How time flies!
It seems only a year or two ago – three at most — that a good many of Alade "Allah De" Odunewu's contemporaries in his years at Kakawa and a host of his admirers gathered to honour him at ceremonies marking his 80th birthday.
As befitted the occasion, reminiscences of the Man of the Day filled the air – his essential decency, his quiet dignity, his sardonic wit, his mastery of the art of satire, his unwavering professionalism, and the great mentoring skills he brought to bear on the grooming of a generation of Nigerian newspapermen and women.
I found myself then thinking about Odunewu and two of his younger contemporaries at Kakawa — Peter Enahoro, who entered Nigerian journalism as "George Sharp" and is much better known as "Peter Pan," and Sam Amuka who began his journalistic career as "Offbeat Sam," and morphed later into "Sad Sam." Though their Kakawa overlapped, each exercised editorial suzerainty at different times over the mighty journalism empire that the late Babatunde Jose built.
Of the three, Odunewu was the most self-effacing.
The boyishly handsome face of Enahoro, Odunewu's star predecessor at the Daily Times adorned his column "Life with Peter Pan." His bohemian lifestyle perfused it. Amuka signed his column with a sketch of his jaunty, hirsute self wearing a floppy hat and blowing a trumpet from the wrong end, and he lived up to that iconoclastic billing.
Odunewu permitted only an outline sketch of his face to appear on the column, simply called Allah De. It showed him in a thoughtful, Byronic pose, wearing what looked like a French suit, and a skullcap.
This depiction, it now seems in retrospect, was his way of signaling that though the "Allah De" column would inevitably be a projection of Alade Odunewu the columnist, it was not going to be extension of his person.
That, after all, was the tradition at Fleet Street, then the mecca of journalism, a tradition in which he had been schooled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in London, where he won the highest accolade bestowed on students from the Commonwealth.
From the first column he wrote for the Daily Times after crossing over from the Allied Newspapers group where he had risen through the ranks to the position of editor-in-chief, you knew you were in the hands of a different person – different in temperament, in style, and in his concerns.
One of the defining attributes of professionalism, sociologists tell us, is the capacity to separate fact from feeling. On this score, Odunewu must be rated the consummate professional.
He dissected the issues of the day clinically, based on what he judged to be their merits. You suspected that he had to have some affiliations, if only by virtue of his being human. But you could never guess just what those affiliations consisted in. He kept them discreetly, and I should add, decently, to himself.
The closest he came to volunteering something about himself was during one of the religious upheavals that have now become endemic in Nigeria, when he revealed that his wife was a Catholic. His Hadj title gave away his identity as a devout Muslim, but you could not guess it from his writing.
It is not for nothing that Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of the finest newspapermen to emerge from these parts, canonised Odunewu as the dean of Nigerian satirical writing. Satire was the stuff of his work. Master of the well-placed innuendo, and of what the British call "damnation by feint praise," Odunewu deftly laid bare the follies and foibles of his era without wounding the vanities of the men and women of the moment.
Enahoro took great pride in being "controversial" and "hard-hitting." Odunewu was self-effacing even when delivering those gentle jabs, those pin-pricks that in the end proved just as effective, even if not as dramatic, as a sensational knockout.
Those were my reminiscences when Alade Odunewu turned 80, in 2007.
He died six days ago, aged 85.
Not much can be added to the tributes that poured forth on that epochal milestone and have been cascading since he drew his last breath.
Odunewu knew no retirement or semi-retirement for that matter. Long after he quit active newspapering, he was an influential presence wherever journalism was being discussed, contributing insights and suggesting strategy and tactics, and generally helping to raise its professional and ethical tone.
He steered the Nigerian Press Council for about a decade, monitoring performance, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and providing magisterial guidance for future conduct. The Council had won only grudging acceptance from the media at its inception and, with a person of lesser specific gravity than Odunewu as chair, it would have been marked for failure.
For the better part a decade, he presided over the Nigeria Media Merit Awards recognising excellence in various aspects of print and broadcast journalism.
It is a mark of his commitment to the pursuit of journalistic excellence that he personally endowed one of the most prestigious prizes in the business, the Alade Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary, administered by the premier industry journal, Lanre Idowu's Media Review.
Now was it an accident that when new titles entering the Nigerian newspaper market used his name and prestige as strong selling points. Thus it was with The Guardian at its launch in 1984, and much later, in 1999, with The Comet, now defunct, where managing director Lade "Ladbone" Bonuola proudly introduced him as "our leader."
Without question, he will be remembered as one of the greatest pillars of Nigerian journalism — pillar by force of personal example, by tireless exertion. In that respect, he was a model.
He was also a monument – monument to an enduring commitment to the best practices in journalism, to "All The News That's Fit to Print," as the evocative motto of The New York Times has it.
His public service also bore the stamp of distinction. As the Commissioner for Information and Tourism in Lagos State from 1973 through 1975, he helped nurture and consolidate the state's communications infrastructure. His even temperament and innate sense of fairness and justice suited him especially for the post of Lagos State Public Complaints Commissioner, a remit he discharged with his accustomed distinction.
As a member of the Federal Electoral Commission that midwifed Nigeria's transition from military rule to republican democracy in 1979, he was a front-row witness in the manipulations, the opportunistic revisions and the desperate fudging that handed Shehu Shagari and the NPN victory at the first ballot during the presidential race. But you could never get him to discuss them even off the record.
A man of the utmost discretion, he seemed to have resolved to take those secrets with him to the grave. That may explain, at least in part, why he never wrote his memoirs when he was so abundantly endowed for the task.
In more than four decades at the front ranks of journalism and public service in a country where the next major scandal is just one news bulletin away, Alade Odunewu served and thrived without being tainted even by a whiff of impropriety.
There is no greater tribute.
Portions of this article first appeared in my December 11, 2007, column for this newspaper, titled "The Kakawa Triumvirate".
