Chairman: Sunset at Midday.

By Ibrahim Sheme

“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” – Chuck Palahniuk

The very day I first met with Mr. Sam Nda-Isaiah, within minutes, he gave me a job. He had been looking for a competent hand to edit his new newspaper, Leadership, and a veteran of the profession mentioned my name to him. When he went to Sokoto to promote his paper to Governor Attahiru Bafarawa, he met with a friend of mine in the waiting room of the governor’s office, and during a chat between them my friend told him he knew me. A few days later, my friend and I travelled from Kaduna to Abuja to meet with the publisher at his office. He was expecting us, the meeting having been agreed upon during the two men’s chance encounter in Sokoto. Within minutes of my appointment, Mr. Nda-Isaiah asked me to execute my first assignment even though I was supposed to assume duty a week later: write the newspaper’s editorial for the coming edition. I did, and we left with my appointment letter tucked away in my pocket. He was such business-like.

Thenceforth I was to become the longest serving editor of Leadership. We started as a weekly publication in 2004 and, after two years, I resigned to pursue a venture that became ill-fated. A year after my departure, I was invited back by Chairman (the sobriquet that was Mr. Nda-Isaiah’s official title at Leadership), who asked me to choose any high-sounding title I liked with the exception of “Chairman” or “Editor-in-Chief”, for obvious reasons. I chose “Chairman of the Editorial Board” and thus became the first person to hold the title in the company. A month or so later, Chairman moved the chairs and made me the editor of the daily. I held that title for years until I got tired and threatened to be reassigned or else I would quit. Chairman made me the first Editorial Director, with responsibility to supervise the editors of the various titles he had founded. I eventually left in 2010 when a fresh opportunity opened for me elsewhere.

Through all the years I had worked with Chairman, it was all good-times-bad-times between us, depending on the day, the moment or the event. Overall, however, I’d rather tip the scale towards the good simply because, despite the occasional pressures and cataclysms of our working relationship, Chairman was, in the long run, a good man.

I could count more gain and prosperity than loss and disconsolence during those years. I gained more experience, exposure, friends in high and low places, stardom etc. For, beyond his iron-clad mien as a hands-on manager, occasionally defined by volcanic eruptions, Chairman was essentially kind. While many staffers would dwell on his censorious nature, I’d rather recall many instances of his personal kindness, including cash or book gifts and, more especially, wise counsel. I was able to spend more years than anyone in the editorial chair because, apart from the mutual respect we had for each other, I had learnt to master his tackles and knew exactly where his next kick would land. Unknown to many people, I was instinctively drawing from the boss-employee experience I had had a decade earlier with a publisher with similar demanding attitude, Alhaji Hassan Sani Kontagora (Magajin Rafi), whose weekly newsmagazine, Hotline, I edited.

I realised, years after I left LEADERSHIP (note: Chairman insisted that the name of his newspaper should always be written in capital letters!), that Mr. Nda-Isaiah’s strong-arm approach towards his staffers was not meant to dehumanise them as some that worked for him were wont to think but to push them towards a higher form of accomplishment and excellence. He was a pharaoh building a media pyramid in the Giza of Nigerian business climate and saw that without pushing his editors and managers the job would not be completed within his allotted time.

The strategy worked. Operating from a small business centre (call it a shop) in Kaduna where he started producing the monthly, subscription-based newsletter called Leadership Confidential, he was able to grow a media empire which stands like a colossus in the Nigerian media sphere. Today the company boasts of several titles and a modern headquarters (complete with a printing plant) situated in the heart of Abuja. I figured that to some extent Chairman must have been seeing himself in the mould of his friend, the media mogul Nduka Obaigbena, or, to put it more succinctly, Rupert Murdoch, and therefore didn’t want to be left behind in their trail.

Chairman was an untiring gladiator in the Nigerian media world, consistently comparing his papers with those of his mentors like Messrs Obaigbena and Sam Amuka in order to be counted amongst the best. In that regard he was a merciless pugilist, one who never underestimated the competition. I recall the day I informed him that Media Trust, our nearest competitors, were planning to start a vernacular newspaper. As soon as I closed my mouth, he said with an air of excitement, “How can we beat them to it?” Of course, we did not start before them, but Leadership Hausa was established closely on the heels of Aminiya. Years later, he actually “beat them to it” when he turned his vernacular weekly into the first Hausa daily in history. It was that kind of unquenchable desire to build more pyramids in the media industry and elsewhere that took him to the verge of sawing hard into the burgeoning broadcast arena with radio and TV stations.

But then the anvil fell suddenly. Even pharaohs and moguls had a lifespan, and Nda-Isaiah wrapped up his earthly duties on Friday, December 10, 2020. I had longed to finish this piece without mentioning the grim word ‘death’ or contemplate the definite reality of mortality, hence this long background. Chairman dead? Even though the news was conveyed to me a few minutes after the inevitable had happened by the publisher of Blueprint Newspapers Limited, Alhaji Mohammed Idris, and I spent the next 24 hours exchanging condolences with Chairman’s family members, editors and my own friends and former colleagues, I waited until I read it with my koro-koro eyes in Chairman’s own newspaper. Chairman is dead. Gone, and forever.

I was too dazed to cry. I did not expect him to die, I mean not now, not this or any other year! On this my wild observation, one of the Leadership editors told me: “Even Chairman did not expect that he would die in the next thirty years.” Honestly, I never contemplated death for him even though I know very well that death is the most assured eventuality for all the living things God created. In Islam, one is forewarned to expect it any minute, and the threshold is put at “either sixty, either seventy”. Chairman was two years short of the first threshold. Fifty-eight only. O Death! Why art thou so early and swift of harvest? It was only early afternoon for the Kakaki Nupe; why not tarry awhile, at least until sunset. For Chairman, I did not expect sunset at midday!

Now, what do I think of Chairman’s death? Ordinarily, it was a huge loss to Nigerian, nay African, journalism, but it was also a kind of triumph for him. Why? Chairman did not die in vain. He did not die grovelling for success or fulfillment. Death did not snatch him before he served mankind fully. His footprints and voice – encapsulated in his Big Ideas ethos – are large and loud respectively, and will continue to echo. His writings are his most pervasive legacy, closely followed by the businesses he founded. Those are the crust of his battles.

One’s fear now is not about the former but the latter. The former – his writings – will not be blotted by time, especially if they are properly archived. His companies, however, require careful handling, especially the newspapers. The family and the management owe it a duty to sustain this unique legacy. One cannot forget that the media graveyard is full of similar dreams that disappeared with the demise, disbandment or economic ruin of their main promoters; their tombstones are legion in the cemetery, especially in the north. Please, do anything to make the Leadership Group not go to that yard. Chairman had actually wanted to do it through re-strategising but prevaricated, probably thinking he had all the time in the world to juggle his crystal balls. Now fulfill his wish. It would be a posthumous honour for him. It would make him smile in the great beyond. It would certainly make all of us smile.