‘Nobody Likes the Journalist’
“According to the Yugoslav reporter, on arriving in Lagos, the airport authorities detained him and locked him up for four days pending the arrival of a Swissair flight for him to be deported to Switzerland.”
Nobody is the journalist’s pal. He is used and manipulated by the politician, then discarded and hated. He is regarded as a pariah and a scoundrel, the man not to confide in except when it serves the other man’s purpose, and even then the journalist is not told the whole truth. In fact, the truth he is told is mixed with some untruth. The security granted the journalist is the jail, where those in power like to keep many a nosy reporter, especially when he is on to something. The international reporter who travels from capital is even treated more badly. Maybe that’s justified, no matter how little, because he allows himself to be used as courier of other nation’s secrets.
Scorn and Distrust
He is briefed before leaving home on what his government needs from him. He is quickly debriefed on returning home by his government which hopes that the international reporter is on to something valuable. Through all this, some honest reporters get ill-used at International airports where they are viewed with scorn and distrust. As I was going to Liberia, for example, a Yugoslav journalist, Vjekoslav Grabaric, of Daily Vjesnik in Zagreb, came over to me at the Murtala Muhammed Airport with a tale of how he had spent three days in a Lagos lock-up. Seeing me with my shoulder beg and a typewriter in the other hand, Mr. Grabaric took his cup of coffee and moved over three stools to sit next to me at a bar in the airport.
“Are you a journalist?” Mr. Grabaric asked in his East European accent and correct English.
“Yes,” I told him, offering him a cigarette.
Are you going to Liberia for the OAU?” he asked, using the French acronyms.
“Ya,” I told him. “Are you?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But I have to go to Switzerland and then find my way to Liberia.”
“But why do you have to go that way. The Nigeria Airways is flying tonight to Liberia en-route to New York. Why don’t you get on the aircraft?”
Mr. Grabaric said he couldn’t because he was being deported. He said he had flown in three days earlier on a Swissair flight with the intention of spending four days in Lagos. He said he had applied for a visa in a Nigerian embassy in Switzerland where he was told that it would take up to three weeks to find out whether he could get a visa to Nigeria. Not having much time to hang around in Switzerland, Mr. Grabaric said, he decided on flying to Lagos and applying for a visa to stay in Nigeria for four days. But on arriving in Lagos, he said, the airport authorities detained him and locked him up for four days pending the arrival of another Swissair flight so that he could be put on it for a return flight to Switzerland. Poor Vjekoslav, he thought the whole episode funny and he laughed. Tried to explain the security system to him and apologized for his headache. He said that was all right. He understood.
“Nobody likes the journalist, Vjekoslav Graberic said in a lower and comradely conspiratorial tone.
“I Am A General”
It shouldn’t have happened to Leon Dash. But it did anyway. Leon is a black American reporter in West Africa for the Washington Post. He is one of the few western reporters who reporter the Third World with a feeling of sensitivity. He puts the facts in context, without interpreting Third World problems against the background of western experience and needs. Thus it was fitting that Alex Nwokedi, the Press Secretary to the Head of State, called on Leon Dash to ask General Olusegun Obasanjo the first question at a relaxing chat the Commander-in-Chief had with the World Press at the Organization of African Unity Conference Center in Monrovia.
“Mr. Obasanjo,” Leon Dash began, but he was cut short by a smiling General Obasanjo.
“I am a General,” the Head of State corrected him.
The reporters chuckled and Leon smiled contritely. “General Obasanjo,” he then corrected himself. Kennedy Mackenzie, the editor of West Africa, who was called to ask the next question, stayed clear of titles and such things and settled on the harmless “Sir …”
“Leon,” I called out after the chat, “remember next time, it is ‘General.’ Period. Okay.” This time, Leon Dash really laughed good.
Bridge of Understanding
A team of black American reporters and doctors arrived in Nigeria to find ways to establish communication link between the black community in the United States and their brothers and sisters in Nigeria. At a reception to welcome them to Nigeria at the VIP lounge, Murtala Muhammed Airport, Carlton Goodlet, leader of the black American visitors, said their visit was the “beginning of the beginning” in what he hoped would become a continual exchanges of visits between Nigerians and black Americans. The visitors expressed the desire to understand Nigeria and Nigerians during the tour. They said arriving on the Nigerian soil evoked an emotion recalling the fact that the bones of their forebears lay buried feet below.
The tour which had taken the visitors to various states where they were attached to a number of projects was the first manifestation of the pledge that General Obasanjo made to the black community in the United States to build a bridge of understanding between it and Nigerian. A number of Nigeria newspapers – including the Daily Times – the Nigeria Airways which supplied return tickets for the visitors, and the Federal Ministry of Information, jointly sponsored the tour.
©Daily Times, August 15, 1979
(Pp.35-37)
