Monday Column By Emmanuel Yawe
royawe@yahoo.com | 08024565402
At the tail end of 1983, the military moved in to sack the democratically elected government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. The sacked president had just employed my Editor at the New Nigerian, Mallam Abba Dabo as his Chief Press Secretary before the military putsch.
A well connected young man, he lost his job with the sack of his principal, the President. His friends in the military made sure he did not lose out completely and made him the Managing Director of the Triumph Newspapers established by Kano, his home state government in 1980. Not too long after his appointment, the military was on the move again. This time against themselves; General Muhammadu Buhari the man they first appointed as the Head of State when they sacked the Shagari government was removed in 1985 and the Chief of Army Staff, General Babangida took his office as a Military President.
Things were moving fast in Nigeria with coups and rumours of coups taking place at a speed that nobody found comfortable. A few months after Babangida’s take-over of government there was an announcement that another coup plot had been uncovered with General Mamman Vatsa as the ring leader. The leaders were given secret martial trial and then executed. The whole country was gripped with fear of the military.
Abba Dabo had taken me from New Nigerian to Triumph as one of the measures to improve the editorial content of the paper and made me the Group news editor of the Triumph group which had about four or so titles. Another step he took was to start a literary corner for the paper. He put another young man, an enthusiastic new comer to journalism with the name Bashir Bello Akko in charge. It was a popular innovation which went down well with those interested in poetry and literary matters. Abba Dabo himself a man with abundant literary gifts used to come down his high horse and attend the not very orderly meetings of the literary people in our newsroom on Saturdays. I never attended the meetings.
At these meetings, the literary and poetic materials to be used in the next edition were selected. Lawan Farouk then an undergraduate student at the Bayero University was a member of the club. Most of us who were regular staff of Triumph newspaper did not know him. But we soon did. He wrote and submitted a poem at one of those meetings. The poem was debated and thrown out because the members of the club felt it was the wrong poem for the newspaper, any newspaper in Nigeria at the time to publish.
Titled the Dictator, the poem called President Babangida many unprintable names – a dictator and at a stage referred to him as an IMF pimp. He did not stop at that, he predicted that the military President would soon be overthrown. The poet then moved very close to murder when he said the president would be killed in the process of the coup against his government. In good conscience, members of the group decided to give Lawan his explosive poem to take back home or better still to his university since such heretical ideas normally find home there in universities. Somehow, the poem mysteriously found its way back to the next edition of Triumph newspapers. It was the Sunday Triumph, a broadsheet the only one in Nigeria at the time. It was printed Friday night/Saturday morning distributed nationwide on Saturday and read on Sundays.
Then Holy Hell was unleashed on the newspaper.
The ever vigilant Abba Dabo was the first person to notice that the ‘Dictator’ had been splashed in the Triumph when the early copies of the paper were taken to his house on Saturday morning. He just jumped into his car and could not wait for his driver but drove himself at a suicidal speed to the Triumph premises. He came too late. The copies had been put out to Lagos and other stations for distribution. In those days of NITELS monopoly on phones, there was no way to stop the circulation of the DICTATOR. Some of us spent a peaceful weekend not knowing the time bomb we were sitting on.
I went to work the following Monday and hardly settled down when word came that the MD Abba Dabo wanted me in his office. With much trepidation I walked upstairs to his office. Then Bashir Bello Akko, Editor literary corner and Hajia Bilikisu Yusuf, Editor Sunday Triumph also came in. Abba Dabo a man of unlimited courtesies hardly acknowledged our greetings; first sign of big wahala. Then he exploded demanding from Hajia Bilki and Bashir Bello why the Dictator was published. We were just four in the room and the other three were aware of the Dictator; only poor Emmanuel Yawe was unaware of the dangerous poem in circulation. He ordered the duo of Bilki and Bashir to resign which they did promptly.
Abba Dabo himself disappeared from our midst. We did not know where he went to but by the time he reappeared some days later, both Bashir and Bilki were ordered to drop their resignations. We were all saved and back to the Triumph. Sadly both Bashir and Bilki are now late and only Abba and Emmanuel who were in that tense conclave meeting are alive today.
The name Lawan Farouk has permanently stuck to my brain. When later in 1999 I heard it as a member of the House of Representatives, I immediately reached out to Bashir asking him whether it was the same poet who gave us hell in Kano. Bashir confirmed he was the same character.
At the House of Representatives Farouk made his mark not as a poet but as an anti-corruption crusader. Diminutive in stature and a voice that sounded like that of a cricket he decided to wage a ferocious war against corruption. Soon, in a House full of scandals, he became known as ‘Mr. Integrity’ both in the House and the media. So when the House decided to set up an investigative committee to probe the massive heist in the fuel subsidy regime, it was not a surprise that his name came up as Chairman.
That was his greatest undoing. A trap was set for him and he was the victim of a sting operation. In the film that finally nailed him at the trial, the anti-corruption crusader was seen collecting bribes in dollars. When his over-sized flowing gowns could not contain the huge bribe, he used his tall Shagari type cap to store the illicit money. Today he is a convicted felon.
What I have always wondered is why Farouk Lawan decided to write the poem the Dictator and used all tricks in the book to plant it in the Triumph, a government newspaper. Coup makers, assassins and other such dangerous elements in the Nigerian society do not announce their intentions in newspapers, least of all government newspapers. But here was an unknown student thinking of a coup and assassination of a President loudly announcing his evil plans in a government owned newspaper. Clearly he wanted to put the papers editors and managers in big trouble.
