My journey with Trust

...also published in Daily Trust

Though the emergence of the Daily Trust newspaper as the 2016 winner of the prestigious Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NNMA) is a remarkable milestone in its pursuit for unrivalled journalistic excellence, it isn’t unexpected. After all, since its establishment in 2001, its potential to grow more competitive at the national level was already quite evident, especially in view of the phenomenal popularity of its sister paper across northern Nigeria i.e. the Weekly Trust, which had been launched in 1998, albeit its title is now discarded in favour of the Daily Trust.

Also, though I am not in a position to shed light on the dynamics behind the Daily Trust ‘s attainment of this feat, yet, inasmuch as nothing good materializes in a vacuum, it’s obvious that its management and editorial team have conceived and pursued polices that enabled the paper to achieve its potential, earn and maintain this enviable level of credibility, which suggests that they are particularly committed to the ethical and professional values in journalism that also explains why the paper outdoes other major national dailies that had dominated the scene for decades in the past.

Yet, this achievement appears even more remarkable when viewed against the backdrop of the prevailing socio-cultural circumstances and other peculiar challenges in northern Nigeria where the newspaper project was conceived, launched and nurtured. Obviously, the region was at that time particularly notorious for effectively being a graveyard for newspaper publishing business. Besides, there had already been many promising newspapers and magazines in the region that were actually forced out of business by such challenges.

Anyway, like many of my contemporaries in northern Nigeria who weren’t old enough to have attained newspaper-reading age when the likes of the legendary New Nigerian newspaper thrived in the region, I considered the advent of the Weekly Trust, in 1998 and the subsequent launching of its sister paper, the Daily Trust a few years later, particularly significant developments, especially considering how the region had been largely neglected and indeed grossly misrepresented by the dominant newspapers based elsewhere in the country, which had also capitalized on the absence of any competitive newspaper in the region to perpetrate their misrepresentations against it for so long in the past. 

 

I also shared in the enthusiasm particularly among northern Nigerian newspaper-reading enthusiasts, that greeted the advent of the Weekly Trust and, subsequently, the Daily Trust, which has ever since then proven its unquestionable credibility as an alternative source of daily news on current affairs and other information. However, though, all along, it has been my favourite newspaper, and even though I had had a few commentaries published in London-based New African magazine, I only sent my first piece for Trust’s editors to publish in 2010.

Thereafter, when I had a few more articles published in it on different occasions, its Opinions Editor then, late Ibrahim Auduson communicated to me the paper’s editorial decision to offer me a weekly column space on Fridays. Also, though I realized the challenge of maintaining a regular newspaper column due to time constraints, I gladly accepted the offer anyway, and have, ever since then, maintained the column, of course skipping only when I am either too busy to spare a time to write, or for some other reasons.

In any case, I am deeply grateful to the entire Daily Trust management and staff for sparing a space in their reputable newspaper, for me to regularly share my views with its readers on various issues of common interest. I really feel profoundly honoured for this. After all, many people tell me how they assumed that I was working with Daily Trust, only to provoke their disbelief by telling them that I actually don’t.

However, one interesting, yet admittedly rather embarrassing thing to me is that, I have never met in person with any Daily Trust staff. The journey started all along through correspondences and some occasional phone conversations with a few of its editors, and has so far remained so. Unfortunately, on each visit to Nigeria, I would love to visit its head office in Abuja, only to be constrained by packed schedules, limited time and/or other constraints. Yet, I still look forward to visiting them as soon as possible.