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.
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| Mannir Dan-Ali's list |
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?
