Casimir Igbokwe joined The Punch as a Senior Correspondent and was later promoted Chief Correspondent, Editorial Board member, and Sunday Punch Editor. He left the company in 2013 as a Senior Member of the Editorial Board.
While at The Punch, he was nominated for a British Council/Cardiff University international colloquium on the role of journalists in facilitating pluralist democracy in multi-cultural societies in Cardiff and later won the Chevening Scholarship for a master’s degree in International Journalism at Cardiff University.
Currently, he is the Publisher/Editor-in-chief of the NewsProbeonline newspaper.
I joined The Punch Newspaper reluctantly in 2003. Reluctantly because my wife, Ifeoma, pushed me into joining. I had been toiling dutifully as a senior correspondent of TheNews/Tempo magazines in Port Harcourt when a friend of mine, Mr. Simon Utebor, drew my attention to the vacancy in The Punch. Mr. Utebor, who was a computer operator in the newspaper then, wanted me to help get a correspondent who would report for The Punch in Abia State and Owerri, the Imo State capital. It was when I was thinking aloud about whom to recommend that my wife intervened.
What about you? Are you saying you don’t need the job?” she queried. I shot her down immediately. “I can’t work in The Punch!” I retorted bluntly. My wife did not find it funny. For more than one week, she kept pestering me, asking when I would submit my application letter to The Punch. I would flare up each time she woke me up early in the morning asking if I had sent my application. I kept telling her that The Punch was a difficult place to work in and that the organization was in the habit of sacking people anyhow; that it could hire you today and sack you tomorrow.
“If they sack people anyhow, it’s not for you. The problem you have is that you don’t know your worth. You are not anybody and The Punch will not sack you,” my wife said. Just to please the woman so she could leave me alone, I applied. After going through written and oral interviews, I was employed to work as a senior correspondent in Aba, the commercial capital of Abia State. That was in August 2003. My first shock was the salary. It was almost five times higher than what I received in my previous organisation. The allowance I got for my one-month stay in Lagos for orientation was far higher than my salary in my previous place of work.
After my orientation, I resumed work in Aba. I also shuttled between Aba and Umuahia, the Abia State capital. That was the first time my job would separate me from my young family who then stayed in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital. What I was doing then was to visit them every weekend and go back to Aba on Mondays. Then barely six months later, I was transferred to Lagos from Aba. That was precisely in March 2004. Then, my wife was heavily pregnant with our second child. Anger gradually built up in me. I called my wife and shouted: “You see what you have caused?
When I told you I didn’t want to work at The Punch, you didn’t listen to me. Now, barely six months in Aba, they have transferred me to Lagos. You see what you have caused?” On hearing this, my wife started singing and praising God.
READ ALSO: ‘Crazy’ things I did to get stories done
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