[i]‘I’m sure Buhari’s people will have their own stories to tell’ [/i Vastly-experienced Dr Rueben Adeleye Abati was the presidential spokesperson during the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. He is even more popular today as one of the anchors of a thriving morning TV show in the country. He tells a bit of his journalism story to SAM NWAOKO in this interview.
SIR, how did your journalism start, how did the beginnings of your journalism come about?
I started writing for Nigerian newspapers since my undergraduate days. I was sending comments like letters to the editor to newspapers like The Chronicle when I was an undergraduate in Calabar. During my youth service in 1985 in Benin, I also contributed opinions and comments to the Nigerian Observer. In those days, states had their own newspapers and they were also very active. That was the beginning. When I got to the University of Ibadan as a graduate student, I wrote for virtually every newspaper to such a point that I was a major contributor to the book review pages of the Nigerian Tribune and Daily Sketch. The Features Editor of Daily Sketch at the time encouraged me and always published me on a weekly basis. The Tribune also published me almost on a weekly basis. That was the time I got close to people like Dare Ajayi, who was with the Tribune at the time. In Sketch, we had people like Sam Adesua. We had very active journalists. While writing for the regular press, I also contributed to The Guardian newspaper. During that time, I must have written virtually every other week. If I did not write for The Guardian, I wrote for The Times Literary Supplement or I wrote for The Guardian Literary Supplement. I was very prolific on the pages of Nigerian newspapers.
On the side, I also wrote romance. I became a Contributing Editor to Hints Magazine, a romance magazine that was very popular in the 1990s, especially in university campuses in the country. I was writing two columns. Hints Magazine grew and founded another publication called Channels Magazine. I also wrote for Channels. The company was called True Tales Publications and the owner of that company is Dr Ibe Kachikwu, a former NNPC GMD and former Minister of State for Petroleum.
I finished my PhD and moved on to go and teach at Ogun State University. Even as a university lecturer, I kept writing because it had become a habit. Then it happened that there was this long ASUU strike that went on for almost a year. We were just on campus doing virtually nothing. The only option available to me was to focus more on all these writings. That was how I came to Lagos and got invited to be Editorial Page Editor of a newspaper called The Hammer founded by Alhaji Najeem Jimoh, a former Editor of The Punch. So, I became the Editorial Page Editor of The Hammer with our office at Oregun in Lagos. Then, the people at The Guardian heard that I was with The Hammer and said ‘well, if you want to come into full-time journalism, we think the best place you should be is The Guardian’. So, they came and lured me away from Alhaji Najeem Jimoh. So I ended up at The Guardian.
At the time, however, The Guardian said they were looking for a young member of the Editorial Board – somebody young, educated who writes very well. When they invited me and I went to meet Dr Olatunji Dare, I was given two options — either to go to African Guardian or to come to the Editorial Board. So, I chose the Editorial Board. So, once I got into The Guardian, my full time journalism continued. Then, there were two options before me – if the universities opened, I should return to teaching or I should stay in The Guardian. By the time the universities would reopen, I had already taken up full employment at The Guardian. That was how I didn’t go back to full time teaching. When the universities reopened, they said ‘okay, even if you are not coming back, you have to keep teaching your courses. We will now make you a visiting lecturer’. I did that visiting lecturer thing till about 1997. I was shuttling between Lagos and Ijebu Igbo to go and teach every weekend. Eventually along the line, I had begun to study law at the Lagos State University, so it became very difficult at a point to combine teaching with journalism and the studying of law. The one I had to strike off the list was teaching – going to Ijebu Igbo every weekend to go and teach. That way I got trapped in journalism. I got promoted Chairman Editorial Board and I also held several other posts in The Guardian. Then, I landed in Abuja.
Before Abuja, you practised journalism from the outside, what I may refer to as ‘free bird’ experience before you went to serve in government, which would have been journalism in a controlled environment. What comes to your mind when you weigh the two experiences?
By 2011, I had been Chairman, Editorial Board of The Guardian Newspapers for more than 10 years. In the course of my stay in full time journalism, I had gone abroad to the University of Maryland at College Park to study journalism – Mid-career journalism Fulbright programme. By 2011, I had spent more than 20 years in journalism. There is a point you will reach in a particular line of work you begin to get bored and you start looking for adventure. When I was invited to come and be presidential spokesman, I said ‘well, this is something new, something different; another experience. Let’s try it’. In any case, there is nothing new in newspaper house work that I had not seen. So, I went on the limb of adventure. It then turned out that it was a very useful experience.
We do basically the same things that you do in the newsroom. We report a story, it’s just that this time round, you have to report a story to favour government – your principal. It is still a kind of journalism handling the presidential media team or the communications team. You are interfacing with the State House Press Corps where we have quite a large team, although from different media houses.
The only difference here is that you are providing guided communication, you are there as an insider trying to report the government positively. That in itself has its own challenge because a lot of people will say look at this man who has been criticising government, who is known as a social critic, is defending government. I used to tell people that these are two sides of the same script – informing people, providing information. It’s just that on the side of the newsroom depending on the orientation of your media house, you have more latitude to perform your duties. If you are on the side of the government, you are basically reporting government to the people but also trying to make government look good. That is just the only difference but the experience that you go away with, I always tell people, is like going to school. When you are in the newsroom or in your media house you just do everything like ‘aluta continua’ kind of thing.
Many journalists of today rely on Google and Twitter. Anything that they see there that is what they run with, half of which is not well-informed. But when you go into government, you gain knowledge of how government works. You understand that other side of the street from inside: how are policies made? How is government run? What influences the decisions? What are the various dimensions to governance? What are the issues? Where are the corpses buried? You gain a better knowledge of how your country is run. By the time I was leaving that position in 2015, I used to boast confidently that if you give me this country to run, I will run it. I say this because, sitting in Council every Wednesday in a corner very close to the president – if he needed anything he will ask me to quickly do this or that and it will be part of my duty – you hear his every conversation, I follow him everywhere and to every meeting. That in itself is a form of education. So, you have better knowledge of how your country is run. As far as I’m concerned, going to serve in the Villa for four years, there may be no certificate, but for me it is equivalent to the acquisition of a second PhD.
You have written so much but after four years in Abuja, after your journalism on the other side, you wrote about demons in Aso Rock Villa and this has remained a reference. How did the reactions to that article come to you?
That article appears to have become so popular. A lot of people thought it was fiction, but it was not fiction. What I reported in that article – the spiritual side of Aso Villa – is about direct experience in that place. In fact, you will recall that after I wrote that article, some other people gave accounts of their experience in the Villa. What I even narrated was not the full story. People were dying, people were losing their loved ones, people were having all kinds of strange experiences. I was simply saying that, yes the presidential villa is a security zone but people there are also human beings who go through all kinds of strange experiences. It is so bad that it is only the people who are affected who would be able to tell the story. I’m also saying that look, to go there for four years or eight years and go back home in one piece calls for celebration and I wasn’t making up that article. I had the mind that okay, one of these days I will return to that article and rework it, add more to it and include people’s testimonies. Nigerians will think it was fiction and said Abati was giving excuses for the failure or non-performance of the Jonathan administration. But here we are, eight years after the fact, nobody is referring to Dr Jonathan as a ‘clueless president’ anymore because Nigerians have been confronted with the true definition of cluelessness. President Jonathan has been vindicated before the very eyes of Nigerians. So, sometimes, people talk about things they don’t know about or what they have not experienced. But part of our training as literary persons is to observe society and as journalists to report society and to give a picture of the society and hold a mirror to the society so that the society can see their reflection. So, I’m sure persons who have now also gone to the Aso Villa and who will be exiting will have their own stories to tell. Not many of them will come out and say when they were there they were having visions of encounter with angels except they do not want to say the truth.
Post-Aso Rock sir, your new experience is TV. Having been a print man all along what are some of the marked differences you have experienced on the job on TV as against the print media?
Many people think that I stumbled onto broadcasting. I’m a graduate of a department called Department of Theatre and Media Arts, University of Calabar. In our time, it was called Department of Theatre Arts but they later changed the name to Department of Theatre and Media Arts because there are about eight different specialisations in that department. One of the things we did was media studies. One of the things we did was broadcasting and incidentally, we did radio; we did television and television production was in fact my sub-specialisation. But here in Nigeria nobody pays any attention to details. People are given jobs or positions because they know people, nobody double-checks their background. I have a background in television in terms of my training. You will recall Patito’s Gang, that programme that was set up by Professor Pat Utomi. I was part of Patito’s Gang from the very beginning once as a panelist and later as a presenter when Professor Utomi went into politics, when he went to run for president. For three years, I was in charge of that programme until when Professor Utomi returned. Even when he returned, he allowed me to carry on until I went to Abuja. So, speaking in front of the camera is not new to me. I’ve Patito’s Gang for over 10 years before I went to Abuja. So, all the processes of sitting down, looking into the camera, speaking into the camera are not new to me. But Arise News is a different experience. It is a daily appearance and it is an international TV station and the production is live, real time. So the dynamics have differed. Every morning, you sit down there and as you are sitting down you know that you will be watched all over the world. That in itself is a special kind of experience. It gives you a special kind of adrenalin. However, what people see are the anchors, the faces on the television but it’s a team work. There is a whole team in the background: Director, producer, manager, make-up artist, engineer, cameramen etc and all of them are there every morning to help us put something out and make it look as if it is spontaneous. A lot of activities are going on at the back of the production process and I find that quite different from the newspaper. In the newspaper process, if you are a writer or you are a reporter, the process is not as complex. You go and write your report, you give it to the sub-desk they will fine-tune it and put it in the paper. If you are a columnist, you write your copy and they put it out. If you are an editor, people submit their copies, you look at it and take a decision on what you want to use. You have more control over what you want to put out. But in broadcasting, especially television broadcasting, it’s a whole team and it’s live. So, all of you working together will just have to create a special synergy because it is live, you won’t have time to be adjusting things and you have to be in your best form. That puts additional pressure on you. If you are a reporter doing documentary, you might have some time. So also is a reporter doing a report might have a little time. But the challenges are just as daunting. The linkage between the print and broadcasting is that you are serving the public and you are being assessed by the public. However, the basic principles are the same at the level of principles; at the level of output and at the level of professionalism. I enjoy it, it’s fun. I wake up every morning knowing that you have to sit on that chair and you can’t go there and forge it or pretend. I always tell the younger people that this is a profession in which you have to do your home work well. You have to prepare. If you are writing, you have to be sure of what you are writing, if you are going to speak and communicate with the public, you have to be sure of your details. You can’t be going on TV every morning and you are sounding stupid. There are a lot of people out there who know the subject better than you. The only difference is that they are not on television. So, when you want to comment on what they are saying, you have to give them informed opinion. This Google culture is probably a big threat to television commentary. People go on Google and go on Twitter for everything and it is going to get worse with artificial intelligence.
Reactions to what your show on TV gives every morning vary and sometimes, many of the feedback on the social media come from the younger people. Do these reactions or feedback get at you? How do you receive them?
We are in the age of social media; we are in the age of Twitter and so on. Now we are talking about artificial intelligence, tax GPP and so on. Technology is affecting everything and has further expanded the frontiers of democracy. Everybody complains about what happens on the social media because everybody has access to the social media. Social media platforms also grant anonymity. So people hide under that anonymity to say what they like. There are positive sides to it. For people like us who are engaging with people everyday, you have no control over what people say whether they are speaking from a position of knowledge or ignorance, you have no control over it. The only control you have over it is that if you say you have been maligned or you have been abused, there is a law called Cyber Crimes Prohibition and Prevention Act. So you can seek redress in the court of law. But how many people have the time to take people to court even if they abuse you? For someone like me, I’m not bothered. Some other people resort to engaging them. When they abuse them on the social media they will be responding. For me, that is a waste of time. I don’t have the time because many of these people who are abusing are hired. They are paid N20,000 per month and are instructed to go and abuse people. Some of them are agents of political parties. During the campaigns, I got abused, I got trolled. It didn’t bother me because I knew that once the campaigns were over, many of them would lose their commission and you can focus on more serious-minded people. That’s my attitude to that, if you want to speak theoretically, every feedback is useful and that is putting it in the context. Take everything as a feedback but just make up your mind that your primary commitment is to make sure that you do your best. On this job, you take an exam every day. The pressures come from every direction, you just have to keep going on. We are inspired by the example of more senior journalists who have been in this profession for years and are still writing. When you look at the likes of Dan Agbese, Yakubu Mohammed, Akogun Tola Adeniyi – all these people are still very active in the profession. Chief Segun Osoba may have stopped reporting since he went full time into politics but you will see that his heart is still in journalism. There is a generation behind that their own, you still see these people working, and forging ahead. When you engage these people you will see that they love what they are doing whatever the platform. That in itself motivates people like us that this is one line of engagement in which you can stay and continue to function until you creator calls you. That in itself is a source of adrenalin. https://tribuneonlineng.com/my-claim-on-aso-rock-demonic-attacks-is-not-fiction-rueben-abati/ 1 Like 
|
