The musketeers of Lagos-Ibadan press

“You and your friends were known as the Three Musketeers. Who gave you that name?” I asked the patriarch of the Nigerian media, Chief Olusegun Osoba.

“Chief Awolowo did. We were Papa’s advisers on all public and political issues.” He told me on Friday.

Every expression of note in English has a history. The original Three Musketeers rode into public imagination through a newspaper. Alexandre Dumas’s novel ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires’ appeared in instalments in Le Siècle newspaper in 1844. The three men, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, stood for a fellowship whose watchword was “All for one, and one for all.” More than a century later, Awolowo found his own three in the newspaper houses of Ibadan.

Osoba and the other two legs of the tripod, Messrs Felix Adenaike and Peter Ajayi, had made their mark in journalism and caught the sage’s eye.

“We met with him every other week,” Osoba continued. In Lagos or Ikenne, they discussed and firmed up policy and politics deep into the night. At 3 or 4 a.m., Papa’s door would open, and the musketeers would begin their journey back to Ibadan.

“Nothing bad will happen to you,” their host would pray for them.

Chief Osoba was Managing Director of The Sketch; Adenaike, Editor-in-Chief of the Nigerian Tribune; and Ajayi, Managing Editor of The Sketch. The mafia was Ibadan-based; Lagos had no mouth there.

Then came Buhari’s coup on December 31, 1983. Osoba became Managing Director of the Lagos-based Daily Times, leaving Ajayi to inherit his Sketch mantle in Ibadan.

The government, the military and the North noticed their widening reach. And with that, the “Lagos-Ibadan press axis” entered the vocabulary of Nigerian politics and public commentary. At its core were three newspapers: the Daily Times, the Nigerian Tribune and The Sketch. One in Lagos, two in Ibadan.

Through Osoba’s headship of the Daily Times, Lagos supplied one leg of that formidable tripod of the early 1980s. But the man at the helm had himself come from inland Yorubaland

In that respect, he was continuing an old tradition: the country behind Lagos feeding the city, and as it gathered the wealth and the glamour, the towns beyond the coast kept supplying people who gave it meaning.

Consider Herbert Macaulay, the Lagos nationalist whose family roots reached deep into Oyo country.

Macaulay’s relationship with the Daily Times was considerably less pleasant than Osoba’s. Fred Omu, in ‘Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880–1937’, records that the newspaper’s leading Nigerian figures were bitterly opposed to him. In 1927, Macaulay and Dr John Akinlade Caulcrick bought the rival Lagos Daily News, the first daily newspaper in British West Africa. With that newspaper, Macaulay fought the colonial government and his political opponents. The man whose voice ruled Lagos had an ancestral road leading back to the interior.

His authorised biography, published in July 1946, two months after his death, identifies him as the seventh child of Reverend Thomas Babington Macaulay, founder and first principal of the C.M.S. Grammar School, Lagos. The story gets more interesting from that point. On its first page, the book traces Macaulay’s father’s ancestry:

“The late Rev. T. B. Macaulay was the eldest of the three sons of Ojo Oriare of Ore Aganju in the district of Ikirun in the Yoruba Province of Oyo who was popularly known as Daddy Ojo at Kissy in Sierra Leone where he had been taken and liberated during the trans-Atlantic traffic in slaves, and was practising his profession as a native doctor which he had acquired in the Yoruba country before his capture; and his mother, the wife of Ojo Oriare was Kilangbe, a grand -daughter of the founder of Ile-Ogo in the Yoruba Province of Oyo in the Southern Province of Nigeria” (page 1).

This family history travelled a terrible circuit: from Oyo country into slavery, through liberation in Sierra Leone, and back to the coast at Lagos. Out of it came a pioneer of secondary education and, in the next generation, a father of Nigerian nationalism, and a major stakeholder in the country’s newspaper press. That contribution to Lagos was flesh and blood, learning and leadership.

That history, and similar ones, ancient and contemporary, were on my mind when, a day before our telephone conversation, Chief Osoba arrived to chair a major media event on Victoria Island, Lagos: the 80th birthday celebration and book launch honouring another hinterland great, Mr Lade Bonuola, The Guardian’s pioneer editor and later Managing Director.

Bonuola’s children, in conjunction with the thoughtful management of Premium Times, put the celebration together. The book, ‘Ladbone: A Life in Print’, according to its publishers, “draws on contributions from more than 80 editors, media managers, academics, political figures and industry experts.” Bonuola co-founded The Comet in 1999; seven years later the newspaper metamorphosed into The Nation. Premium Times appropriately described the man behind it all as “one of the most consequential editors in the history of the Nigerian press.”

Almost everyone who was anyone in the Nigerian media was at the event.

So overwhelming was the gathering that Mr. Azu Ishiekwene, Leadership newspaper’s Managing Director, who had come from Abuja, looked round the hall and whispered to me and Festus Adedayo a dark joke at our collective expense: Abuja should simply come and seal the hall, and all its problems would be over.

We laughed.

But beneath the laughter lay an acknowledgement of the power gathered in that room, and of the old Lagos-Ibadan press axis that had helped to shape it.

I greeted Chief Osoba the Yoruba way. He ‘lifted’ me up, looked round and spotted Tribune’s ace columnist, Festus Adedayo.

“I knew he would be here,” he smiled. “The two of you are always together.”

I laughed and reminded him of his own ubiquitous group: “The Three Musketeers.”

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He laughed too.

There is something about Ibadan and its rich rival, Lagos.

We say here in the interior that Lagos has mere money; royalty belongs to Oyo: Owó l’Èkó ní; ará Ọ̀yọ́ ló l’ọba. Even the Lagos-Ibadan press axis has its roots, and its core in Ibadan.

I am not done with the two cities and the axle that connects them to the Nigerian story.

The Guardian prides itself as the flagship, but it was born in Ibadan.

Speaking as event chairman, Osoba disclosed that for its first three months, The Guardian was printed in Ibadan, then “shipped” to Lagos.

Printed in Ibadan? Yes, at The Sketch Press, where Osoba was Managing Director.

On Friday, I called Chief Osoba to hear the history again. His account did not shift from what he had told us in Lagos on Thursday.

“The Guardian started as a weekly paper. The first edition was published on Sunday, February 27, 1983. The paper’s printing press had not arrived, so I printed The Guardian at The Sketch in Ibadan for about three months. The newspaper went daily in July, then started printing in Lagos,” he told me.

Ibadan is Oyo, and the Oyo-Yoruba warn that a visitor does not recount the town’s history to the host (Àlejò kì í pìtàn ìlú f’ónílé). Here was the host himself, recalling where he laid the newborn’s head.

Why, then, do The Guardian people mark their anniversary in July? Osoba wondered aloud in Lagos on Thursday and again on the telephone with me on Friday.

“They keep celebrating the Daily printed in Lagos. But their history started earlier with the weekly printed in Ibadan. It is wrong,” he said.

The British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote that “everything has a history, often a very strange one.” Our Three Musketeers and their Lagos-Ibadan press axis have theirs. Lagos may celebrate its coming of age; in the story of our press, its umbilical cord remains buried in Ibadan.

From the thousands of proverbs in Prof. Oyekan Owomoyela’s ‘Yoruba Proverbs’, I picked this for here: “Ìlasa ò sunwọ̀n; ta ló bí ilá?” The okra leaf is no good? Who, then, gave birth to the okra? Lagos may wear the crown of wealth; the road that brings that wealth passes through Ibadan.

And that road is never tired of carrying traffic back and forth. On Tuesday, 24 November (about one month from today), Ibadan will host another rainbow gathering of the press and politicians; the academia, business and government as I present ‘Sitting on Two Hundred Needles’ and five other books. The collections span Monday Lines from its inception in October 2011 to early 2025. One runs to 627 pages. Ibadan is a city that has nurtured newspapers, made journalists and preserved their words in books. Next month, we are adding more of our pages to its unfinished story.