✕ CLOSE Online Special City News Entrepreneurship Environment Factcheck Everything Woman Home Front Islamic Forum Life Xtra Property Travel & Leisure Viewpoint Vox Pop Women In Business Art and Ideas Bookshelf Labour Law Letters
Click Here To Listen To Trust Radio Live

Adamu Ciroma – a man with the courage of his convictions (II)

 His forthright stance on the press at the CA, as we shall soon see, reflected not only the way he edited and managed the New…

 His forthright stance on the press at the CA, as we shall soon see, reflected not only the way he edited and managed the New Nigerian. It also formed the guiding principle of his politics and public life.

Because his New Nigerian experience laid the foundation of his political career, half of my June 10, 2002 article appealing to him to retire from public service focused on his life as a journalist. The italicized paragraphs that follow is a reproduction of the edited version of the first half of that article.         

When Malam Turi Muhammadu, one-time editor and managing director of New Nigerian, decided several years ago to write the history of that once great newspaper, his working title was simply New Nigerian: The First 20 Years. Some of the people he got involved in the project thought the title was not catchy enough for the highly influential role the newspaper played in the affairs of the nation in those 20 years. As a result, several other options were considered. Eventually, the team settled for Courage and Conviction as the main title, with New Nigerian: The First 20 Years as the sub-title.

Anyone who had worked in the New Nigerian or who had been even a casual reader of the newspaper during those 20 years, will agree that those two words truly captured the essence and the spirit of the newspaper. It was a newspaper of strong convictions and on virtually each and every occasion it demonstrated the courage to stand up firmly and unequivocally for those convictions. As a result, in under two years it became the second largest circulating newspaper in the country, after the Daily Times under the much-respected late Alhaji Babatunde Jose. It also became second to none as the most influential newspaper. It was not for nothing that it was often described by its admirers and detractors alike as Nigeria’s Al-Ahram, after that great Egyptian newspaper which, under its great editor, the late Mohammad Heikal, was the Arab world’s greatest voice.

The man most credited with the rise of the New Nigerian was Malam Adamu Ciroma.

Malam Adamu came to the New Nigerian with absolutely no knowledge of newspapering. Before his appointment to the editorship of the paper, he was a civil servant, first in Kaduna and then in Lagos. As a civil servant, he was, of course, supposed to know how to manage people and his record showed he did. However, as he himself admitted in an interview for Malam Turi’s book, “I had no experience in newspaper production or editing”. In retrospect it can be said that what he lacked in journalism skills he more than made up with his management skill, his wit and his moral convictions.

As Charles Sharp, the expatriate managing director of the newspaper whom Malam Adamu served as editor and whom he succeeded as the first indigenous managing director said, “I was beginning to think we would never find the right man (for the job of editor) when someone said, I think it was Ahmed Joda, that the right man had come along. He was right. His name was Adamu Ciroma.”

According to Sharp, one John Smith, a close friend of his and a former colonial servant who had stayed on after independence, and someone whose judgement he trusted absolutely, thought highly of Malam Adamu. “A very clever chap.” Smith had reportedly said of Malam Adamu, “but a man with a mind of his own. One of the few who never toadied to the Premier, who he had a knack of upsetting. Has a tendency to wear European style clothes which was one of the things that upset the old man. I think you may well come to the conclusion that he was worth waiting for.” 

“Once again, Smith’s judgement”, said Sharp, “turned out right on the mark.”

For the three years Malam Adamu served as editor from1966 and for the 5 years he served as managing director from 1969, he made the New Nigerian a must read for the common-man and the high-and-mighty alike. The list of his achievements in making the newspaper the most influential in the country is the stuff legends are made of. These included the one-inch wide editorial column that ran down the left side of the newspaper’s front page. That editorial column, which became one of paper’s trade marks, was probably the best written English in the country, so well written, that the paper’s detractors used to say it was all faxed in from London! Not only was it well-written, it anticipated, sometimes down right dictated, public policies.

There was also the inimitable Candido, one of the longest running anonymous columns, who wrote irreverently about issues and personalities, big and small, and seemed to have spies in every nook and corner of the country.

On several occasions when Malam Adamu clashed with those in authority, he always stood his grounds on point of principle. On one occasion, at the beginning of the civil was, for example, Major Hassan Usman Katsina, objected to the newspaper carrying the story of the rebel bombing of Kaduna airport because, as the then Northern Military Governor, he believed such a publication would undermine national security. Malam Adamu said the greater danger lied in censoring an event that everyone in Kaduna knew had happened. To do so, he said, would be to destroy the newspaper’s credibility and an organ without credibility is of no use to anyone. The Major remained unpersuaded but the editor went ahead and damned the consequences. The Major threatened fire and brimstone, but in the end sanity prevailed and nothing untoward happened to the editor.

On a previous occasion, Lagos had asked the New Nigerian not to publish a story on the same dubious ground of national security. This time the newspaper obliged in a uniquely creative manner. It printed a blank page and told its readers why. That bit of mischief reportedly got the Head of State, Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi Ironsi, hopping mad. However, somehow in the end no one got thrashed at the New Nigerian.

On yet another occasion when, as managing director, he clashed with Lagos over the arrest of Malam Mamman Daura, his equally capable successor as editor (and eventually as managing director), he demanded rather than pleaded for his editor’s release. “I told him (that is General Gowon as Head of State)”, Malam Adamu said when he met Gowon, “it is not possible for us in the New Nigerian to do Government biddings all the time on every issue. I am not here to beg for Mamman’s release. If you like you can set him free”. A little after this encounter, Malam Mamman was set free. But by now Malam Adamu thought he has had enough and he decided to resign.

It was therefore in the middle of all the ovation the newspaper was getting that Malam Adamu left the New Nigerian for the uncertainty of the private sector. As one special correspondent who wrote about his departure said in the New Nigerian of February 1, 1974, “Trust the man to know when to quit”.  Adamu Ciroma, he said, is one of the few who lived by the truth that it is best to quit when the ovation was loudest.

As someone who cut his journalism teeth in the New Nigerian beginning from my university days in the early seventies, and who rose to become its acting editor for nearly one year in 1980/81 and its managing director for over three years from December 1985, I was, needless to say, an admirer and a disciple of Malam Adamu.

By sheer example, he – and subsequently Malams Mamman and Turi – was largely responsible for inculcating disciple, as against mere fear, in the New Nigerian’s newsroom. Reporters and editors alike imbibed the ethos that you did the right thing because it was right and not because you were scared of the boss. So, reporters reported fairly, accurately and as objectively as possible without any Sword of Damocles dangling over their heads.

As I said a little after the beginning of this tribute to Malam Adamu, I never thought he agreed to serve under Obasanjo for personal aggrandizement. One may question the wisdom of his decision to serve under the former president, and worse, double as the man’s re-election campaign in 2002/3, but when he finally decided to quit public life long after my 2002 article in question, he left with his reputation intact as, to use the words of Malam Mamman, his successor as editor and managing director of New Nigerian, “a man of character”.

Perhaps the most obvious testimony to this was that when the man died at 84 on July 5, about fourty days ago, he did so as a man of modest means. You could hardly say that of most Nigerians who have had half, even less than half, the opportunities he had to hold public office.

May the Good Lord forgive his trespasses and reward his good works with Aljanna Firdaus.  

Haruna is a former Managing Director of New Nigerian Newspapers. He wrote this piece from Abuja

VERIFIED: It is now possible to live in Nigeria and earn salary in US Dollars with premium domains, you can earn as much as $12,000 (₦18 Million).
Click here to start.