By Olatunji Dare, The Nation.
In the past six months, the fraternity of Nigerian journalists has lost four of its ablest, all of them of my generation.
Not to the lucrative field of Public Relations or corporate communications, or to the political bureaucracy, with its delusions of power and influence, but to the cold, undiscriminating handsof death.
I knew Ayo (Arena) Ositelu, one of the four, only through his writings on sport. Now, sportswriting, like sports casting, is probably the most cliché-ridden journalistic form. String a few stock phrases together; garnish it with some atmospherics; deliver the product with breathless excitement, and you were well on the way to a career in sports journalism.
The resulting narrative was predictable. But it was rarely remarkable or memorable.
Ositelu was different.
Tennis was his passion. And whenever he reported a tennis match, he made you see the flow and ebb, the crosscutting currents of play. He made you know not just the player but the person behind the racquet. He made you feel the atmosphere. He transported you to the scene of action.
And he did so in graceful, riveting and uncluttered prose, and in a context that gave the event full meaning. You knew you were in the hands of an expert guide and a craftsman who cared deeply about words, chose them with precision, and deployed them with telling effect.
Someone once rebuked Ositelu for “wasting “such elegant writing on tennis, of all things.
The fellow must have been weaned on the tradition of sports writing that I described earlier – the one rooted in stringing a few stock phrases together, throwing in some atmospherics, and delivering the package with breathless excitement.
But there is a richer and nobler tradition — one that elevates sports writing to the status of serious literature, even great literature. Here I am thinking of the writings of AJ Liebling and Grantland Rice in the first half of the last century, and their American compatriot Red Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the third Mohammed Ali – Joe Frazier fight, “The Thrilla in Manilla”.
I am thinking of Frank Deford, the contemporary National Public Radio personality who has parlayed sports writing into an art form. I am thinking especially of Ernest Hemingway’s gripping writings on bull fighting
On the other side of the Atlantic, I am thinking of Peter Wilson of The Mirror, called by avid sports fans “the world’s greatest sports writer, on account of his great mastery of that form, and High McIlvanney, the Scotsman who has written for a string of British publications with enchanting facility on soccer, boxing, and horse racing.
On our own shores, intimations of that tradition of sports writing as literature perfused the work of Bonar Ekanem and Peter “PECOS” Osugo, and is stamped on the commentary of the unfailingly delightful Bisi Lawrence.
Ayo Ositelu kept that tradition alive until he breathed his last.
I knew Victor Ogundipe the way I knew Ositelu: through his reporting of the economy, particularly banking and corporate finance. Ogundipe pioneered that genre in Nigeria, along with two or three others. Before him, that kind of reporting was perfunctory at best.
He wrote about the subject incisively and engagingly and transformed it to the substance of headlines and the frontpages. With his boyish good looks and an elegant wardrobe, he brought glamour and not a little excitement to the trade, at a time the Nigerian economy was caught in the throes of a Structural Adjustment Programme.
Ogundipe’s kind of expertise was just what the burgeoning banking industry needed, and for a time, he was its articulate and personable public face.
But he was soon caught up in the intrigues that governed banking and left on terms not entirely his own. His plans to return to financial journalism did not materialise, and he left Nigeria for the United States, where he lived until he died late last year.
Although he left active journalism more than two decades ago, he was at his death remembered as a pioneer and an innovator. There is no greater tribute.
Ashikiwe Adione-Egom I knew quite well. I went to work for The Guardian, on leave from the University of Lagos, shortly after he burst on the scene with a 10-part serial for that publication that he signed with the self-deprecating byline, “The Motor-Park Economist“.
I would learn later that he had had his secondary education at King’s College, Lagos, where he and Guardian managing director Stanley Macebuh were classmates,had entered Cambridge to study archaeology and branched into economics and social anthropology, and that had once served as a financial adviser to the Central Bank of Tanzania.
He had joined The African Guardian at its inception and served as its editor for several months while maintaining a regular column on the economy for The Guardian.
There was always something of the tramp about Peter Alexander Egom, as he later chose to be known. The settled life – home, wife, family, personal possessions — was not for him. He preferred to live in hotels or hostels, with as little freight as possible, and with the freedom to move on at short notice to wherever the spirit led him.
On leaving The Guardian, he went to found and edit the weekly Financial Post. When the publication collapsed, he became resident preacher at a church in Surulere, Lagos, where congregants fondly called him Pastor Luke. Later still, he went to serve as scholar-in residence at the Ibru Ecumenical Centre in Agbarha-Otor, in Delta State.
For years thereafter, he lived in Abuja in a Catholic facility, courtesy of Archbishop (as he then was) Dr John Onaiyekan. It was then that he wrote his 2002 book, “Globalisation at the Crossroads.”
The last time I heard of him, he was reportedly affiliated with the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, in some unspecified capacity.
He cared a great deal about ideas and expounded them with great versatility. But he was no intellectual snob. He was one of the least pretentious scholars I ever met. The Oxbridge thing never got into his head.
Whatever his circumstances, Egom never lost his engaging, sometimes ribald, sense of humour, and his capacity for friendship.
And then, Pini Jason, real name Jason Onyegbado. One day I was reading his measured remonstrance of an official of a public agency who claimed he had been victimised for publishing an article criticising its chief executive, Dr Ngozi Okonjo, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy no less.
It was vintage Jason. Measured. Combative, without being pugnacious.
Disagreeing, without being disagreeable. Illuminating, without being pedantic.
During his brief stint in Rutam House, we used to meet at the editorial conferences of The African Guardian of which he was a correspondent and I was contributing editor. I found him enormously well informed.
His Op-Ed pieces for The Guardian, and his reports for the London-based New African, and for the short-lived ThisWeek magazine were models of clear thinking and lucid writing. The same quality perfused his writing for Vanguard Newspapers, his last stop.
Jason was as much at home in Lagos and Ibadan as he was in the Igbo country. He wore his Igbo heritage on his lapel but did not make you feel that you should be apologetic that you belong to a different ethnicity. He campaigned for the validation of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, arguing that if the winner MKO Abiola could not take power, it would be hard for an Igbo to become president.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jason is that he was largely self-taught. If his formal education extended beyond CMS Grammar School, Lagos, he kept it a close secret.
In life and in journalism, he exemplified the truth that the best part of a person’s education is that part the person gives himself or herself.
Ayo Ositelu, Victor Ogundipe, Peter Alexander Egom, and Pini Jason: Nigerian journalism is the poorer for their passing.
Published on May 21, 2013 in The Nation Newspapers. www.thenationonlineng.net