Comment - We Are One Year Old
Many people thought and said at the time that his answer demonstrated that he had achieved nothing worth recording and had been too preoccupied with security to have settled down to the job at hand.
As it turned out in the event, even his survival was nothing to comment upon for a few months after his famous answer he was overthrown in a military coup.
We are sorely tempted to state also after one year of that 'we have survived', well, thus far at least. For in the past one year the problems of the weekly survival of 'Talking Drums' have threatened to overwhelm us and take more energy than we could devote to the task we set ourselves a year ago.
The survival battle has been an everyday reality and led to a two-week break in production in November last year and a one week break in April this year, but we have made it to one year and we would like to think that we have done more than simply survive.
Telling the West African Story, an area described by one of our contributors recently as "a region in turmoil" has not been easy and has been especially more difficult because we have undertaken to promote open and free debate.
We have not been coy about our distaste for military rule because we are convinced that the good that they seek to do is undone by the inevitable intolerance and brutality that come with rule by the gun.
What is more, we are convinced that if the only way of ensuring accountability by elected governments in West Africa was by military intervention, then our societies will never mature and develop.
We were also moved into taking the plunge into the Talking Drums' adventure because of the anger and frustration that we felt at the way West Africa was being reported.
We lamented at our birth, the fact that very few places on the African continent could boast of a free press, not controlled by government and we noted that most gov- ernments in the region were either military or controlled by one-party rule and they equated criticism or disagreement with subversion. If you disagreed with the government of the day you were immediately labelled un patriotic and hunted down.
We noted that in Nigeria (which at the time was still under elected constitutional government) "the practitioners have not been able to resist the temptation to align themselves to various factions, the result being that one needs to read about six different newspapers and listen with to about three different radio stations before one can pick out the truth in any matter".
Thus we wrote in our maiden issue, "to those countries that have free press but where everybody is screaming his own story so loudly that nobody can hear anybody else, we offer the opportunity to make their points without hysteria"
As it were, Nigeria has also in the course of the year gone the way of many other countries in the region and now has a military regime plus a phenomenon called Decree Number 4 which has tamed the country's hitherto virile press.
We have in the past year managed to ruffle a few feathers and succeeded in bringing up for public debate a number of issues that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.
We have undoubtedly published views that have displeased a number of people, but then we would be failing in our duty if we pleased everybody.
We are particularly grateful to all those who have taken the time and trouble to call us or write to us. We would like to thank all those who have written critical appraisals of our performance or have written to register their disagreement - we could not have managed without them.
There are those who, like the gentleman who wrote to us from Holland last week, have been simply abusive of our persons without stating what their disagreements are. As we have demonstrated amply, we are not afraid of publishing views that are contrary to ours, but we find it totally futile to encourage abusive exchanges that do nothing to enhance the important debates that face us.
Our thanks must necessarily also go to those who have written to us to simply get matters off their chest or who have made analyses of various subjects and we have to thank those who have called or written to encourage us even though we regret that so many of them have been reluctant to be publicly identified. Their encouragement is helpful of course, but would be even more helpful it openly done.
We cannot say that we have achieved even half the target we had set ourselves but we have no doubts that the patronising and smug attitude of covering the West African sub-region that we came to meet a year ago will never be the same again.
A year ago we wrote: "We are under no illusions whatsoever about the enormity of the task we have set ourselves, but we are counting on the support of all those who believe that human problems can be solved through dignified debate to join us in this adventure".
A year later, the message is the same even if the task has been even more daunting that we had imagined. But survived, we have, and hope to survive even longer with the help from you, our readers.
