Three weeks ago, Professor Olatunji Dare, one of Nigeria’s celebrated journalists and distinguished newspaper columnists, rested, “At Home Abroad”, his intellectually-engaging column of 14 years in The Nation newspaper.
The eminent don chose the occasion of his 80th birthday celebration to hang his boots, leaving the stage for some of his contemporaries (like Dan Agbese, Dare Babarinsa, Ray Ekpu, Mohammed Haruna and Professor Jibrin Ibrahim) and younger colleagues (Tunje Asaju, Zainab Okino, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Aisha Yusuf Umar) in the business of column writing to sustain one of the beautiful arts of journalism practice.
“In Dare’s hands, words are like clippers in the hands of a barber; he can weave them together in a unique manner to deliver a fantastic submission week after week. He also wrote in very serious language to speak truth to power whenever the need arose.
“For nearly a decade, he served as editorial page editor and chair of the Editorial Board of The Guardian newspaper where his award-winning and wide-ranging weekly column, in turn satirical and serious, attracted a wide, appreciative national audience.
“In 1995, he was awarded the Louis M. Lyons Prize for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University in recognition of his steadfast commitment to journalism’s best practices.
“Dare’s numerous prizes include the Nigerian Media Review award for Informed Commentary, the Faculty Award in Teaching Excellence as well as the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship from the Slane College of Communication and Fine Arts, and the President’s Prize for Meritorious Service from Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, where he was a full professor until August 2015, when, on his retirement, he was named Professor of Journalism, Emeritus.
“He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Nigeria Media Review in 2018. Dare earned the first-ever First Class (summa cum laude) degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he subsequently became a senior lecturer in journalism.
“He also holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York, where he was the prizewinner in editorial writing, and a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, with twin concentrations in international communication and public policy,” the Lagos State Commissioner of Information, Gbenga Omotosho, submitted in a piece to felicitate Prof. Dare.
To honour Dare, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE, and The Nation newspaper also organised a colloquium themed: “Same craft, changing times—the columnist as societal conscience,” in Lagos state on July 17, 2024.
On my own part, I have shared beneath the valedictory (but abridged) article of Dare, with the fervent belief that the piece will inspire the younger generation of Nigerian columnists and media writers to reach for the stars in the arduous yet fulfilling business of columnism.
Enjoy part of the article titled, “A Farewell to Columnism,” as published in The Nation newspaper of Tuesday, July 23, 2024.
If you don’t find “columnism” in the dictionary, you have my word that I did not make it up. I first encountered the term in an essay for The New York Times by the lexicographer, William Safire. Following him, I have used it in this space to denote the art and craft of writing a newspaper or magazine column.
Columnism has been my preoccupation, on and off, but more on than off, for some 30 years. But as I hinted last week, it is time to go. This is the final installment of “At Home Abroad.” the brand name of the column since this newspaper debuted some 14 years ago.
In its previous iteration on different platforms, the column ran as “Matters Arising” and furnished the title of a selection from my collected journalism between 1985 and 1993. Writing the column has been a great honour and privilege. At a time like this, one is expected to reflect on one’s adventures in the business and share with fellow practitioners in general and the younger ones in particular nuggets of the best practices one has learned over the decades.
It is incomparable, this privilege of inflicting one’s views and biases, and prejudices on others week after week on the issues of the day, issues large and small, with no direction other than the broad editorial policy of the journal, the enduring examples of some of the finest practitioners of the craft dead or living, the laws of defamation, the dictates of decency, the moral law within you, and the values that have shaped you.
It is in fact more than a privilege: it is a trust that must be earned and constantly re-earned. The trust carries with it a corollary duty: to deploy your gifts, skills, insights and judgment to help shape the standards of sense and sensibility; and to produce a picture of reality on which sound public policy can be founded.
The columnist must not get so absorbed in the privileges and trappings that he or she loses sight of this overarching goal. The most accomplished columnist, working under the tyranny of deadlines, with unfolding situations and incomplete or faulty data, can be permitted his or her mistakes.
But it is inexcusable for the columnist to be irresponsibly wrong, or to persist in error after a truer picture of the situation has been provided. The columnist is thus obliged to refresh his or her knowledge, update the available information, cultivate a multiplicity of sources, eschew oracular pronouncements, and instead, cultivate humility.
To write competently and confidently about the use and abuse of power from a distance, you have to be stationed up close. But not so close that you cannot see clearly. You have to maintain an “air space” between you and the authorities. Watch out for the seductions of power that come in many guises and disguises, and never put your trust fully and uncritically in princes and principalities.
You can be harsh, even brutal, if that is what the situation demands. But never write from malice or hatred, for they undermine that charity that is the foundation of the good society. That is what I have distilled from the reflections and reminiscences of some of the best exemplars of the craft.
I have tried to apply them to my work. How well I have succeeded is for the reader to judge, but I can say that they have served me well, just as they have served the sources from which I derived them and will doubtless serve those who diligently seek to apply them.
In my writings over the decades, I have won many friends and admirers. Many of them remember and remind me of things I wrote long ago and now remember only dimly, and they do so largely from appreciation. I thank each and every one of them. I know I did not always live up to their expectations, yet they kept faith with the column week after week.
The column has also attracted its fair share of critics and antagonists. When the paper still provided facilities for instant comments without mediation, the column was the haunt of one anonymous troller who could never bring himself to see or say anything good in it – or in the columnist for that matter.
Within minutes of the column being posted, he is there excoriating him remorselessly and imputing the basest motives to him. Together, admirers and antagonists kept me on my toes much of the time. They all constituted a crucial part of my education. I learned from them even as I sought to teach them.
Mahmud, Deputy Editor of PRNigeria, writes via [email protected]