Why walking away is hard to do, by Muyiwa Adetiba

2026-03-21 - 05:03

Before the advent of digital media with its era of quick clicks, the print media was the most enduring means of reaching and influencing minds. This made its practitioners visible and its Editors powerful. And connected. There was therefore, the tendency to see the world as your oyster, or worse, to think the world owed you, if you became an Editor of a national newspaper in your twenties or thereabout. Especially, in an era when truly national newspapers were few, and private, less fettered ones, even fewer. I was lucky to be among those in this category. But I was also lucky to be brought down to earth very quickly by people who had my interests at heart and had one or two life lessons to teach me. Several decades on, I still remember what they said to me as if it was yesterday. I will recount two. One was from someone who had headed the PR department of a very powerful and lucrative parastatal. He was voluble and well liked – he later became a Minister in Babangida’s government. We ran into each other around the old Kingsway building on Broad Street – big men used to walk Broad Street/Marina a lot in those days. He pulled me aside and warned me not to take my new position to heart or confuse adulation for