Remembering MKO Abiola’s Transformer Semiotics

 By Banji Ojewale

One of the captivating political campaign lines of MKO Abiola has been immortalized in a seminal work by Professor Tunde Ope-Davies (Tunde Opeibi) of the University of Lagos. Titled Discourse, Politics and the 1993 Presidential Election Campaign in Nigeria, the book documents the drive of the gladiators to secure the mandate of the electorate.

*Abiola 

Ope-Davies’ uncanny nose for hidden details smokes out Abiola’s rush for virtually every trick in the advertising books to outwit his main challenger, Bashir Tofa, of the National Republican Convention, NRC, leading Abiola to create the famous punchline on the transformer as a metaphor for abiding leadership. MKO, as he was fondly called, was of the Social Democratic Party, SDP. He is quoted by Ope-Davies (then known as Tunde Opeibi) as saying during his search for votes that all Nigeria needed to overcome its age-old statehood concerns was ‘one transformer’, one singular and enduring personality in the saddle whose beam of integrity would permeate all of society for salutary ripples in his days and beyond.

Dimgba Igwe, The Enigmatic Born-Again Journalist

 By Onoise Osunbor

(First published in Sunday Concord, February 21, 1988)

“If there is one achievement I have successfully accomplished, it is to prove wrong the myth that you cannot be a successful journalist and be a born-again Christian.”  These are the words of Dimgba Igwe, the Sunday Concord Staff Writer among the prizewinners at the first UAC Merit Award for Journalists. 

*Dimgba Igwe 

People often perceive journalists as permissive, loving wine and women, but that is not the life of Dimgba who is deeply religious—a real born-again Christian.  Stylistically, he is an impressionistic writer who applies his pen like a brush in the hands of a painter, carrying the reader along as he tells his story.  One of his works is a masterpiece he wrote on Dakar, the capital of Senegal.  And he wrote it without talking to anyone.  He says: “The story I have done that I am likely to read over and over again is the one on Dakar.  

2023 Poll And Lessons From The Masters Of Journalism

 By Banji Ojewale

I have in front of me the 396-page book, SEGUN OSOBA: The Newspaper Years. It is the 2011 work by the pair of Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe on former newspaperman Osoba who went on to become the elected governor of Ogun State in Nigeria’s southwest. Osoba himself is silent in the biography.

But he is present everywhere, garlanded chapter after chapter by those who knew him as a friend, professional colleague, community figure, politician etc. Both those who mentored him and the young ones he trained are allowed to straddle the pages to say a word. That the eponymous personality of the work isn’t brought in to say something about himself doesn’t enfeeble the book. The writers’ approach, somehow, glamorizes their delivery.

We can also count on the relative objectivity of the witnesses summoned by the duo of Igwe and Awoyinfa to tell Osoba’s story on account of their proven candour.

Segun Osoba: No longer Waiting For Godot

By Banji Ojewale

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book”

—Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English critic and lexicographer.

Waiting for Aremo Segun Osoba’s book, BATTLELINES: My Adventures In Journalism And Politics, has been akin to the experience of the two characters expecting the arrival of someone called Godot who never arrives. In his 1952 tragicomedy, Waiting For Godot, Irish writer, Samuel Beckett presents the helplessness and an accompanying barrenness of an endless wait for a Godot who doesn’t show up. Joined by three other funny actors, these tarrying figures get further mired in a futile wait for the person they do not know. The play closes, tragically and comically, without Godot being revealed in the two-act work.

*Segun Osoba 

Mercifully, lingering for the autobiography of Osoba, former editor of Daily Times of Nigeria, who went on to become the paper’s Group managing-director and the governor of Ogun State, hasn’t followed the trajectory of Godot. Yes, there was a long expectation. But, as it turned out the other day in Lagos, it wasn’t a wait for Godot. Osoba’s own Godot arrived at the presentation of his book ahead of his birthday.