By Adagbo Onoja
The problem of surviving into national limelight from a backwater region of Nigeria is that those who did so end up with a vast list of people to be grateful to, for life. Some of us have such a reality to contend with. The story is not due yet, partly because there is time for everything and fundamentally because the intellectual weight to underpin it is still in fermentation.
There is, however, one of the benefactors that one is compelled to take right away. That is James Audu, erstwhile Assistant Director, Programmes at Radio Kaduna. Young students of Mass Communication today might not have heard of him but he, indeed, was and in many ways. I do not consider even myself competent to write on him as far as his standing in broadcasting is concerned. When I bring him up, I do so only within the scope of his facilitation of my employment in that radio house in April 1982.
I am compelled to do that now because Martins Oloja has invited us to remember the late James Audu. We should be grateful to Oloja for that. He did so by reminding his readers through a piece on the 24th anniversary of James Audu’s demise.
The iconic edifice from where Radio Kaduna operated
James Audu is worth being remembered for so many things. In relation to identity politics in Northern Nigeria, he shares the same pathbreaking streak with the equally late Alhaji Aliyu Akwe Doma whose significance in the management of difference in Northern Nigeria will, hopefully, be highlighted someday. I stand to be corrected but I doubt if people like James Audu, Prof Ishaya Audu and Aliyu Akwe Doma embodied the retruamatisation and re-experiencing of the original trauma that produces real victimhood in non-Muslim Northerners. Aside from James Audu, I encountered the two others deeply, spending hours with Prof Ishaya Audu at his Hayan Dogo medical outfit in Zaria in 1997.
This piece is not about mourning James Audu. It is about celebrating him. There is nothing to mourn about him. He achieved great heights comparable to any other of the big names in journalism in that generation.
As I mentioned already, I barely knew him. In generational terms, he was far, far above mine. It means I can hardly talk about him as a person and as a broadcaster. What I can only do is recollect how he got me employed into Radio Kaduna as a semi-secondary school product. I use the word semi to capture the fact that all I had at the time of my employment in Radio Kaduna in 1982 was my Mock-WASC result, not the WASC result which was still being awaited. But James Audu was not looking at that. From hindsight, I think he was arrested by my English Language score in the Mock result. It was an ‘A’ score.
In my last year in the secondary school, I read a speech he delivered at the Speech and Prize Giving Day of a secondary school in Niger State. It was about how anybody from the audience could become like him. So, to his office I headed once my admission to the School of Basic Studies at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria could not fly due to delayed WASC results.
I am not certain about what he saw in an unsure secondary school product who entered his office to ask to be employed and who when asked why he thought he should be employed answered back by asserting his English Language felicity. It is doubtful if he found that answer persuasive. He was more likely to have been persuaded by the fact of an answer rapidly rolled out than by the quality of the answer.
Anyway, he asked his secretary to take me to another office with a minute on a photocopy of my Mock result. It turned out that he was asking Mohammed Suleiman, the then Director of News, to screen me for employment. The long and short of it is that, within a month or so, I had been recruited as a radio reporter with Radio Kaduna without bribing anybody or without any prior connection to anyone in that establishment and even without a certificate, properly speaking.
By the time my WASC result proper was released, it no longer mattered because I had already been promoted twice. I was promoted twice within a year. I don’t know what I was doing so well to merit that but I can recollect Alhaji Mohammed Suleiman coming down himself one day to ask who wrote a certain ‘News Analysis’.
In those heydays of Radio Kaduna, there were four star or defining outputs. The bulletin at both 6 am and 6 pm was one, followed by ‘Democracy in Action’, then ‘All The News’ and ‘News Analysis’ which was featurised opinion but analytical.
Martins Oloja is right. The 24th anniversary of James Audu is a moment to bring him back to the agenda. it is what we should be doing on the 25th, 30th, 50th and so on too.
May James Audu be luxuriating beautifully in the presence of God!
