Mohammed Haruna
6 August 2008
opinion
The news came to me through the multi-talented ace photographer, Sunmi Smart-Cole, last Saturday at precisely 11am. I had just switched on my MTN line when his terse text came through. "Alhaji BABATUNDE JOSE," it said, "died at (5.45am) this morning, aged 82. Burial at ATAN cemetery at 4pm."
At that age, death is sad rather than shocking. I knew the old man had been ill for quite a while. Still, his death came to me as a shock perhaps because the notification was what I received on my mobile phone first thing after waking up from my mid-morning nap on a cool, lazy Saturday.
I have decided to reproduce on these pages a tribute I paid to this titan of Nigerian, indeed African, journalism on his 75th birthday, seven years ago. Quite rightly, the tribute focused on his contribution to Nigerian journalism which is without equal in the contemporary history of Nigeria.
Although he was himself not a man of letters, having started his journalism career when he was barely out of secondary school at the young age of 16, he contributed more than any contemporary journalist in changing the face - and substance - of journalism from that of a profession of school dropouts, hard-drinking, shabby-looking never-do-wells to one of decent, self-confident, highly literate and respectable gentlemen.
He did this by simply scouting for talents from the four walls of our universities and making them offers they could not refuse. He also identified talents already working in the organisation and sent them out to good schools here and abroad to better themselves professionally and otherwise. In other words, he achieved his objective by putting the company's money into where its mouth was rather than into his pocket as many a publisher does these days. Above all, Jose led his company by example.
He attracted good and capable hands because by dint of hard work, integrity and foresight, he built the Daily Times of Nigeria into one of the most influential and successful businesses in Africa. At its height, the company's flagship, the Daily Times, and its sister, the Sunday Times, were selling over 200,000 and 500,000 copies per edition respectively. On the commercial side, the company's property, printing and packaging subsidiaries were bringing in money faster than they could be banked, if you catch my drift.
Naturally, such success was bound to attract envy. The envy against Jose manifested in the wake of the July 1975 coup that ousted General Yakubu Gowon from power and brought in then Brigadier Murtala Muhammed as head of state and then Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo as his deputy.
The old man has given what I believe is a dispassionate account of events leading up to his premature departure from Daily Times in February 1976 in his 1987 book, WALKING A TIGHT ROPE: Power play in Daily Times. It is a book that should be required reading for all students and practitioners of journalism. It should also be recommended reading for all students of policy and even, indeed especially, for politicians.
His highly readable narrative of how he upheld the ethics of his chosen profession over many issues including the scandalous Mbadiwe Land Deal in Ijora, Lagos, in 1964, through the Daboh/Tarka fiasco that led to the forced resignation of Chief J. S. Tarka as a leading member of General Gowon's cabinet in 1974, to his - Jose's of course - vindication as an upright and fair-minded leader following an internal rebellion sparked by changes he had proposed in the publications division of the company in the aftermath of the July 76 coup; his story about all these contains lessons that we all can benefit from whatever our profession.
As I said earlier and as the reader can see, my tribute to the man on his 75th birthday focused on his journalism career. Jose was, however, more than just a great journalist and successful publisher. He was also a deeply religious man without being religionist. As he said in his book, he started out as a leading member of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a sect whose members orthodox Islam regarded as apostates because they believed in the prophethood of its founder, Gulam Ahmad, a Pakistani. It is a cardinal principle of Islam that Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is the seal of prophethood.
Three years after Jose became its president in 1967, he led a successful campaign to change the movement's image and its belief in the prophethood of Ahmad. In 1973, its name was changed to Anwar-ul-Islam Movement of Nigeria. Some leading members objected to the change and went to court all the way to the top. They lost at every stage. So by the time Jose left as president of the movement in 1973, it had returned to orthodox Islam.
This, in brief, was the man who finally died last Saturday having served God and touched the lives of millions of Nigerians for good. Jose, as his son, Babatunde Jose, Jr., said in last Sunday's Thisday, truly "lived a good life and built a good name for himself and his family." The trouble with today's journalists and publishers - and politicians as their rich cousins - is that few have followed Jose's exemplary life. May Allah grant him aljanna firdaus. May He also grant those he has left behind the fortitude to bear his loss.
Jose and today's journalism
Last Wednesday, December 13, Alhaji Babatunde Jose, probably the most accomplished post-independent journalist in this country, celebrated his 75th birthday. Starting as a cub-reporter in 1941, first at Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's Daily Comet and then at the Daily Times, Jose rose through the ranks to become the most powerful newspaper chief executive this country has ever seen. It is significant that he did so with little formal education. The secret of his success obviously was his commitment to hard work and to professionalism in journalism and integrity in management. The Daily Times is today a sorry shadow of its days under Jose precisely because these three vital qualities were missing in most of the regimes that succeeded him, especially those from the eighties.
It is indeed a mark of his remarkable achievement at the Daily Times that nearly a quarter of a century after he quit journalism, he remains the foremost reference point of journalism in the country. This was somewhat foreseen by the New Nigerian which, in its heydays in the late sixties and seventies, rivalled the Daily Times in editorial integrity, courage and conviction. Its editorial on March 11, 1976 on Jose's retirement which is as apt today as it was then and which was characteristically precise and to the point, is worthy of reproducing in full. Titled Jose Quits, it ran thus:
The retirement of Alhaji Babatunde Jose, erstwhile Chairman and Managing Director of the Daily Times Group of Companies, is sad news. For Alhaji Jose has been part of the industry for as long as most newspaper-men can remember. He has given a generation's service to his beloved profession and reached the top by hard work and ruthless business drive.
A valedictory comment is probably an inopportune occasion to go into the inner details of a distinguished career. Suffice to say that Alhaji Jose was the moving force in transforming the Daily Times from a newspaper to a business. Jose appreciated earlier on that for a private independent newspaper to survive, it must be buttressed by money-making ventures.
As he built up the company, so also he established his own primacy. The irony of his departure is that an error of judgement in the course of exercising his near absolute powers unleashed a process which in the end proved his undoing, for the senior staff accusations and counter-accusations which resulted in the massacre last week of the top management made it inadvisable for Alhaji Jose himself to stay on.
When a man is in difficulties, all sorts of accusations can be heard. It is true that purists would look the other way in (the) face of certain revelation in the Daily Times, but the organization was run as a private big business. We believe an investigation into the conduct of chief executives in indigenous or foreign private sector companies will show Alhaji Jose in good light by comparison.
He laid down certain standards and tried to maintain them. Above all, he ran an efficient and profitable business. How many private companies can boast of that? Alhaji Jose may be out but he is not by any means down for he is a formidable personality who may well re-emerge on the political arena before we are much older.
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