By Frank Aigbogun (The Third Editor)

The meeting was surreal. I had been told that Uncle Sam wanted to see me. I was prompt, and so was Uncle Sam, who welcomed me warmly and asked that I should tell him a little about the book I was reading at the time. And when I was done, he asked me when I would be resuming. I responded immediately. “If half of what I have heard about you is true, then you are the one we want here,” Uncle Sam told me. 

The interview was over, and this began my 14 years sojourn through Vanguard, years that turned out to be some of the best of my life.

There was no way that you would not love the Vanguard to the full. The people were warm. The people were fun. The newsroom was alive. And having Uncle Sam as a boss made it even more exciting every day.

I was hired first as the pioneer News Editor for Vanguard, and as time passed, I moved on to be deputy editor and then editor. The day I resumed, it was to Muyiwa Adetiba, the editor, I had to go. I had followed his ground-breaking interviews at the Punch, and as a journalism student, he was easily one of those that I was drawn to. He sought to make me  comfortable and explained how he wanted the work done. His deputy was the hard-nosed newsman, Toye Akiyode, a brilliant journalist who could knock a story out of a stone. You handed him a copy and often what will become the lead of the next day’s paper, and Toye will shine it up. “Let me have it, Frank”, he will say. A cigarette, in the other hand, Toye will grab some off-cut paper and then proceed effortlessly to rework the copy. And all the time, the result will be a first-class material ready to go to print. Then he will smile in satisfaction.

In time, Muyiwa, the pioneer editor, departed Vanguard, and not too long after, Toye followed, too. Chris Okojie, one of the best sports journalists I have ever met and who then should have been editor, also left. The result was that I was thrusted into the chair of editor of Vanguard without fanfare. 

I had arrived at the Vanguard from the Guardian, where my journalism life started. From there, the great editor, Lanre Idowu, who gave so much to mentor the young ones like us, had attracted me for a brief stint at the then Democrat. Lanre kept my feet steady, and from him came encouragement frequently, especially in those early days as editor.

Uncle Sam is not just a master of the trade. He is as generous as one can be. He treated you with respect as an editor and helped you to be the best you could be. I learnt many things you will never learn in journalism school. Like, “the best editor is the one who knows what not to publish.”  The first time Uncle Sam told me this, I struggled to understand. Then he said, “Frank, everyone knows what to publish.” More than 35 years ago, those words rang true. In the seven years as editor, what I put out to be published was only a small proportion of what I knew or had heard.

When we were about to wed in 1988, Uncle Sam sent me and my wife to London and gave us the keys to his Maida Vale apartment where we stayed during our visit. Uncle Sam was unsparing when it came to generosity. Today, when we run into each other, he will call me “superstar”. To Uncle Sam, I have an eternal debt of gratitude.

My 14 years at the Vanguard were also some of the most challenging for the print media in Nigeria. We were in the newsroom when Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor were sent to jail by the Buhari military junta and we were shaken several times during the regime of Sani Abacha, the bespectacled former dictator who at one point let it be known that he was coming for us. Somehow, Vanguard escaped the worst of that regime. But I recall vividly spending a night with Toye at the Panti Police station for an innocuous story we had published. And then at another time, I received message from a friend who was close to Abacha’s son and who told me he had just come from Abuja and was overhearing the junta people pondering what to do with the newspaper and I was its editor. He appealed to me to be careful. Forty years after, we are alive to tell the story or some of it. Forget that the cover price of the first edition of Vanguard was 20K. We are alive today to thank God. Some have since gone to the other world from where no man shall return, and we have this duty to wish Vanguard another 40 years of impact.