Regular readers will notice a shift in this week’s column. It steps away from commercial property and infrastructure to attend to a personal matter. Sometimes a column must leave its usual ground to settle a debt. In the coming days, a man I consider one of the finest minds Nigerian journalism has produced will present his memoir. Before that happens, I want to say in print what I am not certain I have ever said to him directly.
There was a season in Nigeria when a newspaper column could summon a head of state. Dr Chidi Amuta once wrote a piece titled ‘Ibrahim Gorbachev,’ drawing a comparison between Nigeria’s military leader, Ibrahim Babangida, and Mikhail Gorbachev, then undertaking sweeping reforms in the Soviet Union. In another article, ‘Thesis on Liberia,’ he argued that Nigeria should use its influence in West Africa to prevent Liberia from descending into civil war. Both pieces found their way to Dodan Barracks. The president read them and wanted to meet their author.
That episode may seem like a footnote in a long career, but it has stayed with me because it captures what serious writing once represented in this country, and what it can still represent. A column was not decoration placed between advertisements. It was an instrument of public thought. It could clarify a national problem, disturb official comfort and travel all the way to the highest office in the land.
That power has not entirely disappeared. More recently, Amuta’s commentary on the state of the nation drew a sharp response from the presidency. The setting may be different from the days of Dodan Barracks, but the central point remains: those in authority still read him, still answer him and, occasionally, still seem unsettled by what he writes. Decades later, the Amuta pen continues to command attention.
Regular readers will notice a shift in this week’s column. It steps away from commercial property and infrastructure to attend to a personal matter. Sometimes a column must leave its usual ground to settle a debt. In the coming days, a man I consider one of the finest minds Nigerian journalism has produced will present his memoir. Before that happens, I want to say in print what I am not certain I have ever said to him directly.
There was a season in Nigeria when a newspaper column could summon a head of state. Dr Chidi Amuta once wrote a piece titled ‘Ibrahim Gorbachev,’ drawing a comparison between Nigeria’s military leader, Ibrahim Babangida, and Mikhail Gorbachev, then undertaking sweeping reforms in the Soviet Union. In another article, ‘Thesis on Liberia,’ he argued that Nigeria should use its influence in West Africa to prevent Liberia from descending into civil war. Both pieces found their way to Dodan Barracks. The president read them and wanted to meet their author.
That episode may seem like a footnote in a long career, but it has stayed with me because it captures what serious writing once represented in this country, and what it can still represent. A column was not decoration placed between advertisements. It was an instrument of public thought. It could clarify a national problem, disturb official comfort and travel all the way to the highest office in the land.
That power has not entirely disappeared. More recently, Amuta’s commentary on the state of the nation drew a sharp response from the presidency. The setting may be different from the days of Dodan Barracks, but the central point remains: those in authority still read him, still answer him and, occasionally, still seem unsettled by what he writes. Decades later, the Amuta pen continues to command attention.
Here I must make a small confession. Although I had read and admired his articles for some time, providence later brought me much closer to him. The writer I had known from a distance gradually became someone whose character, habits, and discipline I could observe up close. I will leave the precise circumstances of that closeness unstated; they belong to the private part of life. What matters here is that proximity did not diminish the admiration formed from afar. It deepened it. I discovered that the discipline visible on the page was not a pose adopted for publication. It was part of the man.
I began to notice the behind-the-scenes effort: reading, curiosity, and a refusal to become intellectually lazy. While many can produce a single memorable article, few manage to remain relevant across various political eras and shifting editorial standards. Amuta has accomplished this without allowing longevity to become an excuse for repetition. His consistency extends beyond weekly content submissions; it includes a sustained discipline of continuous thinking.
I now write a weekly column on commercial property and infrastructure in the Perspective section of BusinessDay Sunday, drawing from more than two decades of professional practice. The challenge is not finding opinions. It is translating experience into a clear argument, meeting the weekly deadline and returning with something else worth a reader’s time. My journey bears no comparison with Amuta’s. Yet his example has made me understand that influence is built quietly: through preparation, careful reasoning, consistency and the humility to keep improving after publication.
His career has been as varied as it has been consequential. Over the decades, he has worked as an academic, literary theorist, newspaper editor, editorial adviser, chief executive and columnist. He was an early member of The Guardian’s Editorial Board, served as Group Editorial Adviser and Chairman of the Daily Times Editorial Board, and later became Chief Executive of The Post Express. He remains associated with the THISDAY Editorial Board and continues to write his weekly column, Engagements.
What strikes me is that he has never truly stopped. Decades into a career that would have given most people sufficient reason to rest on past achievement, he continues to turn up with something worth saying. He has therefore become a model to me beyond writing: a lesson in how a career is built, repaired and sustained, and in how one continues to work with integrity long after there is anything left to prove.
Even now, he often sends me a simple message: ‘Keep going.’ From someone who has lived those words throughout his career, they carry heavy weight. They are encouragement, certainly, but also a rule: do the work, survive the disappointment, resist self-pity and return to the page. I have come to treasure those two words because the life behind them gives them authority.
If I have one quarrel with the way his career has been received, it is this: a man whose columns once travelled through the corridors of power, whose academic work contributed to the study of African literature, and whose public commentary has interpreted Nigeria over several decades deserves a wider and younger audience than he has been given. Nigeria too often celebrates its elders quietly, among those who already know, instead of introducing them loudly to those who need to know.
Those of us who grew up reading writers like Amuta deserve to acknowledge them more publicly. This piece is a modest attempt at that recognition, written before the presentation rather than after, because delayed gratitude can start to seem more like an obituary than a tribute. The best time to honor intellectual work is while its creator can appreciate the words.
HOMAGE: Return to Familiar Places appears to be a fitting vessel for that conversation: a life recalled with enough honesty and range to become, at the same time, a record of the country’s passage through journalism, scholarship, politics and public life. A memoir by someone who has spent decades interpreting Nigeria cannot be merely personal. The country inevitably enters the story, with its promises, ruptures, characters and recurring disappointments.
The memoir is only one part of a much larger body of work. Years ago, Amuta demonstrated its scale with Writing the Wrong, a collection of more than a thousand pages drawn from decades of newspaper columns. Taken together with his later writings, the work approaches an unbroken record of Nigeria’s condition: its politics, crises and stubborn hopes, recorded in real time by a writer equipped with the history and language to explain events as they unfolded.
There are university departments teaching Nigerian political history from material far thinner than what sits in his back catalogue. I expect to read HOMAGE as I read his columns years ago: slowly, attentively and with a pencil nearby. But I will now read it with an added privilege, the knowledge of the man behind the sentences and with greater appreciation for the discipline required to turn a lifetime of observation into a body of work.
This column will return to its usual ground soon enough. But some debts are worth interrupting the schedule for. This is one of them.