In those days, Media Trust was a very bare editorial operation. The main thing was the flagship publication – Weekly Trust. Its production was a week long process. It started with an Editorial meeting early evening on Friday. Then reporters used the weekend to tie up assignments, sometimes well into Tuesday. Thursday was production night, taking up to 1 – 2 am Friday.
So, a car took all the staff on the shift home except the one or two who could go in their own car even at that time of the morning. The Kaduna into which Media Trust was born in 1998 wasn’t as hopeless, security wise
One of the staff who was taken home is Hajiya Zainab Okino. There was nothing extra-ordinary about that except that, on hand to receive Hajiya almost each time the vehicle went to drop her, was his very pretty daughter who had no name other than ‘Baby’. That was how everyone else knew her. Why are you not sleeping at this time was the question everyone threw at her as soon as the car announced the mother’s arrival and she surfaced with whoever came to open the gate. As the years rolled on, ‘Baby’ became the name by which she was known to that and even other circles.
Mother and daughter much, much later after Media Trust. Date of picture unknown but certainly before moving to school in the UK
‘Justice Baby’
Of course, members of this circle have not been static. Hajiya herself has moved around, from serving as Kogi State Commissioner for Information a few years back to being an Editor-in-Chief and now a water industrialist. It has been a never-ending cycle of meeting and parting between her and many of those in those late night car ride. On learning that ‘Baby’ was reading Law at the University of Abuja before moving to the United Kingdom to complete her first degree at one of those meetings, one of the mother’s colleagues amended ‘Baby’s name to ‘Justice Baby’. It was a way of saying, here is a future judge. That’s where it has remained till recently.
Now, the name has to change again. ‘Baby’ is not only now a full-fledged lawyer, she is also married. None of the existing titles is adequate anymore. She cannot but be called ‘Madam Baby’ pending when she delivers her own baby and the name would have to be amended again.
It’s all very interesting observing a mere child move steadily from there through adolescence to adulthood. In ‘Baby’s case, this included observing her as a Nigerian undergraduate in Abuja to a Nigerian student settling down in a UK university and to becoming a lawyer, then a Madam. Intervention congratulates Nabila Oiza Okino, now Mrs Nabila Oiza Ojelade on her wedding!
