Recently, the Daily Trust on Sunday published my article titled “Daily Trust: My Omitted Story”, which dwelt on my role in the founding of the newspaper. The purpose of the write-up was to set the record straight, as I wrote, because omitting such contributions at a time the newspaper company was documenting the significant epoch of attaining twenty years would be doing a gross injustice to its own history.
Now, only yesterday (Tuesday, May 8, 2018) I observed another glaring omission. The newspaper published a list on page 7 of what the CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Mannir Dan-Ali, called “all the columnists past and present who have contributed to the building of the Daily Trust brand”. The list contains not only those persons who are still alive but also some nine deceased ones, such as Mahmoon Baba-Ahmed (whose name was misspelt as Mahmood).
The list was clearly meant to be exhaustive, from what the CEO/EIC indicated. But my name was not there!
In my recent article published in the Sunday paper, I stated clearly that I created and edited a literary column called Bookshelf, which ran in the Weekly Trust for years. As many commentators observed after reading the article, Bookshelf was one of the most crowd-pulling sections ever published in the newspaper. And as I stated in my write-up, it was only in 2004 that I stopped handling it because I was appointed the editor of the newly created Leadership newspaper, and Odoh Diego Okenyodo succeeded me as the literary editor. Mr. Okenyodo’s name is in Malam Dan-Ali’s list of “all columnists past and present” – on account of his handling Bookshelf.
All this is not about me per se. As I pointed out, the purpose of drawing attention to this type of omission is simply to set the record straight. Official endorsement of such efforts may end up in another publication or a certain hall of fame, and history would then not have been adequately served. Hence my speaking up again here.
And, by the way, since four columnists in the vernacular Aminiya have been listed by the editor-in-chief (Ado Saleh Kankia, Ibrahim Malumfashi, Abdulrahman Abubakar Dodo and Mahmoon Baba-Ahmed), why not similarly recognise my friend Nabila Ibrahim Khalil who has consistently been running a column on marital issues in the Hausa paper for several years?
