The Daily Times we wish for, but can’t have, by Azu Ishiekwene

The piece by columnist and former Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, Martins Oloja, entitled “Why Should We Celebrate Daily Times @ 100, FRCN @ 75? ”, published on September 5, was an angry one. And Oloja had many good reasons to be angry. Daily Times, Nigeria’s newspaper of record, was 100 years old on June 1, and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), the legacy successor to the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), was 75 in April. The anniversaries of these institutional brands evoked mixed feelings, especially regret, because they have not grown into what their founders intended. What it used to be… Oloja narrated the decline of Daily Times, from the newspaper that produced some of Nigeria’s most outstanding journalists and was a formidable, professional, commercial, and asset powerhouse in its heyday, to a scrap of memory, struggling for its future.

Among the many golden assets of the newspaper was, for example, a 60 per cent equity interest in Naira Properties Limited, the company that was the majority shareholder in the Nigerian Stock Exchange House. And that, of course, was apart from having many other valuable landed properties in Nigeria and London, and a content repository that was a treasure trove of Nigeria’s history. Its training arm, the Times Journalism Institute, was also one of its eight subsidiaries. Yet, today, the brainchild of Richard Barrow, Adeyemo Alakija, and V. R. Osborne could use help from the Salvation Army. It’s more of a cautionary tale than the monument it once was. Whose radio now? The odyssey of the FRCN has not been significantly different, and Oloja’s agony and frustration over what might have been poured into his article in a bitter, relentless wave of nostalgia. The problem, however, is that while nostalgia…