By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
In this season of the esteemed Diamond Award for Media Excellence (DAME) powered by the seasoned journalist, Lanre Idowu, I want to lionize a quondam distinguished awardee.
Even in the darkest of days and nights in Nigeria, there are adorable persons to celebrate in fine fettle.
Kunle Ajibade, the Executive Editor/Director of PMNEWS and TheNEWS Magazine, belongs to that class of excellence.
Kunle was on Saturday, November 30, 2024 deservedly presented with the DAME Honorary Fellowship Award.
True to his ever rendering nature, Kunle dedicated the esteemed award to two greatly mourned Nigerian patriots – Dr Stanley Macebuh and Prof Tejumola Olaniyan.
In the words of Kunle Ajibade on the award night, “There are two people whose fond memories I would like to honour with this award: Dr Stanley Macebuh who died 14 years ago and Professor Tejumola Olaniyan who died exactly 5 years ago today. Both of them were amazing spirits of enlightenment.”
Even as I served as a judge in different categories of the 2024 DAME awards, I never knew anything about the honour to be bestowed on Kunle.
Kunle was that one dogged public intellectual General Sani Abacha could not kill in his murderous reign over a benighted Nigeria.
Abacha charged Kunle with treason, and our very dear self-effacing guru of the word had to spend time in General Sani Abacha’s gulag for his courageous efforts.
He was in 1995 jailed for life alongside General Olusegun Obasanjo and others, and Kunle was only released in 1998 after the death of Abacha.
Kunle published his prison memoir, Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes, in 2003 and it deservedly won the first Victor Nwankwo Book of the Year Award instituted by the Nigerian Book Fair Trust.
To underscore the critical fact that he may have been bloodied but remained fervently unbowed, Kunle published another incisive book on his life and times aptly entitled What a Country! with the requisite exclamation mark.
In his as ever combative foreword to What a Country!, the acclaimed poet, essayist and political commentator, Odia Ofeimun, wrote of Kunle Ajibade: “Largely on the strength of his moral comportment as a journalist and because of what I came to know of his love of decency, we grew to be friends. That’s how come, when he and his other colleagues left M.K.O. Abiola’s African Concord magazine in the 90s and began to run THE NEWS and TEMPO – two magazines that had been banned but refused to stay banned – I swore from my London redoubt as an intellectual exile to write for them free of charge. On my return to Lagos, I yielded my place in a more established medium in order to get embroiled in the more indeterminate waters of guerrilla journalism of which they were such intrepid exponents. I later became Chairman of the soon-to-be-rested A.M. NEWS of which he was editorial page editor, the job from which General Sani Abacha’s goons yanked him away before we could evolve a work ethic.”
Me too, I had to abandon the about-to-be-birthed daily newspaper, Thisday, which I had been given the start-up capital to found, and I took a pay cut of nearly half of my take-home salary to serve on the selfsame editorial board that Odia wrote of.
So I was there live when Kunle was taken away to serve an imprisonment for committing no offence whatsoever, least of all plotting a coup to topple Abacha!
It still rankles as one of the saddest memories of my life.
Kunle served Abacha’s prison sentence with the redoubtable human rights activist Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, the legendary musician Fela’s brother.
Kunle may look soft on the outside, but he takes no prisoners, as his words on then President Obasanjo’s abandonment of Beko Ransome-Kuti are indeed galling.
For Kunle, it’s tragic that Obasanjo, whom Beko was ready to pay the supreme sacrifice for, ended up not bothering about his fellow Abeokuta man when serving eight years as Nigeria’s President.
According to Kunle Ajibade, “It was one of the coincidences of history that President Obasanjo, who had not met the victims of the 1995 phantom coup since he had been in power, eventually had a meeting in Abuja with some of them – Col. G. Ajayi, Chris Anyanwu, Ben Charles-Obi, Shehu Sani etc. – on the very day that Beko Ransome-Kuti died in Lagos: 10 February 2006.”
Kunle Ajibade deserves celebration as the DAME award showcased.
In a sordid world where darkness is an ever present danger, Kunle Ajibade shines forth with the endearing humanity of his being.
He belongs to the frontline, and assuredly so because he does not mince words – where he stands is as clear as daylight.
Kunle Ajibade dared death for democracy, and it is such a pity that the inheriting politicians in power are toying with the destiny of Nigeria today.
Let’s end with Kunle Ajibade’s words on his dedication of the DAME award to the duo of Dr. Stanley Macebuh and Prof Tejumola Olaniyan thusly: “My hope is that our country, our continent, will eventually find replacements for these ancestors.”
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is the author of God of Poetry.
