A new life is in the offing for Plateau State-owned newspaper, The Nigeria Standard, if the authorities carry through their plan to return the print medium to better days.
First published by Plateau Publishing Corporation in 1972, the paper grew to be the toast of readers in the whole of what was the Benue-Plateau State and much of the rest of Nigeria until it began to suffer neglect and several things happened over time, costing it much of its readership and reducing its frequency of publication along the way.
The once daily newspaper somersaulted from being printed at intervals to being published once a week, and then to being a Sunday and Wednesday newspaper today. And as it clocks 40 this year, the authorities hope to have so reinvented it that it would begin to be a daily publication once again in the course of the year.
The Plateau State Governor, Jonah Jang, performed a prelude to this last month when he approved N279 million for the resuscitation of the newspaper. Briefing newsmen after the State Executive Council meeting presided over by the governor on April 11, Commissioner for Information and Communications, Abraham Yiljap, said the money would be used to purchase new printing press equipment, robust vehicles, a dependable power generating set, and such other things as a dynamic newspaper would need.
Yiljap elaborated, “The Council approved N228 million for the purchase of modern newspaper printing machines and N10 million for the purchase of newspaper consumables for one year.
The Council has also approved the procurement of three Hilux vehicles and one Toyota Corolla vehicle, all totalling N21 million and there will be more vehicles that will be bought. In addition, Council has approved the purchase of one 500KVA Mikano generator at the cost of N20 million. Council’s total approval is N279, 272,667 million and of course this is the first time it is happening since the company was established.”
So, at 40, The Nigeria Standard looks set to be reborn. This rebirth will not be about just machines and auto vehicles. Plateau Publishing Corporation’s General Manger, Mr Jonathan Ishaku, says buildings of the Corporation’s headquarters in Jos as well as its offices in Lagos and Abuja will be rehabilitated, and that new staff will be taken to contribute to pushing into the market the kind of newspaper that its owners, the Plateau State Government, envisage.
When the Plateau State Chapter of the League of Veteran Journalists made an appeal to the government last year to rescue the Plateau Publishing Corporation, it noted, among other things, that the corporation which has in its roll a significant number of journalists from around the country had remained a legacy.
And it has. The corporation’s headquarters which sits on one of Jos city’s most prominent streets, the Joseph Gomwalk Road, remains the city’s tallest building. Patterned after the older New Nigerian Newspapers’ Nagwamatse House in Kaduna, the 10-storey Standard Building, even in its dilapidated state, remains a remarkable tribute to the late Joseph Deshi Gomwalk, the military governor of the defunct Benue-Plateau State whose government founded The Nigeria Standard.
Although JD Gomwalk, as many prefer to call him, died long ago, precisely on May 15, 1976 following his execution over the Bukar suka Dimka’s coup earlier that year, the famed late police officer remains dear to the heart of many Plateau citizens because of his achievements for the state, The Nigeria Standard being one of such achievements.
The Plateau Publishing Corporation’s General Manager, Jonathan Ishaku, who has seen The Nigeria Standard from the inside and at the different turns it has taken, took a look at the paper during an interview Thursday with Sunday Trust.
He said: “We are a Plateau State paper by ownership but a national newspaper in outlook. In those days when Standard was at its peak, we were one of the five major newspapers you could count in this country. By those days I mean the 1970s and ‘80s. We were read everywhere. In Lagos, in Port Harcourt, in Sokoto, Zaria, all around the country. On federal radio and television, our paper was reviewed. You couldn’t ignore it. We are working to get to that point when we will have a national readership once again.”
He gave an insight into the irony of how military regimes and people with military background made and unmade The Nigeria Standard over time: “The decline of the newspaper set in during the military regime. Yes, it was set up during a military regime under Gomwalk, but, you see, Gomwalk was ideologically very very advanced. He was in the force to liberate his people, and that was what he established Standard to do. Standard came on to give a voice to the voiceless. But that voice became unbearable for Gomwalk’s successors. His successors were people who couldn’t tolerate freedom of expression. Systematically, they began to stamp their overbearing authority on the Standard.”
Ishaku who has been in and out of the newspaper a number of times as the years passed, recalls those moments and throws further light on how government interference drew the newspaper back considerably: “They bore down on the newspaper to a point that when I was the editor here several years ago, they appointed a military colonel as a sole administrator, and the intention was to run Standard in tune with the command structure of the military institution. In fact, a few months later, I was sacked. They said I had irreconcilable differences with the military government. Precisely, that’s what they said.
“But, that evidently wasn’t the real issue. The military ensured that they were not replenishing the consumables here. They were not replacing equipment as they broke down. The condition of the newspaper worsened steadily. Human capital flight became the order of the day. People were leaving to other places just as the hardware, the machines in use, were collapsing. That is how we found ourselves in this predicament when we published just twice a week and we can hardly get out beyond the state.”
He puts the story in more specific timelines: “I first came to Standard on a rescue mission in the year 2000. This was the time we went on colour production. It was publishing only once a week at that time. At a point, some five years before then, it completely stopped production. It had by 2000 only been resuscitated to offer skeletal publishing. When we started the colour production, we actually sought to go daily, but funding was difficult and we settled for two productions a week. Even at that, it seized again after a while, until Governor Jang came and we resumed and went back to two productions a week. That’s partly how epileptic Standard has been.”
The newspaper’s insistence on independence under Ishaku as editor made removing him by the military owners a routine in those heady days. As he would recall, “I was sacked in 1986, brought back by January 1987, and sacked again in August that same year. We wrote an editorial the government didn’t like. Before then, we had a time when we had to sustain ourselves. Government wasn’t giving us money. We said let’s take the paper to the people. We started publishing stories that were actually very credible without fear or favour. On many occasions we published cases of corruption within the military government of the state and people were saying waoh! So, we could do that! We established the confidence of the people and we were selling large numbers of our paper. Before that, during the time of Dan Agbese and co, the same thing was happening. They established the credibility to publish and sell enough copies to sustain the publication. But whenever government interfered, when they deradicalized it, that’s how they put it, the paper lost its market.”
Now, the Plateau State Government appears genuinely intent on reviving The Nigeria Standard and give it the freedom to be itself. The government’s spokesman, information commissioner Abraham Yiljap, sounded so during an interview with Sunday Trust when he said government was willing to spend money in the endeavour to revive the paper.
Yiljap said, “The government is prepared to pump money into The Nigeria Standard and make sure that it rises fully to its feet and stand for all time. We want a newspaper that will engage staff from across the country. We are looking for the best in the industry, the best hands we can get who will give us a newspaper that can hold its own in all competitive environments, one that will give voice to the people so that everyone could be mobilised for development. We are starting to build a newspaper that should enlighten us and make us move forward.”
He added that the envisaged newspaper would return to being a daily one that would be circulated far and wide, and that this would be soon.
He said: “Upon receiving approval from the governor (Jonah Jang) and the state executive council to invite bids for the procurement of all that we need for the resuscitation of the paper, we have placed the invitation in newspapers, including The Nigeria Standard itself. We are receiving responses. The bids will be opened in due course and analysed. We will pick those we consider okay and process and then take them to the EXCO for a final go-ahead. Then the contracts will be awarded and that would be it. This is what we are doing now.”
Pressed for when the dream new Standard newspaper will become real, the commissioner of information said it would be before the end of the year.
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