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Tunji Oseni: A tribute
By Ayo Olukotun
PRAISE of both the living and the dead comes cheap in a society like ours. As there are professional mourners, so there are professional eulogists who invest the dead with superlative attributes. Given that Tunji Oseni, writer and well-known public service journalist who passed on recently shunned ostentation, it would be a disservice to paint him in oratorical colours. As a writer, Oseni disliked stock phrases and cant; and he taught those of us who had the privilege of polishing up our writing under him to avoid them. I did not get to know him closely until he became the managing director of the Daily Times and this writer was Deputy Chairman of the paper's editorial board.
Having edited the Sunday Times in its heydays, Oseni saw his return to Daily Times in the 1990s as an opportunity to stem the paper's free fall into the limbo, an assignment to which he gave his heart and soul, and is generally perceived to have succeeded in. Although he was, broadly speaking, an establishment man, Oseni was nobody's ManFriday. Like Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi before him, he believed that the establishment could be educated to see that its long-term interests could not be served by a paper that merely indulged the vanity of office-holders and threw professional norms to the rubbish basket.
Unfortunately, he failed to bring the military custodians of the state and their cohorts to see the point, and so lost his job, as managing director, after a dramatic episode, in which he was fired four queries on the same day by a minister in General Abacha's cabinet. Let me digress to make a comparison. In Ghana, the state-owned newspapers, the Daily Graphic and The Times sell far more copies up till this day than all the private newspapers in the country. They maintain this position because they learnt slowly to distance themselves from whoever was in power; and rather like the British Broadcasting Corporation to maintain a public service tradition which sees the nation as more important than the politicians of any particular period.
The sidelining of state media like the Daily Times in Nigeria of the 1990s is traceable to a rascally bent in the ruling elite which refused to countenance people like Tunji Oseni who advocated a public service role for the Daily Times. The consequences of that mindset are of course there for all to see, but it is interesting to recall the battles Oseni fought to demonstrate his position as a conscientious objector.
On one occasion, a purported editorial comment relating to former United States president Jimmy Carter's visit to Nigeria had been faxed to the Daily Times from the presidency. It was of course meant to be published verbatim as an editorial emanating from the newspaper. Oseni rebuffed the so-called editorial opinion but said to me that the editorial board was free to generate its own comment on Carter's visit, if it so wished. Needless to say that this professional defiance only added to his 'sins' as far as the government of the day was concerned.
For him, it was a cardinal offence for anyone to seek to politically regulate the editorial posture of a newspaper and he made this very clear. On one occasion when he honestly felt that a particular editorial I had approved for the next day was likely to strain the limits of the paper's relationship with its proprietors, he came over to my flat at the Daily Times Estate to discuss the subject and to convince me that it was better to step down the editorial.
Although not an academic in the formal sense, he straddled the world of the academic and the journalist. He took a personal interest, while at the Daily Times, in the columns of the newspaper which he felt where a high point of the editorial process. His contributions in building the journalism profession at the level of Merit Awards and in bolstering the professional associations have been mentioned in other tributes and need not detain us here. Worthy of mention here, however, is Tunji Oseni's personal rectitude. Like any human being, he had his frailties, but it is true to say that he brought to public service a moral dignity and an austere profile that stand in loud rebuke of the take-the-money-and-run attitude of most Nigerian public office holders.
The story was told to me by a senior manager at the Daily Times with whom Tunji Oseni went to Kaduna on an official trip of how they had taken some money for their trip from the Daily Times only to find that the organisers of the national conference they attended had paid virtually all their expenses. And so they came back to Lagos, spending very little of the money taken for the trip. Oseni insisted that the balance of the allowance taken from Daily Times coffers be returned to the company's kitty on the same day they arrived. This of course is normal accounting practice, except that it does not happen very often in our public institutions.
As Nigeria gropes and groans for fresh direction, it can draw inspiration from the rapidly diminishing tribe of intellectuals like Tunji Oseni who refused to join the hustle to accumulate immoral fortunes, even when they had the opportunity, to so do; but rather strove to replenish a public service legacy that will outlive them.
- Olukotun teaches political science at the University of Lagos.
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