The month of August is typically filled with celebrations in my household—a wedding anniversary and two birthdays—but this year, there’s an additional reason for a drink. It is the 40th anniversary of my debut as an opinion writer. It was in August 1984 that my first opinion piece appeared on the op-ed page of The Guardian newspaper—beginning what has turned out to be a lifelong passion.
Titled “The Way We Are’’, the piece was a piercing review of the insincerity within the Buhari military government. The Nigerian Prisons Service had taken out several pages in newspapers to advertise for tender for the supply of firewood to prisons across the country, essentially undermining a national campaign against deforestation, launched earlier in the year by the same government, to check desertification in the north and erosion in the south. In my young mind (I was only 23, going to my final undergrad year), I could sense internal conflict within the government that had prided itself as a no-nonsense disciplinarian out to correct the ills of society.
How could a government launch and fund such a massive campaign, asking citizens to plant trees and protect the environment, and at the same time, a department in the same government is seeking contractors to supply firewood to be used for cooking food for millions of prisoners? Where would the firewood come from? The article, I understood, caused some dismay within the Buhari/Idiagbon government and triggered a search for alt.