Eugene Kwibuka
29 September 2008
Kigali — A Nigerian journalist who is the only African to win a Pulitzer journalism prize is considering buying land and building a home on the shores of Lake Muhazi in the Eastern Province of the country, The New Times has learnt.
Dele Olojede who has been in the country since Thursday last week to moderate a seminar on leadership, visited the land that he is still negotiating to buy last Saturday. He said that he has fallen in love with Rwanda and he and his family wish to spend a longer time here.
"I love this place, I love coming back, I have many friends here," he said in an interview at Serena Hotel, adding, "We want to be able to build a home here so that we come more frequently and spend more time with our friends."
Olojede was awarded the prize in 2005 after he had covered post-genocide Rwanda in 2004 focusing on how the country's people were together rebuilding their country after the Genocide.
He said that what attracted the jury to award him the prize is the emotional power of the stories he wrote about ordinary people in Rwanda during the three months he spent with them in their villages.
The Pulitzer winner who formerly worked as a journalist and former Foreign Editor for New York based Newsday, said that Rwanda is a place of inspiration for many African leaders in as far as the spirit of good governance is concerned.
"This is a place where we have a lot of African people who have gone through the most terrible things and they have refused to give up they have shown the rest of Africa a good example of how to run an efficient government," he said.
Olojede regrets the fact that international news media did not cover Rwanda well when it was on the verge of Genocide, and he was shocked when he arrived in the country from Johannesburg, South Africa, where his employer Newsday had sent him to cover elections that were going to take the African National Congress (ANC) to power.
"It was something beyond shock because the scale of crime was so horrifying I don't even find words to describe what I saw here," he said of the aftermath of the Genocide in July 1994.
He has been coming back to Rwanda ever since to cover Genocide commemorations and has kept an eye on the country's development.
As a retired journalist and member of several initiatives on the continent including the Nigeria Leadership Initiative (NLI) and a leader of some investment firms in Nigeria and South Africa, Olojede plans to launch a continental daily newspaper called 'Next' that would be distributed across the entire African continent from early next year.
He said that the paper will be first launched in Nigeria in January and then open offices in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Accra, Cairo, and Kigali.
The paper will be covering issues that range from politics, business, to the continent's development achievements.
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Fellow Country man, Be careful what you ask for, you may as well get it. Unless you are "lilly White", be sure that you look over your shoulders in a country full of murderers. They may mistake you for a native and do the "Ruwanda" on you. Why don't you just move to my town, Akassa, in Bayelsa State? No one will touch you. After all, you are an Oduduwa(meaning protect yourself in Ijaw language) picking and will be welcome there.