Uneven Steps

The history of the Nigerian press has been chequered. From its humble beginnings in 1859 as a pastoral adventure to inculcate the habit of reading and seeking information through reading, it has morphed into a pervasive force in the growth and development of the peoples of Nigeria. It was a strong player in Nigeria's resistance to colonial rule, in the efforts at self-rule and in managing the challenges of, first, independence, and second, the military's incursion into governance.

From the ashes of the failures of the first three civilian republics, it remains a player in the politics of the fourth. In all of these eras its performance remains uneven; it has been as much a part of the problem as it has been a part of the search for solution. Much of the narrative about the press has been historical and sociological in conception and execution. This work borrows from that tradition.

This book is about a professional association, the Nigerian Guild of Editors. It discusses the role, place, achievements and failings of the Guild in the quest for press freedom, professional respect, press responsibility and accountability. It is as much an examination of an institutional platform as it is an analysis of the role of individual players in nurturing or restricting the objectives of the Guild.

The book took longer than planned as it suffered great and unanticipated constraints. Being a pioneer work, there was really no pathfinder to trail, no ready literature to examine. Having grown in fits and starts, there was no internal light from the Guild to shed on the path it has trodden over the years. No records at all from its secretariat on its activities in the first 20 years. The Nigerian Press Council (NPC), which had kept a trove of records on professional media associations in its Lagos library and would have been helpful, lost its entire holdings to fire in 2008. Most of the founding fathers of the Guild, who could shed some light on the early days, are dead, except for Lateef Jakande, its first president, who was happy to share what he had. Sources of information, especially in the early days, have come from snippets of writings in newspapers. Babatunde Jose's Walking a tightrope and Peter Ajayi's Not my Will provide a torchlight on some of the Guild's activities in the 1970s. Help, however, came from various writings on developments in the media and the Guild since the resuscitation of the Guild in 1988. Seminar papers, personal notes and interviews with latter-day actors have also been helpful.

Through this work, I give a welcome summary of the story of the Guild of Editors, a key component of the organised media groups in Nigeria. The Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) is one of the tripods upon which the organised media rests. Alongside the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the three form what is known as the Nigerian Press Organisation. They are the press intelligentsia spanning the critical tiers of journalists, editors, and proprietors, or if you like, the general workforce, managers and owners.

This book is the outcome of a grant in 2013 by the Guild under the administration of Gbenga Adefaye (2008-2013) to write the history of the Guild at a time the organisation was not even sure of its date of establishment. The concern was valid enough: When did the Guild start? What were the objectives for establishing it? Who were its directing minds? Where did the Guild start? How did the Guild emerge? Why did it start when it did? What challenges did the Guild face in terms of the socio-political terrain under which it operated? What was the legal landscape like? How did the Guild deal with attempts to restrict/restrain press freedom?