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Tribute

The many sides of Stanley Macebuh
(1942 - 2010)

The news came suddenly. Stanley Macebuh, pioneer managing director of the Guardian, passed on Sunday, March at an Abuja hospital after a brief illness. Torrents of tributes have been written to situate his place in Nigerian journalism. As friends and family finalise preparations for his burial, Media Review publishes a tribute by its editor-in-chief and excerpts from five others, capping the verdict on Macebuh with a reproduction of two of his earlier writings.

Macebuh and friendship “It was the general feeling in our final year that Stanley was capable of making a first in English but somehow he made an upper second which was respectable in those days. Stanley went for his post-graduate studies at the University of Sussex in the beautiful seaside town of Brighton in England while I went to Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada. ..| Read more

Home call for the master stylist
By Lanre Idowu

We had shared the same table March 20, 2009 at the media dinner organised in Lagos by the NLNG Company for Information minister, Prof Dora Akunyili. Happy to see each other after three years, we backslapped, exchanged phone addresses, and swapped informed gist about the state of the country. We agreed that former President Olusegun Obasanjo's blustering performance on the BBC interview programme, Hard Talk, was below par as the programme was ill suited for his temperament. I sought and obtained his consent to include a 1988 article he wrote in The GuardianHistory and its discontentsin a book I was editing, 'Nigerian Columnists and their Art'.

I could see that the stroke he suffered had limited the use of his right hand, but he retained his characteristic conviviality. And I recall thinking that for as long as Stanley Macebuh could hold meaningful conversations, his mental astuteness would find outlet in more lucid writings. Happily, Thisday provided him a platform where as editorial adviser and editorial board member he kept an occasional column, Mediations. ..| Read more

The Macebuh Intervention

History and its discontents
Stanley Macebuh
My colleague, Tunji Dare, never ceases to amaze with his wry, sardonic aphorisms. We were comparing, the other day, the relative maturity of civilization, and I had suggested that we are, in Nigeria today, more or less exactly where the Americans were at the beginning of the 19th century. Another colleague, impatient with this unduly long view of history, said he saw no reason why we should not engage in a decent measure of short-circuiting of history. And then Tunji Dare quipped: if you short-circuit history too much, you might just get electrocuted in the process.

That is exactly the point that needs to be made, at a time when, beset by the burden and discontents of history, we appear confused, unable to read our own history correctly, let alone find in it an adequate measure of legitimate comfort. ..| Read more

Nigerian Press Today
By Stanley Macebuh
I come here today to remonstrate with the Press; not to praise it. The evil that we journalists do will undoubtedly be remembered long after we have left the scene. But the memory of the little good we have accomplished stands a good chance of being completely swept into irrelevance, because of our professional transgressions.

In the beginning, the Nigerian Press played a critical, even indispensable role in our fight for independence. Indeed, it is arguable that it was the Press that transformed the theoretical idea of Nigeria into a living, vibrant reality. But today, that idea is not only being questioned and probed, as it must constantly be; we appear to have come to such a pass where the very word is now thought to be anathema, at least in certain quarters. ..| Read more

BOOK REVIEW

'A timely contribution' By Olatunji Dare
When the Western Nigeria Television Service began transmissions in Ibadan on October 31, 1959, its slogan, “First in Africa” was no idle claim. It was indeed first in all of Africa. Egypt, which had been a prominent international actor well before Nigeria won independence, established its first television one year after Nigeria blazed the trail.

Ghana, which had won independence in 1957 three years ahead of Nigeria did not have television until1965. South Africa, fearing that television would explode the myth on which the white supremacist policy of apartheid was grounded, did not have television until 1976. ...| Read more

A valuable material’ By Andrew Moemeka
It is not always that media professionals more so the society remember that the fortunes of the mass media in any society are intricately intertwined with the fortunes of the society itself; that the media do not exist independently of the society in which they operate. It is to set the facts right and keep them before us always that the specialists gave us the Media Systems Paradigm which states that- In every society (country) certain social factors combine in unique ways to create a media system that is used to perform media functions that eventually help to reshape society.

And with the new transformation, the process begins all over again. The combination of socio-cultural, economic, political and educational factors would lead to expansion of existing media system, which would perform more media functions that would again, positively or negatively, affect society. ...| Read more

PHOTOGRAPHY

Midnight Sun, Deadness,Happy days, Blood, Sweat, and Beef. Photo by Lanre Idowu
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AND

Canons at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana. & Long shot of the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Coast Castle. by Lanre Idowu
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