medical research agency with 27 institutes and centres.

It is part of the US government‘s Department of Health and Human Services, an equivalent of Nigeria‘s Federal Ministry of Health.

Under Rotimi‘s leadership, the centre is also expected to provide ”training opportunities for students and established scientists from developing countries and from minority groups in the United States.

Rotimi, who was described as the ”internationally renowned genetic epidemiologist,” is based in the state of Maryland in the US, where the new centre is also located.

He is a graduate of the University of Benin where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 in Biochemistry, before travelling to the US to do a Master‘s Degree in Epidemiology at the University of Mississippi, 1983, and a second Master‘s degree-in Public Health, that is, -M.P.H. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1988.

In 1991 Rotimi completed his PhD. in Epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

With over 80 published papers, Rotimi is known as a leader globally in his specialised area of Genetic research.

In 1992, a year after his PhD, he became an Assistant Professor at the Loyola University in Chicago, where he later rose to become Associate Professor.

In 1996, the US government recognised him and appointed him a Grant Reviewer at the NIH, where he rose to become a Senior Investigator and the acting director four years ago.

Rotimi‘s rise at the US government-owned NIH in Maryland coincided with his relocation from Loyola University to Howard University in Washington, DC, which borders Maryland immediately to the South. Howard is regarded as the best US black controlled university.

He became Director of Genetic Epidemiology at Howard in 1999 and a full professor at the same university in 2003.

The Nigerian-trained scientists was elected Co-Chairman of the American Diabetic Association in 2001 and the President of the African Society of Human Genetics in 2004.

According to the statement, ”a key focus of Rotimi‘s research is understanding the triangular relationship between obesity, hypertension, and diabetes, which together account for more than 80 per cent of the health disparity between African Americans and European Americans.”

It was added that the genetic epidemiology models developed by Rotimi and his group were now ”helping to address whether high disease rates are the result of exposure to environmental risk factors, genetic susceptibility, or an interaction between the two.”

Besides, Rotimi is currently ”engaged in the first genome-wide scan of an African American cohort, with the goal of identifying genes associated with obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. More than 2,000 participants from multigenerational African American families are enrolled in this large-scale genetic epidemiology study.”

The new US institute headed by Rotimi will employ a Genomics approach, collecting and analysing genetic, clinical, lifestyle and socio-economic data to study a range of clinical conditions that have puzzled and troubled public health experts for decades.

By Agency reporter

March 26, 2008 | 10:42 AM Comments  0 comments

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Uncompromising Defender Of The Faith

By Oluokun Ayorinde

“When Christ sought safety from Herod, he found it in Egypt, in Africa, and when he was completely worn out, an African carried his cross. God is consistent: He has always used Africans to build his church, to save his church from error. Right from the very beginning, Africans are always there to do it,” Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola, Primate, Church of Nigeria told Christian Science Monitor last year. He was defending his crusade to prevent the pollution of traditional Christian values in the body of the global Anglican Community. Yet, implicit in that statement is the irony represented by Akinola. While Europeans brought Christianity to Nigeria and other African countries in the mid 19th century, the Archbishop is now at the vanguard of the move to see the gospel practised in its pristine form in the land of the Missionaries.

• Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola
Like the apostles of old, the head of over 20 million Anglicans has been recognised globally as a pillar and voice for conservatism in the face of the rampaging assault on old and tested Christian virtues by forces of Western liberalism. His theological emphasis has been on the Bible and the teachings of the Apostles. This has seen him taking what some in the Western world have described as “uncompromising stand” against ordination of homosexual priests, and blessing of same sex marriage, in the Anglican Communion.

For one, he led the opposition to the consecration of Gene Robinson as the first confessed homosexual bishop in the Ecumenical Communion Church of United States of America, ECUSA, in 2003. Despite the protest, Robinson was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire. Akinola rallied other conservative Primates around the world not only to condemn the practice, but to isolate the US Church from the mainstream global Anglican Communion. Subsequently, ECUSA’s representatives were barred from the Nottingham Anglican Consultative Council meeting held in 2005. This led the Church of Nigeria to redefine its relationship with other Anglican Churches in 2005 as “Communion with all Anglican Churches, Dioceses and Provinces that hold and maintain the Historic Faith, Doctrine, Sacrament and Discipline of the one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”.

“We want to state that our intention in amending the 2002 Constitution of the Church of Nigeria was to make clear that we are committed to the historic faith once delivered to the Saints, practice and the traditional formularies of the Church.

Even more important in his reforming zeal is the May 2007 installation of Martyn Minns, formerly of the Episcopal Church, as a bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, under the Church of Nigeria structure, as an alternative for those who did not agree to the practices of the US Church. He has also called for sanctions to be imposed on the Church of England and ECUSA, arguing that their approval of same sex marriage is against the Anglican creed.

Born in Abeokuta, the capital of the present day Ogun State in 1944, there was nothing about the circumstances of the birth of the Anglican leader to suggest he would attain his present global popularity. The father of six could not go very far in his education as his father died when he was just four years old. He dropped out of school to learn carpentry. But he later furthered his education through distance learning. He proceeded for further study at an Anglican seminary in Nigeria after which he was ordained a priest. Not done, he proceeded to another Theological Seminary in Virginia, USA.

On his return to the country, Akinola was saddled with the task of laying a solid foundation for the Anglican Church in Abuja in the early 1980s when the Federal Capital Territory was just a mere collection of disparate villages. His sterling performance in this task led to his ordination as Bishop of Abuja in 1989. Akinola was ordained as the Archbishop of Province III of the Church of Nigeria, consisting of the northern dioceses of Nigeria in 1997, and became the Primate of the Church of Nigeria on 22 February 2000. Akinola was bestowed with the National Award of Commander of the Order of the Niger, CON, in December 2003. In 2006, TIME Magazine named the Archbishop among the world’s 100 most influential people in the category: Leaders and Revolutionaries. The Christian leader has also spoken out against religious violence and once warned that Nigerian Christians might be forced to retaliate to end persistent attacks on their persons, businesses and religious houses in the Northern part of the country.

He is never scared to criticise Nigerian governments when they are going wrong, especially the immediate past Obasanjo regime. Indeed, he once accused Obasanjo of a disrespect to God. As President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, it was during Akinola’s tenure that the association was able to complete the National Ecumenical Centre, Abuja where Christians of all denominations now worship.


March 26, 2008 | 7:03 AM Comments  0 comments

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Nemesis Of Bad Leaders

By Ademola Adegbamigbe

During break time at Ansar-Ud-Deen Primary School, Yemoja, Ondo, Gani Fawehinmi and his friends would gather to wolf down their lunch of gari, dry fish and moi moi. One day, his mates started shouting and running in different directions. What happened? A huge snake, coiled on a bough, had stretched beyond Fawehinmi’s neck and was putting its tongue into his gari. The boy did not panic. Rather, with the deftness of a snake charmer, he just flung the reptile off, an action that made his peers to believe that he had supernatural powers.

That action on a hot

• Gani Fawehinmi
afternoon in 1949, showed Fawehinmi’s fearlessness, a trait he exhibits till today and which has made various Nigerian governments, on many occasions, to put him in jail. In other words, he has spent his life fighting all vermin, both military and civilian, without minding the consequences.

Fawehinmi, popularly called Gani, in most cases uses the courts to fight his cause. This, however, did not come out of a vacuum. Fawehinmi’s revolutionary nature, wealth, brilliance and philanthropy took a long and tortuous period of gestation.

He was born on 22 April 1938 in Ondo to Chief Saheed Tugbobo, a timber merchant and Seriki Musulumi of the city, whose own father was Chief Lisa (Alujonu) Fawehinmi, a warrior of great repute. The Alujonu in his name means ‘spirit’, an acknowledgement of his great exploits.

Gani started elementary school at Ansar-Ud-Deen Primary School, Ondo in 1942. At the age of 16, he gained admission to Victory College, Ikare, Ondo State where his Principal, Archdeacon Akinrele noticed his knowledge of current affairs and great ability to debate, and advised him to study law. The young boy got his ideas from Daily Times, which he subscribed to with his pocket money.

After leaving Victory College in 1958, he came to Lagos the following year, working as a clerk at the High Court, Igbosere and later as a tally clerk at the Nigerian Ports Authority.

On 29 April 1961, he sailed to England and enrolled at Holborn College of Law as a part-time student. He was having a swell time with his studies when, in 1963, his father, his source of support, died. Life suddenly became a bed of thorns for him.

Different ideas of survival started whirling in Fawehinmi’s head. First, he got a job as a toilet cleaner at Russell Square Hotel. He wrote 136 letters, begging many individuals for help. None replied. Then he made a beeline for the Nigerian High Commission in London, seeking enlistment into the Army. The recruitment officer saw the book that Fawehinmi clutched, The Free Officers’ Revolt, and wondered whether revolt was what the young man wanted to pursue in the force. He promptly rejected Fawehinmi’s application.

Undaunted, Fawehinmi continued with his cleaning job, schooling as a part-time student and reading voraciously about great public figures like Fidel Castro, George Washington, Karl Marx and others.

He finished his programme in 1964 but, because of poverty, could not proceed to the Inner Temple in London. When he heard that Dr. Teslim Elias, the  Nigerian-born jurist who later became President of the World Court at the Hague, Netherlands, had established the Law School three-month programme in Lagos, Fawehinmi returned home. He carried a small bag holding a pair of shoes, two pairs of socks and one jacket, which made people wonder whether he was still expecting bigger luggage at the ports!

He was finally called to the bar on 15 January 1965. The same year, after a brief stint at a relation’s chambers, he established his practice at 108 Herbert Macaulay Way, Yaba, Lagos.

Since 1965, Fawehinmi has instituted over 5,000 suits at the Supreme, Appeal, High and Magistrate courts.

After the 3 June 1993 election was cancelled by former military president, Ibrahim Babangida, an election won by Chief MKO Abiola, Fawehinmi founded a human rights group, the National Conscience, in 1994, to fight the cause. On 26 August the same year, six security men invaded Fawehinmi’s chambers when he travelled to address a rally in Port Harcourt. Security men did not allow him to go beyond the Port Harcourt airport; they sent him back to Lagos. In December 1995, when the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, organised a rally in Yaba, Lagos, Fawehinmi dared the police that wanted to stop it to shoot him.

Fawehinmi also stood against General Sani Abacha, a former head of state, when some fairweather politicians were advocating that all government registered political parties should adopt him as a consensus candidate. He waved them off as “ungodly charlatans playing with treason.”

For his pro-democracy activities, Fawehinmi, in 1998, was elected the first head of Joint Action Committee of Nigeria, JACON, by 55 kindred bodies that constituted it. The Gani-led JACON demanded that the General Abdulsalami Abubakar regime set up a government of national unity, headed by Abiola. The senior advocate, in July 1998, called for mass action.

When Abubakar did not yield but announced his own transition programme, JACON published a book, Way Forward: Revolution Not Transition, in which he proposed the scheme as a way of opposing “the process and system of the exploitation and repression of the masses under a new form of oppressive government.”

When Abiola died in detention, Fawehinmi filed a suit at the Federal High Court, Ikeja, praying that Abubakar be compelled to explain the deaths of Abiola, his wife Kudirat and even Pa Alfred Rewane. After the exit of the military, Fawehinmi took the new President, Olusegun Obasanjo, to court over the N350,000 and N250,000 allowances to former presidents, heads of state etc.

The human rights lawyer, in May 2002, dragged the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to the Federal High Court in Abuja. He wanted the court to compel INEC not to conduct any election based on the 2001 Electoral Act. His party, National Conscience Party, NCP, was among the 30 political groups seeking registration to participate in the August 2002 local government polls.

Section 80(1) of the act says political parties seeking registration “must win 10 per cent of the councillorship and chairmanship positions throughout the country.” Fawehinmi said it was illegal, unconstitutional, null and void, because it was not passed by the National Assembly “and it was not part of the harmonised bill sent to the President on 5 December 2001 and assented to by the President on 6 December 2001”. Gani took the matter as far as the Supreme Court and won. As a result, over 30 political parties were registered by INEC.

When Obasanjo set up the Oputa Panel, Babangida and retired Brigadier-General Haliru Akilu, erstwhile director of Military Intelligence, sought a Federal High Court order that the panel report should not be implemented, Fawehinmi filed a motion to be joined in the suit. The duo were apprehensive over portions of the panel’s report concerning the death of Dele Giwa, former Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine, through a parcel bomb on 19 October 1986.

Apart from consistently condemning Obasanjo’s incessant increase of petroleum products’ prices, Fawehinmi opposed the former president’s elongation of tenure bid, threatening that the “pro democracy groups will resist it and we will ask Nigerians to revolt. No amount of rigging, amendment of the constitution, misuse of public funds will achieve that result.”

For his advocacy, he was arrested more than 36 times and, beginning with his first detention in 1969 when he defended a less privileged Nigerian whose wife was defiled by a top government personnel, has suffered detention more than 15 times. All these, however, have not blunted his resolve to fight for justice.

Among the various forms of persecution he suffered was the denial of conferring the title of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, on him for more than 21 years. It was not until the International Bar Association, consisting of 40 million lawyers in over 190 countries, honoured Fawehinmi that Nigeria deemed it fit to give him the title.

Fawehinmi’s has been the leading voice against oppression and military dictators like Babangida, who annulled the 12 June 1993 presidential election; Sani Abacha, who set up assassination squads and wanted to transmute into a life president; and Abdulsalami Abubakar, under whose regime Abiola died. Will he quit activism? Absolutely not. In his words: “The question of retirement or quitting the struggle does not exist so far things remain the same. I will not quit until I see a better society.”


March 26, 2008 | 7:03 AM Comments  0 comments

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Winning, The Only Thing

By Tayo Odunlami

Some 28 years ago, a 35-year-old top hand at Grant Advertising concluded he was no longer getting any challenges at the then third leading advertising agency in Nigeria. Biodun Shobanjo, erstwhile Deputy Managing Director at Grant, felt its employers were lacking the ambition to topple the two market leaders, Lintas and Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Which was unacceptable. To Shobee, as Shobanjo is called, “winning is not everything; it is the only thing.”

Shobanjo would not be contented with being No 2, or even the Chief Executive Officer at a third rate ad agency. He was focused on only one direction; the acme. So focused, the advert agent realised there was only one way to attain that height. In December 1979, he left Grant. On 2 January 1980, Shobanjo, together with five aides he poached at Grant, founded a new agency, Insight Communication Limited, at 1 Calabar Street, Lagos. Insight’s pioneer staff totalled 18 and had a billing of only N15,000.

Shobanjo had identified his destination in the industry before he set up shop and was determined to get there. The beginning was rough but he trudged on. He decided he had to carve an image for Insight that would distinguish it from the old pack. A departure from the dull, laid-back advert executive, Shobanjo emerged an unconventional, brash, aggressive, daring and innovative advert sheikh. To Shobanjo, it was advertising unusual.

His style of doing business initially attracted odium from rival advert agencies which frowned at what they perceived as his somewhat unusual extent to win accounts. Insight’s philosophy has been “thinking global, yet acting local.” Within one year in business, the company had firmly announced its presence. Its billings had shot up to N1.5 million. The following year, Shobanjo put into effect the “thinking global” vision when Insight was affiliated with Ted Bates, an advert agency that later became a part of Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide.

Shobanjo was only too glad to take Insight to the Saatchis whose business philosophy perfectly dovetails into his. To both Shobanjo and the Saatchis (Charles and Maurice), “the first position is wonderful, second is terrific, third is threatened and fourth is fatal.”

The association has been rewarding. Insight leads the local marketing communications industry which has flourished since Shobanjo showed the way that indigenous ownership can flaunt a quality that can match foreign competition. By the time Insight celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1990, its billings had leapt up to N53.9 million. The figures have since multiplied and Insight is credited with being the first Nigerian ad agency to cross the N400 million mark in billings. By the end of last year, the figure was estimated to be over N800 million, with more than 30 blue-chip companies in its books.

Shobanjo has since diversified to build a business empire, the Troyka Group. The body includes The Quadrant Company, a public relations outfit; MC & A, an advertising agency; Optimum Exposures, an outdoor advertising company; All Seasons MediaCom, a media buying company; African Barter Company, a television marketing distribution firm and Halogen, a security company. The Troyka Group is worth about N20 billion in assets.

In December 2004, he stepped down as Managing Director of Insight Communications after handing over to his successor, Jimi Awosika, a long-time associate since the Grant days. He remains Chairman of the Troyka Group.

Shobanjo was born on 24 December 1944 in Jebba, Kwara State where Joseph, his father, worked with the Nigeria Railway Corporation. He had primary education at St. Patrick’s Catholic School, Jebba, Kwara State; St. George’s Anglican School, Zaria and finally, Ijero Baptist School, Apapa Road, Ebute-Metta, Lagos. He attended Odogbolu Grammar School, Ijebu-Odogbolu, Ogun State.

He was employed by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, now the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, in 1964 as a Studio Manager and left in 1971 as a producer. Shobanjo is a member of the Institute of Public Relations, London; Chartered Institute of Marketing, England and International Advertising Association. He is also a fellow and former member of the Governing Council of the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria; fellow of the Commonwealth Journalists Association and a past president of the Association of Advertising Practitioners of Nigeria.


March 26, 2008 | 7:03 AM Comments  0 comments

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How We Started TheNEWS —Bayo Onanuga

Bayo Onanuga, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief of TheNEWS, spoke to ADEMOLA ADEGBAMIGBE and ERNEST OMOARELOJIE on the history of the magazine

Q: When exactly was TheNEWS first published?
A: The first publication came out on 8 February 1993. Any other thing we did before then was just like preparing for the birth of the baby. The actual birth was 8 February 1993.

Q: What prompted the birth of the magazine?
A: It’s a story we have told and retold. When we left African Concord in April 1992, some of our colleagues (Dapo Olorunyomi, Kunle Ajibade and Seye Kehinde) joined the African Guardian. There was a problem of what the rest of us – myself and Babafemi Ojudu – would do. We were two of the founding members of TheNEWS who didn’t find where to go initially. We all thought of abandoning journalism and going into other things. In fact, we toyed with the idea of going into fish business. Ojudu actually plunged into it, but regretted doing so because it was not his calling. I still stayed a little in journalism, reporting for Gemini News, which is like a news agency based in the UK at that time.

But the money was not so good and it was not a regular job. At a stage, people started telling us that there was nothing else we could do but to stick to journalism. That prompted us to call ourselves and decide that we needed to start our own publication. We started meeting in April and by July or so of 1992, we started meeting again. And by September, we had registered a company. That same month, we actually tried to open an account. The others were just preparations–recruiting staff, getting an office, doing the preview edition, seeking the help of shareholders and calling people to join our team and the rest of them.

We found out that many Nigerians were willing to at least, put their money into what we were trying to do. Some of them heard about what we were trying to do and actually called us, saying they were ready to help. I remember Chief Femi Adekanye of the defunct Commerce Bank. That was what he said. He told us that anytime we were ready, we should just call him. People like our current Chairman, Tayo Adesanya, and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu did the same thing. I did not have any direct contact with Tinubu. It was a friend of ours who told him and he didn’t even see the feasibility report or any other thing for that matter to be convinced. He just said he would support our dream and that was it. There were a lot of people like that who shared in the passion we had about our country and were ready to assist us.

Q: How were you able to find like minds to start with? Were the founders childhood friends?
A: We all worked as colleagues in African Concord . The defining thing was that those of us who came together resigned together. I resigned first and the others just put their resignation letters in as well. It was as if their editor was being pushed out of the place, since they all took part in the story that led to his stepping aside, as Babangida said. They also felt ‘we were all part of the thing’ and resigned.

Q: Was it true that MKO Abiola asked you to apologise to Babangida?
A: It was true. I didn’t lie against him (Abiola). He called me and I went to meet him in the house and he said something which, ironically, later happened to him. He said: ‘Look, you are a young man, this country is not worth dying for.’ He was trying to persuade me, saying I should just write a letter that he would take to IBB and his security chief, Haliru Akilu, that we were recanting and apologising. Ironically, about five years after, the same man died for the same country. He never denied that he asked me to apologise to IBB. I didn’t lie against him. I just told him that I would think about it and let him know my decision.

Q: Within the period, you started thinking about setting up a magazine and when it finally took off, you must have faced a lot of challenges. What were those challenges?
A: We didn’t face any challenges. No, we didn’t. I was quite surprised by the outpouring of support by fellow Nigerians. I got a lot of letters from Nigerians from all parts of the country saying, ‘you have done us proud, your position is correct.’ And they were urging us to provide more services for our fatherland. A lot of letters like that got to me from across the country. Prominent Nigerians were asking where they could get in touch with me. They wanted to see me and some gave me a lot of gifts, unsolicited gifts, just to say that they supported what we did and what we were planning to do. In fact when you have such words of encouragement from fellow countrymen, you can only say let’s try this thing out. On our part, we knew that there were going to be problems. It’s like you stepped on the tail of a tiger and you are just able to hang on a tree. The tiger would be there waiting to pounce on you. That was what happened to us. We knew that we were going to have that problem. As we were going about talking to people to invest in the company and so on, we kept asking if the government would allow us survive. That was the recurring thought on our minds. We resolved that we would try to do our best within the limits of our laws. Just two weeks after we started, we had a problem with Justice Moshood Olugbani, who committed us to prison.

Q: Then you had a problem with IBB…
A: No. It was his government. I think we published a story on Babangida’s methods and tactics, about the way the man operated and ran the country. We were going to publish a story Help! Nigeria is Dying, but before then, he ordered that they should go and lock up the place.

Q: What were your lowest moments over the period in review?
A: My lowest moment was the time I had to run out of Lagos. I had to escape from Lagos to my home town, Ijebu Ode. It is a place I had not visited for some years. Here was I under serious threat and I felt the best place for me to hide was my town. I ran away from Lagos and I was in Ijebu Ode for more than a month.

Q: Was that under Abacha?
A: It was under Abacha. That was in 1997. That was my lowest moment. Shortly after that, I had to also run out of the country.
The other one was when I was in the US and I was getting to know what’s going on at home, only to be told then that they had shut down all our offices and about 13 to 14 people were arrested the same day and locked up. For me it was very shattering. Well, by the grace of God, we all survived it. These are the things that really made us to rethink whether we could go on or survive.

Q: Is there anything you learnt from those experiences?
A: The experiences really made one to be stronger. As a person, when many people see me they say, this man is a gentleman but they know that the spirit behind the gentleness or the gentlemanliness is a spirit of steel. I am not afraid of any human being. The only person I am afraid of is God, if you call God a person.
But the experiences have only made one stronger, to believe in what we are doing because I believe journalism must not be for journalism’s sake. It must be for making a statement. Journalists should be agents of change wherever they operate. That is the kind of journalism we are practising–to see how we can impact on our society, to see how we can goad governments to do better for the people. This is because we believe that if you don’t get it right at the centre, we are wasting our time at every other level. If Nigeria gets the right leadership at the centre, the problem in our country will be solved. But as of now, we have still not got it right. We very much believe what we are doing and that is what keeps us going.

Q: Was there a period when the company faced real financial c