Repossession is never as easy as it seems. Once a privatised enterprise has passed through mortgages, receivership, asset sales and successive owners, “taking it back” is no longer a simple reversal of the original sale. It can lead to years of litigation without restoring the original productive capacity of the firm.
The piece by columnist and former Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Guardian, Martins Oloja, entitled “Why Should We Celebrate Daily Times @ 100, FRCN @ 75?” published on 5 September, was an angry one. And Oloja has many good reasons to be angry.
Daily Times, Nigeria’s newspaper of record, was 100 years old on 1 June, and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), the legacy successor to the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), was 75 in April. The anniversaries of these institutional brands evoked mixed feelings, especially regret, because they have not grown into what their founders intended.
What it Used To Be…
Oloja narrated the decline of Daily Times, from the newspaper that produced some of Nigeria’s most outstanding journalists and was a formidable, professional, commercial, and asset powerhouse in its heyday, to a scrap of memory, struggling for its future.
