Of Faith (Not) Broken
“I am a journalist and was not about ready to sell my conscience to anybody … The other day Chief Abiola came to my office and remarked: “When you guys carry stories and columns that you know I might not like, do you ever think I might be angry?”
I share Femi Osofisan’s pain as he leaves the Guardian and searches the meaning of life for himself and his society in other endeavours. It is pain quite excruciating and expressed so lucidly in the Guardian of December 4. I am amused to see the turn of Osofisan’s mind as he himself found it after a year in journalism. Femi Osofisan and I discussed on several occasions what would become of the fire always burning in his guts when he might have lived the realistic of public life as opposed to the luxuries of life on the sideline throwing in stones through the window. We first met in February 1980, days before I took on my current assignment in the Concord. I had gone to the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) too spend a few days with Yemi Ogunbiyi to get my bearing between the days after the Daily Times and the new life in Concord. Femi, too, came to spend the weekend in Ife. He looked me straight in the eye after we were introduced and, instead of saying, “Hello,” he said why would a nice fellow like me agree to take a job with M.K.O. Abiola, who, to him at that time, was an oppressor feeding fat on an association with what seemed to him as the ignominious ITT. Osofisan was not the first to so accost me, but his was the most undisguised and virulent. Even then, I had grown a coarse skin that bounced off such attacks as though they never happened. Implicit in his condemnation was the feeling that, for the job, I had traded my conscience.
I didn’t think I should apolodise for my agreeing to work for the Concord, and I told Femi Osofisan so. I went further to tell him and others present that I suspected strongly that what he was quarrelling about was not that I was working for the ITT, as I was not, but that he couldn’t bearing the feeling that I, a seeming progressive, would agree to work for a National Party of Nigeria (NPN) chieftain. NPN being a party profoundly hated by much of the community at the university. I am a journalist, iwent on, and I was not about ready to sell my conscience to anybody. I admitted that it would be difficult at the beginning – that it would be difficult both for me and Chief Abiola – as we tried to understand each other, for him as he tried to inderstand the peculiarity of being a publisher. The education of Chief Abiola in that regard has been telling. He himself said on a number of occasions, from Bauchi to Port Harcourt, that he found journalists maddening, and the Concord was his only business in which he pumped money and the young folks he gathered there would not let him have a say.
In those early days of getting to know each other, things got quite turbulent, and on one occasion, Chief Abiola delivered a speech in Bauchi in which he excoriated me for harshly criticizing the government of President Shagari. He was still in the NPN. Never, not when he was in the NPN and not since he left partisan politics, has Chief Abiola censored my columns. He would only complain, if he had to after the column had been published. The other day, Chief Abiola came to my office and remarked: “When you guys carry stories and columns that you know I might not like, do you ever think I might be angry?” I looked at him and didn’t say anything. He went on: “I am sure that you fellows publish and then wait for my wrath” He laughed, and I laughed, and then he nodded. He got it, for that’s precisely the position. I thought that I should give this account before looking at the farewell column written by Femi Osofisan. His experience as a Guardian journalist has answeres the question that he was asking me in 1980, the answer which I was sure he didn’t accept. The sort to things said to me by Osofisan that evening nearly four years ago was the sort of things said to him by “one Adebayo Williams,” who in Osofisan’s words, “vilifies the Guardian’s position and accuses its writers, especially Femi Osofisan, of being cowards and of having broken faith … that violent article filled with abuse.”
The danger with self-righteousness is the unearned moral superiority it gives the accuser which wrongly licences him to “abuse” others and accuse them of “selling their conscience.” Journalists are human beings who feel the sting of abuses like others, ye others think that journalists should not abuses. I suspect, as I read Femi Osifisan’s reaction to Mr. Williams and the earlier one by Stanley Macebuh, also to the said Mr. Williams, that many of the people in the Guardian who consider themselves the target of Mr. Williams’ barb are more than a little nettled by the man’s works, justified or not. Femi Osofisan should not feel too pained from from the “abuses” rained on him by Mr. William and others who think that he has broken faith. He should be comforted by the fact he is in possession of more information than his detractors, and the fact that the information tempers his manner of reacting to public matters. The exuberance of an “outsider” is a luxury that an insider does not and cannot enjoy, for he is in custpdy of information that an outsider doesn’t have. The insider is thus exposed to other realities that explain to him why he cannot be absolute in his views of current affairs, or allow his prejudice to render him unyielding to the persuasion of credible information.
Before coming to the Guardian, I am sure that Femi Osofisan would not have written the strongest paragraph of his farewell piece. Then, he wouldn’t have talk about the mutability of views, and the need to be educated by available information which compels “constant re-evaluation, constant re-assignment, constant re-interpretation of philosophies …” Before coming to the Guardian, Femi Osofisan could not have been persuaded of the realities which later tempered him. Osofisan was largely of the frame of mind of Mr. Williams, the frame of mind which Osofisan called abusive and perhaps a misunderstanding of the imperatives of journalism. I am sure that if Williams were to wear Osofisan’s journalism shoes, he, too, will write of the pain of leaving and, of course, of being wrongly abused.
©Sunday Concord, December 11, 1983
(Pp.234-236)
