Nigerian Tribune: Salute to the elephant at 74

By Festus Adedayo

When a child pours libation and gives iba (respect) to the shade of the farm, our elders say he will till the land till evening in comfort. I owe the inspiration to write this piece to one of the few surviving icons of the Nigerian newspaper press, hugely venerated Lade Bonuola, a.k.a Ladbone, ex-Managing Director of The Guardian. He is one of the ancestors who trod this path of column-writing long before those of us, today’s masquerades, knew the way to Igbo Igbale, the sacred grove. Seventy-something-year-old Bonuola’s piece, published by The Guardian on November 10, 2023 and entitled Truth and its Majesty not only served as a balm on an aching soul, it provoked the need to pay tribute to the Nigerian Tribune, Nigeria’s oldest surviving newspaper. The Tribune will celebrate the 74th anniversary of its founding in four days time, November 16. The paper first hit the newsstand on that day in 1949.
A tribute becomes necessary, as we say in journalism, so that we can do a tieback to the newspaper’s avant-garde and gadfly pedigree in pre and post-colonial Nigeria. That pedigree is what many are naïve about or have chosen to gloss over due to the atmosphere of complacency that pervades Nigeria today. A tribute is also curative to the scorched souls of those of us who have kept aloft the tradition of the Tribune in holding leaders to account. Perhaps, it can heal us of the unwarranted verbal assaults, derogatory name-calling and deliberate rings ran round us by commissars of the present federal government, which we have endured. These are all in the bid to ostracize us as bastards and our Yorubaness impugned.
The tribute is excerpted from my doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Nigerian Tribune and hegemonic politics in Nigeria, 1949 – 1993, supervised by one of Nigeria’s very best political scientists, Professor Adigun Agbaje. That thesis which I submitted to the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan in 2010 – thirteen years ago, will soon be a book with its own light shed on the role of the press in Nigerian politics.
On the 70th anniversary of the Tribune, I had the honour of presenting same tribute in a paper I delivered to an august gathering that had the late Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi as well as Gen Theophilus Danjuma, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, ex-Gov Gbenga Daniel and many more in attendance. I entitled the paper Tribune at 70: Journey through barbwires, arson and anger of the State.
In his piece, Bonuola reminded the world of the ideals behind Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s establishment of the Tribune and the eternal essence of its 74-year old editorial policy. It is necessary to remind us that the freedom of Nigeria and the democracy Nigerians enjoy today were, in part, a product of the decision by Awolowo to found the newspaper.
Nigeria of the 1940s witnessed a drift toward subgroup nationalism and tribalism, provoked and exacerbated by Nnamdi Azikiwe’s dominance of newspaper press ownership. This was the impetus that fired some Yoruba and Hausa elites’ desire to have a rival hold that would define their own socio-politics. Founding a newspaper was one of them. Azikiwe and his associates were resented because their politics and influence in the media threatened the socio-political positions of Yoruba leaders and challenged their individual aspirations for leadership.
With his West African Pilot newspaper founded in 1937, Azikiwe attacked the Egbe of Oduduwa, a socio-political group founded by Awolowo and his Yoruba-conscious group elites, frequently lampooning topmost Yoruba and their chiefs, as well as some emirs of the north. Quite predominant in the growing disenchantment with Azikiwe was the widespread bitterness with his “over-protection” of his tribal bloc, while seeking to whittle others down. For instance, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiana, one of the first Nigerians to be appointed at the University College Ibadan, (UCH) had claimed to have a DSc. from Toronto, Canada. Ikejiani was a favourite of Dr. Mellanby who was the first Principal of the College. It was later found out that Ikejiani’s DSc. degree was contrived. Thus, Dr. Mellanby, though fond of Ikejiani, had no choice but to dismiss him from the University College. Miffed by this action against his godson, favourite kinsman and party man in the NCNC, Zik had to mount virulent attacks on the University College, as well as Dr. Mellanby, in the Pilot. As a way of spiting the university, Zik got Ikejiani appointed as member of the Governing Council of the university between 1961 and 1965 as Chairman of the Governing Council of the university where he had earlier been dismissed. He later appointed him Chairman of the Nigerian Railway Corporation.
Azikiwe’s NCNC and his Igbo stock became identified with the Pilot group of newspapers, Ahmadu Bello’s NPC with the Nigerian Citizen and later on, the New Nigerian which he founded shortly before he was killed in the 1966 coup. Awolowo became signposted by, and even identifiable with the Nigerian Tribune. Seeing the need to situate the place of the Yoruba in national politics and to counter Azikiwe’s unfairly domineering influence in the Nigerian press of the time, the idea of founding a newspaper to project the voice of the Yoruba in the national scheme of things was conceived. The Nigerian Tribune newspaper was agreed to be its name. And on November 16, 1949, the baby, conceived with fecund thought for the place of the Yoruba nation and ultimately, the Nigerian Project, was born.
Aside his foray into politics, the founder of the Tribune, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, had once been a practicing journalist, having been employed in 1934 as a reporter-in-training by the Nigerian Daily Times and having worked for a cumulative eight months in the establishment. Though he never wanted to be a journalist, due partly to the unenviable public image of the profession at the time, especially the perception of its practitioners as scum of society, as well as the deprivation imprimatur that its leading editors and practitioners in general presented, Awolowo, however, found journalism as a pedestal to earning some money to enable him achieve his life-long ambition of studying law abroad.
On November 16, 1949, however, the Nigerian Tribune appeared on the newsstand. An eight-page tabloid, it came smoking-hot from the beginning, from both ends of its canons. For example, its first edition carried a lead story entitled, Chemists protest. It identified with the protest of the Association of Pharmaceutical Students of Nigeria against the Pharmaceutical School, Yaba, Lagos. The students were protesting the payment of the sum of £5. 5s per month subsistence allowance to them and demanding its increase to £7 per month. The fact that the newspaper chose as its lead story this particular story, as against another story on the front page of the paper, entitled, Mystery tree near Oyo, was unusual.
The Enugu Colliery incident of December 1949, in which the police shot and killed some coalminers, gave the newspaper its desired nationalistic underpinning and recognition as a fighter for the oppressed, no matter where the oppressed was domiciled. The miners were said to have protested against the oppressive conduct of their bosses, low wages and poor conditions of service. The brutal quelling of the demonstration by the police led to the death of about 21 miners which provoked very fierce editorial and features from the Tribune.
Because of this publication, which fell into about five weeks of the beginning of its operations, the editor of the Tribune was summoned by the colonial authorities before the Fitzgerald Commission probing the Enugu coal mine killings for what was considered a seditious publication. Thereafter, however, due to the Tribune publications and the concerned voices of the people, the Western part of the country was co-opted into the drastic steps taken to get to the roots of the crisis and give succour to the families of the victims. According to Arifalo, a coalition was organized by Nigerian political leaders as a response to the police shooting which had Dr. Akinola Maja as Chairman and Mbonu Ojike, the Deputy Chairman.
Even though there was no formal Mission Statement on the direction that the Tribune newspaper would follow at its inception, what could be held as the geography of its advocacy was, one, a piece written by the founder of the newspaper in the maiden edition of the publication and the second, a proper editorial policy of the newspaper articulated by Alhaji Lateef Jakande, the newspaper’s managing director and editor-in-chief (Editorial comment, May 23, 1977 with the title, A leap forward.). This was reproduced by the newspaper on March 4, 1984 under the title, Why we are that way.
Prefaced by a recalcitrant poetry from one C. E. Henley which says “my head is bloody but unbowed,” among other things, Jakande espoused the J. S. Mill utilitarian ideology of the greatest good as the force that fires the newspaper’s zeal and stating that Tribune “owes a tremendous responsibility to the public it serves.” The editorial policy, said Jakande, focuses on, “the expression of public opinion”, rather than the service of any hegemonic quest.
Having performed this role creditably well, however, the years between 1962 and 1966 could unarguably be said to be the most politically tumultuous for the Tribune, as well as the Western region. Nigeria eventually partook of the turmoil, with the overthrow of the First Republic by the military. Even though not as tumultuous as the former, the period of the Second Republic, that is 1979 to 1983, was also as turbulent for the newspaper which witnessed constant struggle to subvert and delegitimize arrayed forces against the interest of the Yoruba people and that of the Awolowo political group.

Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst