Shagari, Up, Up Close (II)
“In matter of power and the struggle for it, proximity is magic. The nearer you are to the centre of power, the more it rubs off on you … Press secretaries were not known to enjoy the type of relationship Mr. Igoh enjoys with President Shagari … and that was good for journalism in Nigeria.”
As I was saying in my last column, President Shagari fixed Wednesday, December 9, for continuing our encounter which started in his office on the previous Monday when I spent 14 hours with him. He wanted me to come over on Tuesday, the next day, but had to attend the NYSC festivities which he said wasn’t quite sure how long it would go. So, he appointed Wednesday, but the time was not specified. Charles Igoh was supposed to get in touch with me on the telephone, either in my office or at my residence. Charles got through by 9 on the morning of Wednesday and asked me to come right over and that we would play the waiting game by the ear. It was a strangely good day with the traffic, because the impossible happened, travelling from Ikeja to the State House in Ikoyi in one hour. By 11, I was knocking on the door of Charles Igoh’s office. Let me say a thing or two about Charles Igoh. Mr. Igoh is the Chief Press Secretary to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The “Chief” in the title is as important as the remainder of the package. As President Shagari remarked in the course of the interview, “Charles is the closet to me.” That was the president’s answer to a question I asked him on the relationship between his press secretary and his other information staff.
In addition to Mr. Igoh, the president has an adviser on information in the person of Chief Olu Adebanjo, a special assistant in that area by the name of Abiodun Aloba, aka Ebenezer Williams. Of all these men, President Shagari described Mr. Igoh as the closet to him in terms of his image management. He went further to explain that Chief Adebanjo was not more than his title suggests: an adviser. President Shagari said that if Chief Adebanjo appeared to have something akin to executive responsibilities, it was because he was also acting as the sole administrator of the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) and Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), pending the reorganization of the corporations. The lateness in the reorganization, explained President Shagari, was due to the slowness of the National Assembly in acting on the bill he had long since presented for the reorganization of the two federal government corporations. And in matter of power and the struggle for it, proximity is magic. The nearer you are to the centre of power, the more it rubs off on you. Charles Igoh, said the president, is the closet to him of all his information aides. I shall go deeper into this question when finally I write the series on the time that I spent with the president. But for now, it is enough to say that Charles Igoh’s office is strategically positioned on the ground floor of the building housing President Shagari’s physical office. Mr. Igoh’s office is like a watchman’s den. It is at the mouth of the stairwell leading to President Shagari’s first floor office.
If Charles Igoh were in the office, nobody could sneak by to see the president without his seeing the fellow. Invariably, those coming to see the president stopped by to say Hi to Mr. Igoh. If they try to come and go without stopping, Charles would yell, “Chief,” as he did when Chief Ayo Shasanya was coming down after seeing President Shagari that afternoon. Chief Shasanya was the chairman of the multi-million naira Fougerolle and other companies. When he heard Mr. Igoh’s voice, he came into office to shake hands with all the people in Mr. Igoh’s office that afternoon. That was how strategic the location of Mr. Igoh’s office was to his position in the corridor of power. As the president’s chief press secretary, Mr. Igoh has come under quite a good amount of fire. When he first took on the job, he said that journalists at the level of editors were the only people qualified to report the president. Of course, Nigerian journalists kicked, especially the editors who considered themselves tin gods in their calling and couldn’t see how and any anyone should ask them to move their desks to the State House, Ribadu Road.
These editors didn’t mind getting their notebooks and fighting to get on presidential planes when he wanted to go abroad. That’s how we got to go with President Shagari to the United States in 1980. The result of that trip was an open declaration of war on Mr. Igoh by the press corps on that trip composed of mainly editors. Well, Charles learnt his lesson after that. He realized that he couldn’t condescend to editors as he could to reporters, not that he had any right or claim to condescend to anybody. But he realized quite clearly that his job would be safer if he stayed out of the posts with the editors. So, he left out the editors on future foreign trips. Since I was on that trip, I could say that Charles committed his share of mistake, the major of which was his misperception of his role. He thought he should spend more time with the ministers and not with the editors for whom he was responsible in every sense. Of course, the editors didn’t like and that they kicked. Some of us on that trip chose not to write about Mr. Igoh’s errors, preferring to express whatever reservations we had behind the scenes. In a way, the incident, the subsequent public criticisms of Mr. Igoh and the private talks with him served the useful purpose of making him a better press secretary to the president.
Press secretaries were not known to enjoy the type of relationship that Mr. Igoh enjoys with the president. Usually, they were men shunted aside and not allowed to rub shoulders with ministers who regarded themselves as super martians. But Mr. Igoh has broken that trend, and it was good for journalism in Nigeria. But much was still wrong with the set-up in the president’s image-making apparatus, and this will come out in the series that will be done on the many hours that I spent with the president. But for now, Charles Igoh has done magic by putting me together with President Shagari. It showed that he had access to the president and that he had the president’s ears on matter pertaining to his responsibilities. When I entered Mr. Igoh’s office that Wednesday morning, Chief Adebanjo was there. Seeing me, he said, “Dele, that was a coup.” He was referring to the first full day that I spent with President Shagari. Chief Adebanjo was right. It was a coup. But it was Charles Igoh’s.
©Sunday Concord, December 20, 1981
(Pp.142-144)
