Trials and Triumphs

Book excerpt: Trials and Triumphs: The Story of TheNews is an engaging narrative of an era of journalistic daring and partisanship on the side of democracy, justice and equity. It chronicles and examines how the founding team of TheNews magazine, their editors and reporters and their support staff endured torture and imprisonment, harassment and abduction, seizures and closures, proscription and arson, threats of death and even death, because of their fundamental commitment to share public intelligence in a society and polity which had been hijacked by the most perverse military regimes that Nigeria ever experienced. From General Ibrahim Babangida's obstinate subversion of the national ethos to General Sani Abacha's evil reign, TheNews and its sister publications stood firmly at the barricades, hand-in-hand with other pro-democratic forces, proclaiming to the martial adventurers that the wisdom and liberty of a collective people would never be surrendered to the ambitions of puny fascists. This is not only a story of "guerrilla journalism" in Nigeria which helped to defeat martial fascsim, it is also the story of a specific conjecture in a people's history where questions of democracy and justice, equity and fair play, federalism and egalitarianism, regional divides and ethno-political domination were confronted headlong by a press that formed the pivot of the emergent civil society.