How Abiola nearly fired Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and me after blockbuster Concord interview with Buhari – Yakubu Mohammed

Yakubu Mohammed, Dele Giwa and Ray Ekpu narrowly escaped
being fired by MKO Abiola, publisher of Concord newspapers, when they
interviewed the new military head of state, Muhammadu Buhari, in 1984.

Mohammed was the senior editor in charge of the daily
newspaper, National Concord, while Giwa was the editor of Sunday Concord, and
Ekpu was the chairman of the editorial board.

In his memoir, ‘Beyond Expectations’ — an advance copy of
which was shared with TheCable — Mohammed said Abiola was a “great human being”
who was at times misled by “hangers-on”.

Mohammed wrote: “In January 1984, after the overthrow of
President Shehu Shagari’s civilian administration, the new Head of State,
General Muhammadu Buhari, at my request, granted an interview to the Concord
newspapers. The trio of Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and myself conducted the interview,
the first major interview with any newspaper by the new military
administration.

“Given his frosty relationship with the media when he was
Federal Commissioner for Petroleum Resources during which there was an alleged
loss of N2.8 billion, General Buhari, still nursing a grievance against the
media, issued his famous threat: ‘I shall tamper with the press.’ He said a lot
of other things that signalled the policy thrust of the new administration.

“To underline the importance attached to the interview, some
of the issues raised with him came on the network news of Radio Nigeria a few
hours after the interview as policy pronouncements.

“To all intents and purposes, our own publisher, ironically,
was not happy with the scoop scored by his newspapers. Instead of a
commendation, he gave the three of us a cold shoulder. Unknown to us, the new
military regime had fenced him off and the duo of Buhari and Idiagbon were not
relating with him. When we returned from the interview and told the publisher
of the warm reception General Buhari gave us, he was rather glum.

“Meanwhile, to find a convenient location to transcribe the
recorded interview and do all the segmented stories we had planned to do, we
took an IOU of N5,000 (Five Thousand Naira) and stayed overnight in an Ikeja
hotel. When we started running the stories from the interview, the circulation
figures of the two newspapers hit the stratospherically high figures of 440,000
copies daily for the National Concord and 450,000 copies weekly for the Sunday
Concord. That was when an elated publisher proudly proclaimed that his
newspapers had the highest circulation in Africa.”

‘PUSHED BY ETHNIC JINGOISTS’

Mohammed attributed the deteriorating relationship with the
publisher to the influence of ethnic jingoists.

“The same publisher was pushed by ethnic jingoists to give
us a query. The query was preceded by an anonymous letter to the publisher
reporting that the three of us were ‘stranger elements’ because we were not
Yoruba and we were deemed not loyal to the publisher. The document alleged that
we were stealing his money,” he wrote.

“Despite our comfortable accommodation paid for by the
company, we took an IOU to go and ‘enjoy’ ourselves in the hotel. And the cheek
of it all, we were using our Mercedes Benz cars to the office as if we were
doing car racing on the premises instead of doing the work for which we were
handsomely paid.

“As if following the management style of the legendary ITT
president and chief executive officer, Harold Sydney Geneen, Abiola attached
the anonymous letter to the query. Geneen, Abiola’s erstwhile boss in ITT, was
reputed to be in the habit of writing an anonymous letter against any ITT
executive that he had earmarked for firing and, thereafter, proceed with a
query accompanied by the said anonymous letter.

“I replied to the query in only two paragraphs, admitting
that we took an IOU of five thousand naira for the three of us, in the course
of duty. The money was not stolen. And the outcome of the interview was
celebrated even by the publisher himself. Before he got my reply, he had called
me to ask about the query and I told him I was typing my reply. He felt
relieved that we were individually replying to the query.”

He said the relationship between Abiola and Dele had been
frosty for a while and that the publisher’s anger seemed directed at the Sunday
editor.

“My understanding was that he was looking for how to get rid
of Dele,” he wrote.

“To prevent Dele from replying to the query in a manner that
would be deemed offensive, I quickly showed the two of them my reply, which was
polite and placatory, and they virtually copied it. All that the chief could do
after reading our reply to his query was to apologise to us, acknowledging the
fact that we were men of transparent honesty with the highest degree of
integrity. The query, he said, was the manifestation of the ill-feeling of
those that did not mean well for his company.”

‘ABIOLA ASKED DELE GIWA TO RESIGN OR BE FIRED’

In February 1984, when the dust seemed to have settled,
Mohammed travelled to the US on a month-long tour of the country.

“It was in my absence that the crisis between Dele and the
publisher came to a head. On March 9, I had called home from my hotel room in
New York but could not get through because the phone receiver was misplaced,”
he recalled.

“I phoned Dele to send someone to my house to get my family
to replace the set. That was when he broke the bad news to me. MKO, he said,
had fired him. He gave him up to Monday to resign or should consider himself
fired. I advised him not to resign but to allow the publisher to do the
difficult job of explaining to the public why he had to fire an editor whose
newspaper was doing exceedingly well.

“Come Monday, the publisher, instead of firing Dele,
transferred him to the editorial board to work under the leadership of Ray, his
bosom friend and his junior in the hierarchy of the Editorial Department.

“I could not get the details of what happened in the office
but I kept wondering whether the crisis would have assumed a new dimension if I
was around. My intervention had saved some ugly situations in the past. Was the
publisher waiting for me to get out of sight? A similar situation arose when
the publisher, for no clear professional reason, asked me to transfer Kayode
Soyinka, Concord’s London Correspondent, to Lagos soon after he had come home
for his wedding. I declined because I couldn’t get the rhyme or the reason for
this directive.

“The publisher patiently waited for me to travel out of town
to do what he had wanted me to do. He called Duro Onabule, my deputy, to execute
Soyinka’s transfer to Lagos, and he, without any question or hesitation, caused
a letter to be sent to London asking Kayode to report in Lagos on transfer.
Soyinka rejected the transfer and resigned on the spot. Peter Enahoro
immediately signed him on as editor of his monthly pan-African magazine, Africa
Now.”

‘HOW WE ALL RESIGNED’

Since his appointment as editor of Concord in 1982, Mohammed
had been working in the background with an investor on starting a newsmagazine
like TIME and Newsweek.

With things going south at Concord in 1984, he said he
reactivated the plan, bringing in Giwa, Ekpu and Dan Agbese, who was editor of
New Nigerian based in Kaduna.

Minus Giwa, all of them studied mass communication at the
University of Lagos in the 1970s.

On his return to Nigeria after a month-long tour of the US
in February 1984, he broke the news of the in-the-embryo weekly newsmagazine to
Giwa and Ekpu, who had come to his residence to welcome him back and to give
him an update on the soured relationship with the publisher.

“Their excitement was both spontaneous and infectious. At
this point, I told them that it would be nice to get Dan Agbese on board. Mr
Agbese was editing the New Nigerian at the time but we needed no prophet to
tell us that sooner than later, the establishment would be through with him. I
was asked to invite him for a discussion. Dan did not hesitate to come to Lagos
when I invited him. After the New Nigerian, he said, he was hoping to retire
into a more relaxed public relations business. But with the picture I had
painted, he said he had no choice but to come into the new venture,” Mohammed
recounted.

“On the evening of Sunday, July 14, 1984, I drove to Chief
Abiola’s residence and dropped my letter of resignation as Editor with his security
men at the gate. I knew it was a painful decision. But if I did not take the
plunge, we might not have done it. In my letter, I told the publisher to be
gracious enough to accept the three months’ notice of my decision to resign. He
graciously accepted it with immediate effect.

“I did not even tell my co-conspirators. It was in the
afternoon of Monday, the following day, when the publisher called me to say he
was coming to the office to give me a small send-off, that I informed Ray and
my editorial staff. At this point, Ray quickly wrote his own letter and dropped
it in the publisher’s office.

“By the time he came into the premises, he discovered that
he was dealing with more than one resignation. He announced at the small
ceremony in his office that the three of us—Dele, Ray and myself—had resigned
and he had accepted our letters immediately. Newly married Dele was in Ivory
Coast with his wife, Funmi, a staff writer with Business Concord, on their
honeymoon when the dam broke. He did not resign but his unwritten letter was
accepted.”

The four of them went on to found Newswatch in 1984, with
the first edition in January 1985. It became arguably the most successful and
most respected weekly newsmagazine in Nigeria’s history.

‘ABIOLA WAS A GREAT HUMAN BEING’

In the book, Mohammed eulogised Abiola for his great “human
touch”.

“He proved to be a true human being with human feelings,
confirming to me that what some people said about him was not mere flattery,”
he wrote.

“I was not just a witness to his humility in greatness but
in many ways, I was also a beneficiary of that human touch. I had my first
child, Usman, in June 1983. At the naming ceremony, Abiola was there with his
senior wife, Simbiat. He dominated the scene with his unmistakable presence. He
felt at home with my family and guests who took memorable pictures with him.
They, too, were witnesses to his humanity and large-heartedness.”

Mohammed also recalled how Abiola allowed him to use his
private jet for an assignment.

“Why would a boss ask his staff, for that is what I became
from December 1980 when I joined his company, Concord Press Limited, to use his
private jet for an assignment I could do just well by public transport or
commercial flight?” he asked, rhetorically.

Abiola later ran for president in 1993 and won, but the
election was annulled.

He died in detention in July 1998, having been arrested for
proclaiming himself president on the first anniversary of the annulment in June
1994.

culled: TheCable