Yakubu Mohammed was a rare gem in the media industry By Prof. Olu Obafemi

I read with pin-drop attention and concentration your Tribute/Chairman’ s remarks at the Memorial Lecture for Yakubu Mohammed.

Here is my little addendum to your tribute.

Unfortunately, I missed out on most of the celebratory outings held in honour of my friend, Yakubu Mohammed.

You will, like most of his more known friends, be surprised to hear my seeming self- entitlement claim that Yakubu was my friend. Unusually so. There are aspects of his life’ s engagement in the Old Kwara and Kogi States which most of his more obvious friends like you missed out or simply ignore. And this forms the intersection of my relationship with him.

Very early in 1970, we met and both expressed our desire to become journalists. While he went for it right away into the University, I also got admission to read journalism, mine at UNN but failed to take it up. My parents won’t let me go into the boiling furnace of the Biafran war theatre just beginning to simmer down. I went to ABU, instead, to read English. But our desires and journalistic aspirations kept pushing us in each other’s way.

In 1973, when the Kwara State newspaper, The Nigerian Herald was introduced to the print market, Yakubu Mohammed, Jonathan Ajakpo and I were the first undergraduates to apply and got employed as Reporters in the paper. We were attached to veterans like the ace newsmen, Yahaya Sanni, the radical Yakubu Abdulazeez, the turbulent, and Russian trained Marxist, Dan Ikunaiye, while the veteran media oracles, Abiodun Aloba ( Ebenezer Williams) and Peter Ajayi roared from the hilltop of the Herald House. Closer to us on the shopfloor were crack reporters and sub- editors like Sam Akanmode and Alfred Ilenre from whom we learnt the art and skills of newspapering and scoops hunting. Even, the discipline of shunning brown envelopes culture by journalists of integrity came to us, first hand, from the stable of the Herald.

The Herald under Segun Osoba, who took over from Aloba, became the hottest cake in the newstands in all the big cities of Nigeria.

Besides the classrooms, the Herald was a major source of Yakubu Mohammed’s journalistic expertise which became handy in his later life’s mercurial sojourn in big time journalism. Ditto for me. We went our different ways: he to the newsroom and boardroom of the media, and I to the classroom and the theatre. But we kept our quiet friendship aglow.

Later, in the nineties, the Kogi State Government appointed us the Board of Directors of the State Newspaper, The Graphic Newspapers, Yakubu as Chairman and I became his Deputy. We did not last too long there because the independent- mindedness and free expression that we brought to the Boardroom was too radical for the military government in Kogi State. We took the liberty to constitute the Management of the Newspaper and before our letters reporting the exercise got to the Government House, the radio houses, newspapers and the television had carried the news. Such effrontery. It took a little time later for us to be shown the way out and the Board dissolved.

Yet, dear Jagun. Yakubu Mohamned was majesterial and sartorial in the practice of his trade. Charismatic but simple, authoritative, yet humble, he never suffered fools gladly, even among the high and mighty that he often rubbed shoulders with.

He knew his onions but hardly gloated or flaunted his credentials. I admired Yakubu, no end. He was a rare gem in the media industry. He was urbane and comfortable in life. He was amiable, jovial but no- nonsense. He is a sad deprivation to the press as a media intellectual. He was a gentleman by all and every standard of reckoning. He was my friend, whose company I cherished robustly.

. .Emeritus Professor Obafemi is a celebrated, award-winning writer and scholar.