A TIME FOR OUR ONE-SIDED STORIES
My main task here today is to deconstruct the relevance of two books written by a partisan journalist. Ike Abonyi’s declaration of himself as a partisan journalist should be curious. The work is a complex and dangerous combination of journalism and public relations, a subject I have been researching for a ground-breaking work: ‘Journalism Isn’t Public Relations’. Ike Abonyi has challenged the central idea of my ‘hypothesis’ as he has now dared to ask public policy and politics experts: What is wrong with being a partisan journalist? He is simplifying the question: Why can’t journalists be partisan too in a society that has entrenched a culture of impunity, where only men rule instead of the laws? That is: we need to pay attention to the message in the books we are about to launch today.
When you read the books, you are likely to renew your mind about some people who use some curious sophistry to impose their opinion that journalists are writing and promoting single or one-sided stories in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. At a recent convention of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) a senior intelligence chief who delivered a keynote spoke extensively on “The danger of a one-sided story”. Now a political journalist who crossed over to a partisan beat of political management who was writing from the beat for the mass media as a partisan journalist may be challenging the allegation of one-sided stories? Who is a partisan journalist? The answer may be blowing in the wind until the book is unveiled for public consumption.
The Bubbles of Nigeria Democracy: The Musing of a Nigerian Journalist
The 530-page book is a compilation of the reportorial and analytical work of an organic journalist who spent more than 30 years in the newsroom of four different newspapers (Triumph, Kano, Champion, ThisDay and New Telegraph) plus a nearly a decade in the corridors of power of political Parties (PDP and Labour Party). It is a rich memoir, a guide for political writers and analysts.
The book has 106 articles capturing different topics depicting the political activities of this republic from 1999 to 2023. These works are mostly drawn from a weekly political column signed as “Political Musing”, published every Thursday on the Back Page of the New Telegraph Newspaper, where the author was a pioneer, Deputy Managing Director. He has maintained this column since the inception of the newspaper in February 2014. On the founding of the Global Upfront Newspaper in 2019, the column has also been published in the online (digital) newspaper every Thursday.
