The great editor we lost

I knew Hajiya Bilkisu at least a decade before I got to see her. In the early 1980s she was the editor of Sunday Triumph, the broadsheet newspaper established in Kano by Governor Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi’s government. You begin to see the level of her achievement when you realise that today, three and a half decades later, there are still very few female newspaper editors in Northern Nigeria.
Hajiya Bilkisu scored a much bigger goal in 1987 when she was named editor of the New Nigerian. I first saw her, albeit briefly, in January 1989 when I was invited for interview as a member of New Nigerian’s editorial board. The interview had been postponed but I did not know it because of the poor communication in those days. When I arrived from Sokoto, an office messenger received me and said, “Come and speak to Hajiya.” He took me to see a tall, gangling, cheerful and very confident woman who sat on a chair in the managing director’s reception area. She then sent me to see the MD, Malam Mohammed Haruna. The interview was rescheduled for two weeks. I then left Kaduna for Maiduguri and it was there that I heard on the car radio that Haruna had been sacked.
A year later, in 1990, Haruna together with Hajiya Bilkisu, Kabiru Yusuf and Adamu Adamu started Citizen magazine. I joined as a Principal Correspondent and was later promoted to Assistant Editor. Citizen occupied the second floor of a white two-storey building at Unguwar Kanawa, Kaduna. Hajiya Bilkisu was the deputy editor-in-chief and was later redesignated as the magazine’s editor. I got off to a good start with Hajiya; it turned out that she was a friend of my elder sister Hajiya Zainab and had even attended my sister’s wedding at our family house in Sokoto in 1977. She also had relatives in Sokoto, the family of former Second Republic minister Alhaji Ibrahim Gusau.
Citizen was a weekly newsmagazine and the editorial meeting was held every Monday morning. As editor-in-chief Haruna chaired it and when he was away, Hajiya chaired it. It was at this meeting that stories and editorials were suggested and shared. Hajiya was very lively at those meetings, which were quite informal and involved a lot of jokes, jests and story telling. Since the editorial topics were discussed and positions were taken, it was apparent what everyone’s ideological bent was. Hajiya held essentially conservative views but she was totally free from sectionalism and religious bigotry.
She was deeply interested in hajj issues. In those days the annual Muslim pilgrimage was very problematic with endless delays in the airlift. After every hajj trip she wrote a detailed report about her experiences, which officials found to be invaluable. Hajiya also held strong views about other issues such as abortion, street begging and corruption.
As editor, Hajiya had the primary duty of seeing that Citizen went to press. What we called “the parcel from Lagos” will arrive Kaduna in the late afternoon flight on Thursday with story contributions and advert material from Citizen’s large Lagos bureau. All materials must be in by Thursday afternoon, after which the production editor and computer operators worked throughout the night to typeset the stories, proof read them, lay the pages and print out copies. Hajiya and Haruna will come in on Friday morning and take a last look at the pages, after which the production manager will take the copy to the printers on Friday afternoon.
Many prominent people also came to Citizen for interviews including military governors, ministers, politicians and elder statesmen. It was at those occasions that I first noticed that Hajiya Bilkisu did not shake hands with men. If a man extended his hand to her, she would bow her head and pretend not to see it. Despite that stance, she was generally liberal in her disposition and she related very well with people of all backgrounds.
Hajiya not only participated in the interviews but she also accepted assignments to write some domestic stories. In addition she wrote a column every other week which covered all subjects but particularly women’s issues. She was also in charge of the section called Back of the Book which included arts, poetry and other light sections. Usually she will submit all the materials for this section on Tuesday. She might then disappear for a day or two, attending seminars and delivering papers at various fora before reappearing again on Wednesday or Thursday to take charge of production.
In addition to her job as editor, Hajiya was very active in NGO circles, especially FOMWAN and one South African-inspired project called Abantu. As such she had some persons that she respected greatly, such as Alhaja Lateefat Okunnu, the National Ameerah of FOMWAN. Hajiya was also a member of the board of Federal Road Safety Commission and she became close to FRSC’s first chairman, Professor Wole Soyinka. The controversial Nobel laureate was not popular with some of Citizen’s editors but anytime his views were criticized at a meeting, Hajiya will rush to his defence and say, “Leave my elder brother alone!” The affection was mutual; one day I opened the door to Hajiya’s office, only to see Wole Soyinka with his flaming white hair sitting in the settee. It was the first time I ever saw him, and he sat there for many hours.
Hajiya was profoundly disappointed by the June 12 debacle. At the height of the annulment crisis I entered her office to brief her on the lead story I was writing. She was hardly listening as I spoke, her chin resting on her palm, the posture of despondency called tagumi in Hausa. When I finished she merely exclaimed, “Wai ni Allah, wannan kaya!”
Hajiya Bilkisu also liked a good joke. One day as I came up the stairs at Citizen I saw seven or eight beautiful teenage girls entering Hajiya’s office. There were hushed whispers all around the office that day. I was a bachelor then so when they left, I walked up to her office, opened the door and said, “Hajiya, it looks like you had visitors today.” She laughed so hard that she almost fell off her chair. That evening Citizen’s admin manager came to me and whispered that Hajiya asked if I was interested in any one of them.
After Citizen ceased publication in 1994 and I went on to other jobs, I visited my bosses every now and then at Citizen’s new office on Sultan Road, Kaduna. Hajiya maintained an office there and was by then fully engaged in civil society activities. I sometimes thought she was overdoing it, that she accepted too many invitations. As the most prominent female journalist from Northern Nigeria she got invited to numerous NGO and government occasions, including invitations to deliver papers. One day in 2001, I entered her office and saw several notebooks spread on her desk. She will read a book or a magazine, underline some passages, then pick up one of the notebooks and scribble in it. She told me that she had five seminar papers to deliver in the next week and was working on all of them simultaneously. At that point I said, “Please slow down, Hajiya. This is too much. Even Shakespeare wrote one book at a time.”
Around that time I also played referee between my two bosses. I arrived one day at Citizen’s office and Malam Mohamed Haruna beckoned me to his office. I found Hajiya sitting in a sofa; they were having an important discussion. Haruna then told me that General Aliyu Gusau was trying to reopen the Reporter/Sentinel newspaper of the Yar’adua family and he wanted Hajiya Bilkisu to manage it. Haruna opposed it because there was a plan to refloat Citizen and he said Hajiya must stay on board. Hajiya bowed her head and did not say anything, so I decided to play the referee. I asked Haruna how long it will take before Citizen restarted. “Six months?” He said, “More than that.” “One year?” He said, “About that.” So I said since it will take that long, Hajiya should go and manage Reporter but should put in place a solid staff structure to prepare for her exit after a year.
My suggestion apparently pleased both of them. Suddenly, Hajiya upped the ante. She turned to me and said if she must go to Reporter, I must come with her and be the editor. Now it was my turn to bow my head. I was already the editor of New Nigerian and it did not make sense to abandon that and go back to Reporter from which, incidentally, I was a still a staff member on a leave of absence. The problem was solved because the revival plan never got off the ground.
Hajiya Bilkisu never slowed down. I last saw her on August 27 when she delivered a paper at Daily Trust’s awareness and fund raising event for internally displaced persons. She left the occasion early in order to catch a flight to Ilorin for another occasion. May Allah reward Hajiya Bilkisu for her decades of dedicated, selfless and God-fearing service that had profound impact on the lives of so many.