Yakubu Mohammed interview (2): In the second part of the two-hour interview, veteran journalist, Yakubu Mohammed, details his relationship with former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, how Dele Giwa spent his last three days on earth and how Lagos lawyer, late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), ethnicised his gruesome murder, thereby jeopardizing investigations.
So, was the cold war between Abiola and Dele Giwa the reason you and Ray Ekpu resigned from Concord? Did you resign in solidarity with Giwa?
In February 1984, I travelled to the U.S. for one month and I didn’t know what happened in my absence and till today, I have not tried to find out what happened. The only thing that Ray told me was that when Abiola was quarreling with Dele, and he was also talking to Ray, who had his hand in his pocket, he forced him to bring it out, saying it was rude. That is just an element of the crisis. It didn’t tell me the source of the crisis.
On Friday, March 9, 1984, I was preparing to leave New York for London and I was calling my house to tell them that I will be leaving U.S. for London and the phone was not properly placed, so it was not ringing. I called Dele and said, please send your driver to my house to tell them to place the phone properly so that I could get them and he said, “Yakubu, you are the son of your father.” I asked him what happened and he said MKO had just asked him to go and gave him till Monday to resign or be fired. I told him not to resign. “Let him tell the public what you have done. You are editing the newspaper well and you are selling very well, so what will he say you did wrong as an editor that will warrant a sack?” I further said, in any case, I will be going to London the following day and I will call him from there.
It is difficult for me to know exactly what happened but my suspicion is that the thing had nothing to do with editorial. Maybe, it was a personal, ego kind of thing. And I don’t know who to blame but I think somebody who had the power to hire and fire, you should defer to him as an editor no-matter how good you are. And I think on that score, Dele was reckless to allow that kind of thing to happen in his newspaper.
On the issue of documents in an editor’s possession, maybe in the U.S., there are laws that protect an editor when he steals documents or do all those things but no law protects you from stealing documents here. We depend on documents for our work but you don’t say to the high heavens that you have such documents. Some of them are classified and you tell the world that you have them. They will come and pick you. So, going to the police on a weekly, monthly basis can make you a superstar but that is not good business as far as I am concerned.
So, why did you decide to leave Concord? You had a chummy relationship with Abiola, your job was safe and not threatened in any way?
I left Concord because of what I am telling you. Abiola started believing all manner of rumours. There was a period when for one month, we were not talking to each other and I could not put my finger on anything that I did wrong. And I will give you one example. I don’t believe in eye service, I do my job and I will close. I will be driving away from the office and Abiola will be driving in and we will meet at the gate and he won’t even wave, quite unlike him.
He will come from the ITT office in Jibowu and others will sit down in the office waiting. Oh, they said chairman is coming. And so what? If you have done your job for the day, you should go home. Anyway, after about a month, he was the one who called me one day around 10am before I went to work to say he had a speech to deliver at Durbar Hotel, he was still in NPN at that time, and that he forgot to draft it. I asked if he wanted me to write a speech for him, he said yes.
I asked him what exactly he wanted me to say. He said it was a party thing and that I should just write a speech. I came to the office and wrote the speech, got my secretary to type it and print out many copies and about 4pm, he drove in but didn’t come upstairs as usual. He just sent somebody to my office to collect the speech. Before now, he used to enter my office and sit like a visitor and we will be talking but throughout this period, he never showed up in my office.
Anyway, he collected his speech, and four days later, he called Doyin’s office but because Doyin was still away, her secretary came to tell me that the chairman was on the phone waiting to talk to me. I said, “Chairman good afternoon sir.” He said, “Yakubu, how are you?” I said I was fine. He said, please help me and thank your deputy, and I said for what? He said for the speech he wrote for him for the Durbar Hotel event. I said okay, but is that what happened? He said he was told that I refused to write the speech for him and then Duro Onabule wrote it for him. I said okay, I will thank him.
But I added, “Is that what happened? You remember you called me and told me about the speech and I wrote it and so, at what point did I refuse to write? And at what point did Duro take over the speech?” And he said, “Honestly, I don’t know what is going on.” I said, “Well you are the owner of this company, you should try and know what is going on.”
I knew a lot of things were going on and anyone who had the power to hire and fire depending on his mood swing at any particular time could hire you and he could fire you. So, the thing kept worrying me. Lai Mohammed was PRO for Nigeria Airports Authority and he was my senior in secondary school. When I was promoted editor in 1982, he walked to my office at Concord and said, “Yakubu, I have come to congratulate you but not really to celebrate your promotion. At 31-32 years, you have risen to the pinnacle of your profession. If you are fired from this job, I am not praying that you should be fired but if you are, where do you go from here? So, I am praying for you.” I said thank you very much.
Later that day, I closed from work and as I was driving back home, at the local airport, I saw one guy from my place and he said Yakubu, congratulations. Now, after this position, where do you go from there? Think about it. I took the two advices seriously. That was in 1982. So, in 1984 when all these started, I remembered. So when Dele was going to be fired, I said this is exactly what I was being warned about. And anyone who can do this to Dele can do same to anybody and nobody knows who will be the next. They said I was a stranger element because I was not Yoruba and I cannot convert myself from stranger to native to retain my job. I had stood my ground with him over a lot of things. He had asked me to sack staff and I refused because it was unprofessional.
You never know when the brainwave will come and he will fire you. I mean, Henry Odukomaiya was the MD, he brought him out of retirement from Daily Times. It was in his absence that family pressure mounted and Odukomaiya quietly left that place. It could happen to anybody. And in any case, I take inspiration from God. If I didn’t resign from Concord, there wouldn’t have been any Newswatch and all the things that came after Newswatch couldn’t have happened – TELL, TheNews, all the newsmagazines were offshoots of Newswatch.
You were once invited to the Buckingham Palace as a guest of late Queen Elizabeth II?
It was not an invitation. It was a happenstance. I was a member of the Commonwealth Foundation Fellows, the only Nigerian that year, there were three Africans – one Gambian woman, and somebody from Botswana. There were other people from the different countries in the Commonwealth for a one month programme. So, we spent two weeks in London that included lectures and visits to the Parliament – House of Commons and House of Lords – and a visit to the Queen. The very day I left Lagos, which was a Friday, the following day was when the Gideon Orkar coup happened.
I had just arrived in London and Kayode Soyinka called to tell me about the coup and Newswatch had a full report of that Orkar coup. And our London office had the magazine so I had a copy. So, when we met with the Queen, she greeted us one after the other. When she came to me, I introduced myself as a journalist from Nigeria and she asked about the coup saga. I narrated what happened to her. And she took interest. So, while she greeted others for about one minute, she spent more than ten minutes with me. And she remembered that President Babangida visited the Buckingham Palace with the ADC, Col UK Bello, who was killed.
Referring to UK Bello, she said, “So that young, amiable fellow died in the coup?” I now told her that the latest issue of my magazine had full details of what happened. And she asked her Private Secretary to get a copy from me. The PS said if I get back to the hotel, I should just put the magazine in an envelope and address it to the Queen, give it to the hotel, and it would get to him. And from that day, I put the Queen on the mailing list of the Newswatch from the London office. And she was getting Newswatch every week just like DJK Farrah. After he retired, he went back to Midlands and I also put him on the mailing list of the magazine until he died.
You had a very good relationship with Babangida. What led to it?
I don’t know what led to that relationship. I had known him when he was a Brigadier-General or even lesser rank. It was not because he was a head of state.
You knew him from where and how? You are neither from Niger State nor were you in the military.
Babangida was always friendly with people he liked. We used to meet at 52 Kofo Abayomi Street in Victoria Island in the evenings. I had an uncle there, the same guy who wanted me to become publisher of TIME or Newsweek kind of magazine. They were close friends. So, in the evenings when I close from work, I will go there and we will sit down and chat. I knew that was Babangida even without asking him. I will stay with them until about 10pm and I will return to Ikeja, where I was living. That was going on all the way till 1983 when they tried to stage the first coup against the Shagari government. But that didn’t happen. Then, it eventually happened in December 1983. When the first coup didn’t happen, they were promoted Major-General. I congratulated him and requested to see him in his office. He said I should feel free to come any day.
READ ALSO: Yakubu Mohammed interview (1): Abiola was a committed publisher who followed me to pursue stories
Beyond Yakubu Mohammed’s expectations
The day I went to see him, I went with Dan Agbese, but he didn’t go up with me. He was Chief of Army Staff then. That was all, nothing special. He liked what I was writing and we kept talking. I didn’t know he was close to Abiola too but that was how we met and kept the relationship until he became military president.
Before then, he once told me that he was usually confused and I asked him about what and he said how to differentiate me from Mohammed Haruna. He has been hearing about him and they are from the same Niger State. I said, Mohammed wears eye glasses. I was not wearing any at that time. He said, is that the only thing? I said, what else do you want, we are the same height, not midgets but not particularly big or tall, and he said I can see you are not a midget. He then said, is there any other thing? I said how else do you want to distinguish between us, we are not twins, he is Mohammed Haruna and I am Yakubu Mohammed and I left him behind in New Nigerian. He said, yes, you had the courage to leave New Nigerian but the man didn’t.
But I said he didn’t have to leave New Nigerian. And he said, what is it I am hearing about him, that they redeployed him from editorial to circulation department? And I confirmed that. I told IBB that they didn’t only redeploy him, they also stopped him from going to Columbia University to pursue his Master’s degree in journalism. He got angry and said, “These people are bastards, let me talk to him. Can you ask him to see me? Give him my number.” I told him I didn’t have his number. And he said, “That means you are not a serious person. You mean you don’t have my number?” I told him that he didn’t give me his number, He countered, “Did you ask?”
Then he gave me all his numbers – house and office. So, when I got back to Ikeja, I called Mohammed around 11pm and said, guess who I saw? He said he didn’t want to guess and I gave him the telephone numbers and told him to call the owner. I told him that I discussed his travails with IBB. I think he helped Mohammed to go to Columbia University. That is it. He is friendly with people he liked. I cannot say that this is what I did for him. I was not in a position to do anything for him.
The most controversial part of your book, Beyond Expectations, is neither how you grew up nor your journalism but the account you gave on the death of Dele Giwa.
Why?
Because the question, who killed Dele Giwa, has been unanswered since October 19, 1986 and you claimed in your book that the popular narratives about Gloria Okon and Dele Giwa interviewing her are false. What then do you think led to the impression that it was the Babangida government that killed him?
You have not read the book and what I wrote on the conspiracy theories. What I set out to do was not to say these are the killers of Dele Giwa or to apportion blame or to exonerate anybody. What I saw in what happened was a distortion of facts which the public keep spreading and it was not in the interest of those of us who want to know the killers.
And I will take them one by one. They said Dele was doing a story on Gloria Oko, interviewed Gloria Okon, and he was bringing the story to Lagos to publish in Newswatch. He travelled in September 1986 to London for that purpose and interviewed Gloria Okon and Kayode Soyinka brought the tape of the interview, the pictures and every other thing to Lagos. And that was why Kayode was in Dele’s house when the thing happened. These are the stories in public domain.
What I set out to do as part of the team that ran Newswatch is to correct the misinformation. As I said in the book, my upbringing and my religion say I must say the truth at any time even if against myself because I am accountable to God.
Was there any Gloria Okon in our life? No! Were we doing any story on Gloria Okon? No! But the public says we were doing a story on Gloria Okon and they killed Dele Giwa to stop us from publishing the story. That is blatant falsehood. I am sure if anyone claims that TheNiche is doing a story on something which you are not doing, you owe the public the duty to correct that fallacy. At Newswatch, we had two levels of editorial conferences – there was the editorial board where only the editors discussed cover stories and there was the general conference where every reporter was required to come with three story ideas every Thursday.
There was this lady who was a new entrant into the profession – Bose Lasaki – and at the general conference presided over by Dan, Ray and Dele were not there, she said she heard a rumour that the alleged female drug courier who was arrested in Kano and who was supposed to have died, didn’t actually die. That she escaped and her colleagues, the editorial staff, laughed at her. And to make her not to feel bad, Dan said, “Okay madam, I think you need to do more work on this your story and then report back next Thursday.” Dan asked her if she wanted someone to work with her on the story and she said no. So, the following Thursday, she said, “Oga, there is no iota of truth in that story.” As far as we were concerned in Newswatch, that was the beginning and end of the Gloria Okon story. Now, did Dele Giwa travel to London in September 1986 to interview Gloria Okon as published widely? The answer is an emphatic no.
Why are you so categorical in your assertion?
I was on that trip with him to London and the reason we went to London was to see our chairman, Ime Umanah, who had an accident driving between Makurdi and Enugu Airport. He was flown to London and hospitalized at Cromwell Hospital. We were going to Amsterdam to buy our own printing press. So, we decided to go to London on our way to Amsterdam to spend some time with our chairman and we stayed in his house off Bayswater Road. We didn’t do any shopping, we didn’t go beyond the hospital and our chairman’s house. Kayode who was supposed to take us round if he was around, was in the U.S. on an assignment. We had nowhere to go. We just stayed with our chairman.
I don’t know where and how Dele interviewed Gloria okon. Was it in his dream and he then gave the tape to someone who was not around to bring to Lagos? So, when you send a reporter to do an assignment, another person will bring the tape? Is that how reporting is done? The tape couldn’t have been excess luggage that it could not be carried by Dele back to Lagos. I had to state all this in the book.
Col. Haliru Akilu was also mentioned. Dele was very close to Aliyu Gusau, the coordinator of National Security at the time. And after meeting with him, Dele will come to the office and tell us how nice he was. Meanwhile, Umanah, our chairman and Akilu were very good friends and he told Dele to widen his network and not depend on only one person. He persuaded him to make Akilu’s acquaintance, describing him as a very nice person. So, when we were leaving, the chairman gave Akilu’s numbers to Dele and the following day, we went to Amsterdam, spent only two days there and came back to Lagos.
When we came back, Dele called Akilu, went to see him and they became friends. He came back to the office to tell us how nice Akilu was, that it was good to get close to people before judging them. He said he didn’t even know that Akilu was about our age. He also told us that he told Akilu that despite his decency, that any time his boys came to harass us, they never respected us. And Akilu told him that now they have met, that will never happen again.
Now, the invitation from the SSS. You remember that Akilu was with the DMI on Child Avenue, Apapa while SSS was on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi. When the SSS invited him, I didn’t even know. He went with Ray to honour the invitation. Dan was on leave in London. It was when they came back on that Friday that they told us the story of the visit and the allegation they made against him, which didn’t include Gloria Okon.
When they finished from the SSS, Tony Momoh had just been appointed Minister of Information, not up to two months, and he was sharing office with the SSS on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi. So, the first person they met after leaving the SSS was Tony Momoh who was not only from the same place with Dele but also worked with him at Daily Times. Momoh told him to calm down, assuring that they will find out what happened. Dele and Ray were the ones narrating this to us in the office. Momoh told them that the person to talk to was Aliyu Gusau before remembering that he was out of the country. So, he said he will talk to Akilu and Dele told him that he had Akilu’s number too. And Tony Momoh told him to call Akilu and promised to call him too so they will see how he can help.
On that Friday, Dele called Akilu but didn’t get him. He left a message. From that Friday till Saturday morning, they were with Wole Soyinka who had just won a Nobel Prize. Vera Ifudu organized a party for Soyinka in Surulere. On Saturday morning, they came back home and slept till afternoon and then went for Wole Adeosun, NAL Merchant Bank MD’s luncheon for media executives. We were all there.
Meanwhile, Akilu who was returning Dele’s Friday call, called his house and the wife, Funmi, who picked told him that the husband was not around. She advised him to try the office. Akilu did without any luck and he reported back to Funmi, telling her to let the husband know he called. That was on Saturday.
When we finished from Wole Adeosun’s house, Segun Osoba, MD of Daily Times said that Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, who had just replaced Ebitu Ukiwe wanted to see the media executives. So, we went to Aikhomu’s house which was not far from where we were and had some drinks. Dele narrated the story of his visit to the SSS and the allegations they made against him and Aikhomu told him the same thing that Tony Momoh said.
I got home before them and at about 9.30pm when they were finally coming home… you know where Telegraph newspaper is now? That was where they were living. That Telegraph was actually Dele’s house – 25 Talabi Street and Ray was living on 25B Talabi, which was the other side of that Telegraph building. Dan and I were living on the other side of Adeniji Jones.
So, on their way back, they passed through my house at about 9.30pm to collect some video cassettes that somebody brought from U.S. Dele took six cassettes. The one I remember very well because I mentioned it to him in the office was 1984 by George Orwell. That was the last time I saw him alive.
So, after all these, they had to sleep and woke up around 10am on Sunday. The wife had made breakfast and put it on the dining table for Dele and Kayode. At that point, Funmi left a note with the food telling Dele that Akilu called him twice on Saturday. And Dele told Kayode that Akilu must have received his message on Friday. This was what Kayode told us. So, Dele now called Akilu to tell him why he called him on Friday, narrating his experience at SSS and Akilu told him to calm down that he will handle it and get back to him.
Dele said he had already briefed his lawyer and Akilu told him it was not a matter for the lawyers, and urged him to leave it for him to handle. He told him to consider the matter closed.
There is no way you can twist ‘consider it closed, leave it for me’ to mean I want to kill you. But that is what came out in the public sphere – that on Sunday, Akilu called Dele to be sure that he was in the house so that he can bring the bomb. And these are the facts that we stated in the statement we put out after Dele’s death, everything that I have told you was written by us. In fact, the statement was actually written by Ray.
So, why was Kayode there if not to deliver the interview tape to Giwa?
Kayode was our London correspondent. From our Concord days, Kayode was the London correspondent of Concord and each time we went to London, we stayed in his house before checking into a hotel if we had enough money. If we didn’t have enough money and we were not staying long, we stayed in his house. And anytime he came to Lagos, he stayed with Dele. So, that was not the first time. He had been coming like that. In fact, on this particular trip, I told my family that Kayode had been taking care of us in London, since he was coming for a meeting, we should create time to have lunch or dinner with him.
So, why did he come?
We had a London office but we were selling more in the U.S. and we asked him to explore the possibility of our printing in the U.S. for wider circulation. We bought a ticket for him – London-New York-London-Lagos-London. It was cheaper to buy from Nigeria and that was what we did.
The reason why people believe that the government must have had a hand in Giwa’s murder was the novelty and sophistication of the plot. Many people believe that its clinical execution could only have been accomplished by security people.
That is not in my own business. What I have just told you, I didn’t discuss the sophistication of bomb, I didn’t discuss that because of its novelty, then it must have only come from the government. I didn’t say that in the book. What I set out to correct are the conspiracy theories and what they ascribed to us which were not true. We were not interviewing Gloria Okon. I was with Dele on the trip they were talking about. Kayode didn’t bring any tape or whatever from the alleged Gloria Okon interview. Because we were the ones who invited him, we knew why he was here and why he was staying in Dele’s house. These are the things I set out to correct.
We had no Gloria Okon in our life and she didn’t even feature in the interrogation at the SSS, which was based on four issues. First, they said Dele was planning to do another story on Ebitu Ukiwe – the other side of Ukiwe and I don’t know what was supposed to be the other side of Ukiwe. Newswatch ran a story on how it happened and we were not planning a follow-up. The magazine was not conceived for one person to write a story and publish without any other person seeing it. Second, Alozie Ogugbuaja had fallen out with the police at that time. He told the soldiers that all they knew was to stage coup and drink pepper soup and they suspended him. They said Dele promised that if they fire him, he will employ him. If we said so, what was the offence there? The third allegation was that he was planning with socialists to bring a new order. The fourth allegation was that in furtherance of his pursuit of a new order, he was importing arms. That was actually the one that rattled him. There was no Gloria Okon in these four allegations but the public injected Gloria Okon into it.
Why do you think that happened and who was behind the wrong narration?
I am not going to name anybody but to illustrate the desperation, when the police interrogated us – we were the first set of people to be interrogated over the killing of Dele, whether we had any disagreement with him, we went to Alagbon, the three of us. When Dan heard of Dele’s murder, he cut short his leave and came back. After interrogating us, they said we should bring Funmi and Dele’s son, Billy, to Alagbon and we said no. Instead, we said they should come to our office and take their statement. We didn’t want to expose them to the public because we didn’t know where what happened came from.
And someone volunteered to go to the police and collect statement form which Funmi filled. While Billy was filling his, he narrated what happened because the letter bomb was handed over to another security man, not Dele’s security man. Jibu who was Dele’s security man went to the market and asked his colleague at the next building to please look after his duty post. So, when the angels of death brought the parcel he collected it and gave to Billy.
Billy, who brought it to his father, made a statement and someone sitting down there said, “Billy, state that this parcel was from Babangida.” I was sitting there and Billy, the blood son of the man who was killed said, “No, Oga, this was not how it happened.” The man insisted, telling Billy, “Say it was from Babangida.”
It was at that point I interjected telling him to allow the boy to say exactly what he knows. And the man said I should get out of the room “after all, you are a northerner.” Now, see the colouration they had given the gruesome murder. What had the killing of Dele got to do with the ethnic imputation? As at that time they had not even made any allegation against anybody.
This led to the board of Newswatch Communications Limited to put a disclaimer to the angle that was being pursued by Gani Fawehinmi. I didn’t want to put in this book the name of the person who was mounting pressure on Billy to say the parcel was from Babangida by all means even when the boy was saying, no this was not how it happened. You cannot be holier than the Pope. This is the man who collected the parcel and gave it to his dad and he is the one saying what happened and someone who was not there said, no, say it like this. Haba! We are all responsible to God. And I am writing my memoir and someone expects me to skip those fallacies because it will generate controversy?
