By Olatunji Dare
With the death last week of Anthony McNonoh Momoh (simply Tony Momoh), the community of Nigerian journalists and the national policy dialogue audience were plunged into mourning again barely a month after the death of the celebrated columnist, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, which occurred some six weeks after the passing of Bisi Lawrence, one of the most accomplished Nigerian journalists of all time. In the first week of the new year, another journalist of note, Eddie Aderinokun, died.
The generation of journalists we fondly call “veterans” is slowly withering away.
Momoh would have been 82 on April 27.
Trained originally as an elementary school teacher, he left his native Auchi for Lagos and entered journalism as a sub-editor at the Daily Times. That humble beginning led to one of the most eventful careers in Nigerian journalism and public life. His was a household name,
That career culminated in his appointment, based on a competitive interview, as editor of the paper, the crown jewel of the Times Group, and the most influential newspaper in Nigeria.
No surprise there. Over the years, he had served in one capacity or another in virtually every department of the organization. On the way up, he completed at the University of Lagos the journalism degree programme he had begun at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, but which the civil war had interrupted. He went on to take a law degree, also from the University of Lagos, and qualified as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court.
Momoh was a scion of the Auchi Royal Court, but he never flaunted that distinction. He affected no royal airs. He was not the type to flaunt anything – be it his enviable job, his prodigious learning, or his connections. He comported himself with quiet dignity, which only served to enhance his dignity and presence.
Momoh’s editorship coincided with a turning point in Nigerian politics – the preparation for the return to party politics and constitutional government after 13 unbroken years of military rule. It was an exciting time to be the editor of Nigeria’s most influential newspaper, and as he soon found out, a treacherous time as well. On that, more, shortly.
At Kakawa Street, the storied home of the Daily Times in its glory days before it relocated uptown to a more commodious setting, Momoh earned a reputation for fairness, probity and forthrightness, and for leading by example. He applied himself to the task at hand with intensity. You rarely found him on the owambe circuit. Not for him the flash and the dash that went with being editor of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.
He was a much sought-after presenter or symposiast wherever issues relating to journalism were being discussed in Nigeria or abroad. His written presentations, based on a firm grasp of theory and practice, were lucid and incisive; his oral delivery was forceful, and he sometimes came across as combative. It was nothing personal; it was all about journalism, which he cared for passionately.
And it is in journalism rather than law that Momoh’s fame, his legacy, will endure. He would have made a theatrical but formidable figure in the courts, delivering his submissions with verve and vigour. But he never went into full legal practice. He operated from his chambers as a legal consultant.
He earned fame through the many books, pamphlets and papers on journalism ethics, media law, media history, press freedom, media-government relations, media’s role in national development, and many other related subjects.
In his “Point of Order” column for the Vanguard Newspapers collected in three volumes, he bore faithful witness to the major events of the era and, through incisive analysis, guided the reader in interpreting, and situating them.
It was also as a journalist that he made legal history in the celebrated case of Momoh v The Senate of the National Assembly.
“Grapevine,” a gossip column in the Daily Times, reported that members of the National Assembly, senators in particular, were parlaying their exalted office into business solicitations, whereupon the Senate summoned the paper’s editor, to appear before it to disclose the source of the information contained in the publication.
Momoh declined, claiming a constitutional right to protect his sources, especially given the fact that the Constitution vests the news media with the duty of upholding the responsibility and accountability of the government to the public.
The Lagos High Court found for him, holding that reporters enjoyed a qualified privilege to protest their sources.
There was jubilation in the media. The courts, per Tony Momoh, had struck a significant blow for press freedom in general, and for investigative reporting in particular. The victory was short-lived, however. The Court of Appeal reversed, drawing on American jurisprudence on the subject, but without underscoring the heavily circumscribed conditions under which the court can ask reporters to disclose their sources.
Momoh had written himself into legal literature. That was not all. Before the Court of Appeal, he had deployed his legal training to make a robust case as plaintiff. It was a fine outing for the lawyer/journalist.
Several years later, as the Brits would say, they kicked Momoh upstairs to serve as General Manager for the Group’s titles.
It was from that station that military president Ibrahim Babagida appointed him Minister of Information and Culture, at a time the government was threshing to find a formula to revive the economy. The vaunted Structural Adjustment Programme generated only a great deal of heat, and hardly any light.
It was Momoh’s remit not only to explain government policy, but to sell it to the public. It was a tough sell. The writer and pamphleteer in Momoh went about the task writing epistles to his compatriots on one aspect of public policy after another. The novelty soon wore thin, without winning the government more friends or sympathisers.
Much more significant was his convening, early in his tenure, a conference at the Administrative College of Nigeria in Topo, Badagry, to fashion a National Communication Policy for Nigeria. No conference of that compass had been convened before, and none has been held since. It remains an abandoned project. The published proceedings and recommendations will doubtless constitute the point of departure for revisiting the subject.
Two incidents in Momoh’s life provide a window into his character and worldview.
In the first, he was confronted at Ishaga, in Surulere, Lagos, by a carjacker training a sub-machine machine gun at his head and barking at him to get out of his official car. He would have lost nothing by surrendering the vehicle. But instead of doing that, Momoh lunged at the gunman. They mixed it. Momoh gained the upper hand and dispossessed the hoodlum of the weapon. The hoodlum fled as an irate crowd closed in on the scene.
In the second, armed robbers broke into his book-strewn residence in the dead of night and demanded money in foreign currencies. They threatened his wife and even roughed up his son. They got into a fight, during which they found that Momoh was no softie. In the end, they fled without getting the foreign currency they were demanding, and without taking anything from the house.
“I am not an inordinate man of valour, but I will not stand oppression, he wrote of both incidents decades later. “You cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to do what my spirit frowns at.”
The key phrase here is “what my spirit frowns at.” Momoh was a person of deep spirituality. He was guided by the Spirit, and lived his life according to the teachings of the Grail Message.
In the five decades he spent in active journalism as trainer, editor and administrator, and in public life as a Minister of the Federal Republic and statesman mediating the political tensions roiling Nigeria, not a whiff of scandal swirled around him.
That is achievement enough.
And in this clime, there is no greater legacy.
Source: thenationonlineng.net
