Akporugo’s … Sense of Humour
“Akporugo was reported to have said he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about in the reassignment of Ray Ekpu from the editorship of Sunday Times to the Business Times, adding that Ray knew what to do if he didn’t like arrangement, of the musical chairs.”
Ray Ekpu and Tunde, my five-year-old son who lives in New York, struck a particularly keen friendship when they first met. And I knew that anytime I showed up in New York without a good account of the whereabouts of Ray, I would be in trouble with the little boy. I was the sort of fire between the two of them that when Tunde and Dele, his eight-year-old brother, came to visit me and Ray in a New York hotel a couple of days after their meeting, Tunde chose to spend the night in Ray’s room, while the possessive Dele of course chose his father’s room. When I told Ray that I was going to see the kids again, he said he would like to come over to New York even if for only two nights so that he could warm up his friendship with Tunde. The arrangement was that he would try and take some time off to join me in London a day before I was to continue my journey to New York. Ray didn’t get in touch until I left London, and I thought it may be because he could not get the permission from his employers to travel, and I went on to New York without him.
The first thing that Tunde asked me in New York was: “Where is Wray, Daddy?” Tunde insisted on calling him that despite all instruction to the contrary, explaining that he knew how to say Ray, but that he preferred Wray. I told him that Ray was supposed to be in New York, and that I didn’t know why he couldn’t come. Then the boy started crying. At that point, Dele suggested that I should call Nigeria to find out why Ray was not in New York to see his friend. The call came through at the first try. I was going to start telling Ray that he had gotten me into trouble with my little son when I noticed that he wanted to say something quite urgently. He said he had been trying to reach me, and that it was a good thing that my calling came through at that time. Well, the rest is a story, suffice it to say that he informed me of his reassignment from the editorship of the Sunday Times to the editorship of the Business Times. I was shocked, and it showed on my face.
“What is it daddy?” Dele asked, and I waved him to remain silent as I carried on the conversation with Ray who was so strangely calm and in good humour, turning the table as it became his labour to calm me down across the Atlantic. I put the phone down and turned towards Dele to field the questions that I expected him to fire.
“What is it?” he asked again, this time him arm around my neck.
“Oh, there is little problem in Nigeria,” I said uncertainly. “It appears that Ray been removed from his job and that’s why he wasn’t able to come to New York.”
“Are you saying he was fired?” he asked, dismissing my talk about why he couldn’t come to New York. Dele always hated being treated like a child.
“No.”
“Then, why are you looking so bad if he didn’t lose his job?” I explained to him what really happened.
“Is that a smaller job?”
“Yes and No.”
“What do you mean, ‘yes and no’?”
Ray’s former paper is bigger and more important.”
“Then, what did he do?”
“Ray is my friend, and some people in Nigeria think that is a capital crime.”
“I don’t understand, why being your friend is a crime?” Dele asked, as I tried to calm Tunde down. I explained to him as pain-stakingly as possible the problems that I and my paper had with the police and the government. Dele didn’t quite understand despite his precociousness, and I really didn’t quite understand why it should be a crime to protect freedom and worry about the soul of my fatherland.
“Wasn’t that the paper you were working for when you first went to Nigeria?” Dele started again.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Did you leave the paper because of the things you have been trying to tell me?”
“Yes and No,” I told him.
“Daddy, it can’t be Yes and No.”
“But it is,” I told him.
Needless to say that my continued stay in New York at that point became quite untenable. I felt extremely bad about what had happened to Ray, a complete gentleman who asked not more than to be left alone to answer to only his conscience and his kind God. I cut short my vacation with my sons in New York and headed for Nigeria where Ray met me at the Murtala Mohammed Airport – such a good friend. During the time that I waited for my luggage and the drive to my residence, Ray filled me in on the details of his macabre reassignment, and I got increasingly furious at his reaction which he had best described as “philosophical calmness.” I kept quiet and thought about the mindlessness of it all. What sort of people would do a silly thing like that? What sort of people couldn’t worry for one second about the effect on a man’s state of mind of their intemperate, inexcusable and outright vindictive action?
When I got home, I asked for all the papers of the preceding week. I read the report in the National Concord of Friday, November 19, and I couldn’t imagine a more nauseating and thoughtless statement than the one credited to Andy Akporugo who was named to replace Ray Ekpu. Akporugo was reported to have said he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about in the reassignment, adding that Ray knew what to do if he didn’t like the arrangement of the musical chairs. My initial reaction was of utter anger, but as I sat back and reflected on the whole episode, I began to feel extremely sorry for Andy Akporugo. I really felt sorry for him and for Daily Times as a company. How, I asked myself silently, could the Daily Times company put a man who could make such an outrageous statement in charge of an important paper like the Sunday Times? How and why? Was it Bacchus or Narcissus who tampered with Mr. Akporugo when he made his patently uncharitable statement about a man who clearly didn’t deserve such a highfalutin crap? Was he talking of his (Akporugo’s) 40-odd years on earth, or his experience as a journalist when he said he was Ray’s senior? If the first, it couldn’t possibly count towards the determination of intelligence and competence. And if the second, then Akporugo was wrong.
When Akporugo was pining away in Benin writing his polity stuff that nobody understood, for it never meant anything really, Ray was in Calabar making sense on the Chronicle. Ray was the editor of the Nigerian Chronicle at the time that Akporugo was the deputy editor of the Nigerian Observer, both regional papers belonging to state governments. The figures are there to prove it: Akporugo was appointed to act as the editor of the Sunday Times while the Daily Times was courting Ray, and in that period, Andy took down the circulation of the paper by nearly 100, 000 from where Tunji Oseni left it. When Ray finally agreed to come to the Sunday Times, he succeeded in taking the figure back up to the level where Tunji Oseni left it. Against that background, where did Mr. Akporugo come off making his uncharitable statement. Clearly, the man was possessed of a diabolical sense of homour, the expression used by Ray to describe the state of minds of those behind his reassignment. But unknown to Ray at that time, he couldn’t have found a better answer to describe the man who succeeded him on the Sunday Times.
©Sunday Concord, December 5, 1982
(Pp.189-192)
