A newspaper editor is expected to be robust in the face of many challenges, from the rants of a government spin doctor to the libel threats of people in the public eye, but spare a thought for Nduka Obaigbena, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Nigeria’s leading daily, ThisDay.
After his paper ran an article suggesting that if the Prophet Mohammed was alive today he would ”probably” have chosen a wife from among the candidates in this year’s Miss World contest, all hell broke loose.
Not only has the death toll from inter-faith riots in the Muslim north topped 100 but Obaigbena and his paper have been targeted. ThisDay‘s office in Kaduna has been burned to the ground and a mass subscriptions boycott has been instituted by furious Muslim readers. Oh, and one of Obaigbena’s columnists has had a fatwa taken out against her.
Editors of a more fragile disposition might choose this moment to leave the business, but Obaigbena grew up in the hard school of Nigerian journalism. I know this because I worked as his editorial consultant in Lagos for three months a couple of years ago and I’m aware that he’s faced worse and survived.
There was the day that an armed gang turned up at the front gate from the state security service, cutely abbreviated to the SSS (Nigerian governments never have been strong on PR).
We had been running a series of stories about a senior member of the government who was collecting millions in looted funds from Western bank accounts set up by the late dictator Sani Abacha, banking them and siphoning off the interest before eventually lodging them in the appropriate central bank accounts.
Apparently he had decided enough was enough and sent in the heavies. They demanded to see Obaigbena and, when the surprisingly plucky gateman attempted to stop them getting in, he was pistol-whipped to the ground and the group headed for the main building. By this time, another gateman had sprinted 100m down the drive past the print room, raced up the stairs of the editorial and admin block and warned Obaigbena of what was afoot.
Fortunately for Obaigbena, he had taken to avoiding the appalling rush-hour traffic by hiring a motorboat to take him from the upmarket district of Ikoyi, where he lived, across the Lagos lagoon, to the newspaper’s office in the port area of Apapa. And so, as the heavies came in the front door, Nduka’s motorboat was pulling away from the jetty at the back.
He went to ground for a week or so, fielded death threats on his cellphone for a few days and relinquished his title of editor-in-chief after a smear campaign about some unfounded allegations of financial irregularity.
It wasn’t long before he was back at the helm, however. Obaigbena is nothing if not resilient. Under Abacha, probably the most vicious military strongman (in a highly competitive field) to have ruled Nigeria, he was jailed at least once when his former magazine, ThisWeek, went that bit too far.
Nigeria’s weeklies have always made some of the bravest contributions to the national debate. Unlike newspapers that require large printing plants, they could be produced in almost total secrecy with plates being smuggled to obscure printers in the boots of cars, and titles such as Tell baited a succession of increasingly furious but impotent generals.
Obaigbena moved from magazines to newspapers when he founded ThisDay in 1995 and, in the years that followed, turned it into the undisputed market leader, eclipsing The Guardian, which had previously seen off the state-run Daily Times.
Under the more benign, democratic regime of President Olusegun Obasanjo — a retired general himself, incidentally — the pitfalls awaiting the newspaper editor tended to be of a more subtle kind than they once were. But ThisDay has certainly dropped a clanger of mammoth proportions with its throwaway remark about the Prophet Mohammed.
In the extensive apology for the affair that appears on ThisDay‘s website (www.thisdayonline.com) — an apology that follows two on the front page of the paper itself — there is a quote from the Qur’an aimed at pricking the conscience of the paper’s critics: ”Whoever forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is with Allah”.
That may sound a bit of a desperate ploy. But Nigerians do have a habit of making up even after the most bitter of disputes. Take the endgame in Obaigbena ‘s death-defying spat with the fearsome interest-siphoner. As we sat in his suite at the Abuja Hilton earlier this year, finishing off a bottle of his favourite posh brandy ($300 a bottle from the dollar shop), I asked him how his relations were with one of the most feared men in the country.
”Oh, we’re friends now,” he said airily. ”I saw him this afternoon and he brought me a present of some tea.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002
Dominic Midgley writes for the London-based Daily Mirror