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Celebrating
Magaji Danbatta at 80
By
Mohammed Haruna
Newsdiaryonline
Tue Nov 15,2011
Anyone old enough and literate enough to
read newspapers in the late sixties and seventies knew the
New Nigerian was the
envy of all other Nigerian newspapers, including
Daily Times, then the
mother of all our newspapers; for literary quality, accuracy and
courage of its convictions, the Kaduna based newspaper was
simply nonpareil.
The newspaper was born – reborn is the more
accurate word, for, it was established to take over from where
the bi-weekly Nigerian
Citizen, published in nearby Zaria, left off – on January 1,
1966, after the authorities in Kaduna, the Northern regional
capital, had arrived at the painful conclusion that the
Citizen was unequal
to the task of countering the very bad press the region and its
people had suffered from in the hands of the Southern, more
specifically, Lagos, press.
Within months of its birth the newspaper
established itself as second only to
Daily Times in
circulation, thanks in large measure to its well informed and
accurate news, its trademark typically one inch editorial column
that ran down its left hand side beneath its masthead, and, not
least of all, its irreverent satirical Wednesday columnist, the
anonymous Candido.
The newspaper achieved this feat through a
combination of sheer luck and excellent leadership, but through
more of the latter than the former. The sheer luck came through
the country’s first military coup which came exactly two weeks
after the newspaper’s birth. The excellent leadership came in
the human shape of Mr. Charles Sharp, its first and only
expatriate managing director, and Malams Adamu Ciroma, Mamman
Daura and the late Turi Muhammadu, successors to Sharp in that
order, after each had served as editor.
Malam Magaji Dambatta, veteran journalist,
veteran civil servant, veteran politician, and a co-founder at
youthful age of 19 of the radical political party in the First
Republic, the Northern Element Progressive Union (NEPU) led by
the late radical politician, Malam Aminu Kano, missed being at
the centre of the remarkable story of the
New Nigerian in the
early sixties by sheer happenstance. At the time Malam Magaji
was a youngish 35 year-old. He was born 80 years ago this year.
Mr. Sharp, who mid-wifed the rebirth of
Citizen as
New Nigerian, was a
veteran of Citizen
itself. He left the newspaper as editor in succession to Chief
Bisi Onabanjo - subsequently a disciple of Chief Obafemi Awolowo
(Awo) and first civilian governor of Ogun State - and returned
to his country, the UK, before the Northern authorities had
despaired of its lacklustre performance. But this was not before
he had recruited Malam Magaji as a reporter for the newspaper in
1954. He had come to know Malam Magaji from his journalism as a
reporter and Hausa editor of Daily
Comet, one of the newspapers in Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s (Zik)
famed stable whose flagship was the Lagos based
West African Pilot.
Comet,
based in cosmopolitan Kano, became a mouthpiece of NEPU which
was then in alliance with Zik’s National Congress of Nigeria and
Cameroon, subsequently National Congress of Nigerian Citizens
(NCNC) after the 1960 plebiscite in which Northern Cameroon
became part of Nigeria as Adamawa Province and Southern Cameroon
joined the French Cameroon ahead of its independence from French
rule.
As you can imagine,
Comet proved a thorn
in the flesh of the authorities in the region and was, at least
in Kano, more than a match not only to
Citizen. It was also
more than a match to The
Mail, the better printed mouthpiece of the ruling Northern
Peoples Congress (NPC) published in Kano.
Mr.
Sharp recruited Malam Magaji apparently to give the opposition a
voice in the regional newspaper for fairness and balance in its
coverage of the region’s politics. Very likely Mr. Sharp’s
action did not go down well with the authorities in Kaduna but
in the end Malam Magaji survived their misgivings, thanks
obviously to his ability to walk the tight rope of reporting for
an Establishment newspaper as a radical journalist-politician.
His secret was his apparent possession of a
huge dose of the virtues of a good reporter not least of which
are a keen sense of observation, the ability to cultivate and
keep sources and good old personal integrity. Throughout his
journalism career at both the
Comet and
Citizen, and
eventually at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (now FRCN)
which he joined in 1957, Malam Magaji demonstrated these and
other virtues to the great satisfaction of his employers.
In time, however, his stint at
Citizen changed his
radical politics and by the early sixties he had moved away from
active journalism and joined the regional civil service as an
information officer. He rose eventually to become the region’s
Chief Information Officer.
It was in this position that he almost
became the managing director of
New Nigerian. As he
himself told it in his highly readable 2010 autobiography,
The Pull of Fate,
barely two weeks after the Kaduna authorities had invited Mr.
Sharp back to Nigeria to raise the
New Nigerian,
Phoenix-like from the ashes of
Citizen in Zaria, he
(Malam Magaji) was invited for a meeting by the late Alhaji
Aliyu, Makaman Bida, the region’s Minister of Health and Deputy
Premier, with Alhaji Ahman Pategi, the Minister of Agriculture
and the Secretary-General of the NPC and Alhaji Ahmadu Fatika,
the Minister of Information, both also late, in attendance.
During the meeting he was told a decision
had been taken to sack Mr. Sharp for offending the sensibilities
of the authorities so soon after the newspaper’s debut and he
was to take over from the expatriate the following Monday,
January 15. As we all now know the soldiers, led by Major
Chukwuma Nzeogwu in Kaduna, struck in the wee hours of that day
and killed Sir Ahmadu Bello, the region’s premier, in his
residence and, in the process, burned it down.
Thus Malam Magaji never became
New Nigerian’s boss
and Mr. Sharp, who probably never even knew he’d been sacked on
the eve of the coup, carried on with his job.
The newspaper’s location in Kaduna gave it
the vantage position of breaking to the world in words and
pictures what, at that time, was clearly the biggest story out
of Africa’s most populous country. Mr. Sharp made a remarkable
job of it gauging from the fact that from then on the supply of
the newspaper never met its demand, edition after edition. And
the rest became the story of what, once upon a time, was the
country’s most literate, and arguably, most authoritative
newspaper.
We can now only speculate on what would have
been the fate of the newspaper under Malam Magaji if the tragic
events of January 15, 1966 had not happened. And it would merely
be idle speculation.
But whether or not he could have done as
well as, or even better, than Mr Sharp and his successors, the
fact is that his subsequent record of public service as
bureaucrat and politician was ample evidence that the virtues of
personal integrity, modesty and tolerance, among others, are not
the reserve of any creed, political or otherwise.
His sense of tolerance was pretty obvious
from his relationship with his late younger brother, Mustapha,
who had followed his footstep as a journalist and politician but
who had remained a radical politician till death. During the
Second Republic Mustapha contested against him for Kano
North-Central senatorial seat on the ticket of the Peoples
Redemption Party, the successor to NEPU.
The younger Danbatta
handily beat his elder brother by 133,490 votes to 38,234. Malam
Magaji never showed any bitterness towards this somewhat upstart
of a brother. Instead they retained their fondness for each
other till death did them part.
As for his personal integrity and modesty
the fact is that at 80, and in spite of the opportunities he has
had to self-aggrandise himself as, among others, Counsellor of
Information in the Nigerian High Commission in London during the
civil war years between 1967 and 1970, as Chairman of Daily
Times and the Federal Housing Authority during the Second
Republic and as Chairman of the well-endowed Kano Forum, an
independent foundation for the private funding of education in
the state, Malam Magaji has remained a man of very modest means
and lifestyle.
With no worries about maintaining a false
lifestyle like several of his contemporaries who were once
prepared to die for what they believed in when they were young
but have ironically become political prostitutes at a time they
should have no care for material things, is it any wonder that
at 80 Malam Magaji is still strong enough to drive himself
around town in his old banger and walk without a stick?
Two years ago, his mother died at a youthful
age of 98. She lived long enough to see her son become an
important player in the country’s journalism, bureaucracy and
politics, receiving several honours along the way, including the
Fellowship of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, a doctorate degree
from Bayero University, Kano, an OON in 1982, and only last
Monday, the higher CON.
Unlike several of his fellow honourees last
Monday, Malam Magaji deserved each and every one of his honours.
With 18 more years to equal his mother’s longevity, may he
remain healthy and strong enough to continue to serve his
community and his country at large with all the zeal and
commitment with which he has served both all his adult life.
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