The 27th edition of the Lagos Book & Art Festival, LABAF, held at Freedom Park and the JRandle Museum in Lagos from November 10 to 16, may have come and gone, but its memories will definitely linger for a long time—what with the poetry, music, discussions around books, pertinent issues that came to the fore, and the many revelations at the symposium held at the JK Randle Museum on November 14, 2025.
As a literary festival with a socio-political bent, LABAF uses the book every year as an instrument to discuss burning issues, particularly those relating to national and global development. This year was no different.
The theme of the festival, which spoke to current happenings on the Nigerian socio-political landscape, was Change: Imagining Alternatives. “With Change: Imagining Alternatives, we are examining the possibility of building a better alternative to this counterproductive ecosystem,” Mr Toyin Akinosho, Secretary-General of CORA, said in a press statement, giving a foretaste of the weeklong festival.
Still, one programme many will never forget was the symposium themed “They Won the Epic Struggle, But Is This What We Signed For?” At the session, Mr Kunle Ajibade, Executive Director of TheNEWS/PMNEWS, engaged two notable Nigerian journalists and activists, Mr Babafemi Ojudu and Mr Abdul Oroh, on their recently released books, Adventures of a Guerrilla Journalist and Demonstration of Craze, respectively. They had ample time to speak about their Kafkaesque experiences.
Remarkably, the duo are not only journalists and activists; they also had stints in public service, which made them perfect fits for the discourse. Ojudu served as a Senator and Special Adviser to the Presidency, while Oroh was Commissioner for Information in Edo State and a member of the House of Representatives. And they both had their time in Abacha’s gulag.
The two journalists spoke, among other things, about what inspired them to take up journalism and activism, their experiences in the trenches during the military era, the struggle for the actualisation of June 12, the several periods they spent in detention, and their later experiences as political office holders.
Ajibade—who also did three years in Makurdi Prison after being jailed for life by the Abacha regime—opened the conversation thus: “The country was eagerly awaiting the official announcement of the winner of that election. What it got instead was an annulment of that election, which was a clear violation of electoral law. It hurt the feelings of a lot of people. So thousands of Nigerians went to the streets in protest. That was not the first major protest in Nigeria.
“But the magnitude of this particular one and its duration were different. What forms did these protests take? What was the nature and character of the military regime that triggered a raging anger in Nigerians and friends of democracy around the world? How was the crisis eventually resolved? The answers to these questions and many more that will be raised here constitute the first leg of this symposium.”
It was an evening of discourse, memory, revelations and, of course, fun and laughter as the trio did justice to the theme of the symposium. It was also an evening of deep, sober reflection, as their agonising experiences during the military era naturally called for it.
Before the conversation began, Mr Waziri Adio delivered a keynote titled “Five Tasks for a Reimagined Nigeria,” in which he presented five things Nigerians must do to move the country to the Promised Land. He set the stage by quoting from the preface of his memoir, The Arc of the Possible:
“Our country can do much, much better. However, it is not going to happen by itself. We do not need people of extraordinary abilities or resolve to move the needle on governance in Nigeria. But we must be ready to put in the work at the technical and the normative levels. A lot of work.”
The “lot of work” Adio believes Nigerians must put in to move the needle of governance forms the basis of his keynote. The five tasks, which he describes as needs, are:
“There is so much work to be done at different levels: technical, conceptual, normative, individual, collective, etc. The question is: are we ready to put in the work, a lot of work?” Adio asked rhetorically.
At the symposium, Ojudu set the ball rolling by explaining why he became a guerrilla journalist and how he and his colleagues functioned under the regimes of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha.
“I think we had a job to do. We wanted to inform. We wanted us to be informed. And there were people who thought that by informing others we would be exposing quite a lot about them. And as young men and women then, we were driven by ideas, by a task we had given ourselves. The kind of temperament we put into what we did was what we were taught at Ife: to challenge authority and to vigorously fight if there was a need for it.
“So, we went out to reject every attempt to keep us down, every attempt to shut us up… At every point they wanted to shut us up, and we said no. That was how we found ourselves doing all kinds of unthinkable things to publish at that moment. We knew what we were going into. We knew it was going to be dangerous,” Ojudu said.
He lamented, however, that they did not have a successor generation to continue the work.
“And when I look back now and see what is happening today, I feel very bad that we didn’t have a successor generation that could have continued—even at a time when the risk was not as much as what we went through. Today, what we have is a regurgitated kind of journalism… No more investigation. No more commitment. No more risk-taking. And when you have a nation with very tepid journalism or media, it’s going to be difficult to have development,” he noted.
Oroh began his discourse by recounting how his time at The Guardian led him into activism when a colleague, Andy, introduced him to Mr Olisa Agbakoba, who wanted him to write about prisoners he was defending pro bono.
That meeting not only led to a close friendship between him and Agbakoba; it also resulted in the formation of the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) on October 17, 1987. According to Oroh, CLO initially focused only on the plight of detainees awaiting trial and not political activism. Their involvement in activism, he said, was a spontaneous reaction to military highhandedness.
“We were not interested in liberating Nigeria from the military. We were only interested in prison reforms… But as we were trying to get them out, the military started showing interest in us,” Oroh said.
He also spoke about how tension escalated after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, leading to the clampdown on journalists, activists and trade unionists, and Abacha’s plan to succeed himself as a democratic president.
He narrated how Agbakoba narrowly escaped assassination—a plot revealed later by the assassin, Sergeant Rogers himself.
Ojudu also shared some of his experiences in solitary confinement. One included picking strands from his beard to separate grey from black hairs in order to retain his sanity. He also recounted how he cried all night when he thought a woman brought in crying was his wife, only to learn she was General Jerry Useni’s former girlfriend arrested over false allegations.
He described the abuses and threats he faced during interrogation, including one occasion when Zakari Biu put a gun to his head.
There was also the case of a Sierra Leonean woman, a gold and diamond dealer who was falsely accused of being Wole Soyinka’s girlfriend simply because powerful people did not want to pay her for goods they had taken. She was detained for one and a half years.
“So it was a bad time, a time one would never want to experience again. So when I see people now… canvassing for the military to return, I just say, ‘Do they know what they are saying?’… It’s not that one does not dislike what is happening now, but it’s not an alternative,” Ojudu said.
Oroh also spoke about his several detentions, which traumatized him for years. He read an excerpt from his memoir, Demonstration of Craze, describing the lasting psychological scars.
He recounted humorous episodes as well—such as his secretary Titilayo Mustapha’s arrest and her defiant refusal to disclose his whereabouts. He also narrated how he escaped through Cotonou to board a flight to the United States, only for the plane to return briefly to Lagos to pick up more passengers, prompting hilarious moments, including Pat Utomi teasing him for pretending to read Le Monde.
Many other stories followed, including how Ojudu and Bola Ahmed Tinubu—then in exile in London—obtained an exposé on Abacha’s reckless looting of public funds. Tinubu had secretly recorded the source, and after returning home, Ojudu stole the cassette and returned to Nigeria to publish the story—despite Tinubu warning that it could cost him his life.
As predicted, three days after publication, Ojudu was warned that “death was hovering around” him and that Abacha had dispatched soldiers to kill him within 24 hours. He fled through the border to Cotonou and flew to Kenya.
The conversation wore on as Ojudu and Oroh revealed more details about their experiences. The Q&A session that followed deepened the emotion of the evening, as the duo—completely in their element—spoke freely about their bone-chilling ordeals.
At the end of the day, guests were unanimous that the experiences of the trio—Ajibade, Ojudu and Oroh—were more than enough to discountenance any call for a return of the khaki boys.
NAN
As a literary festival with a socio-political bent, LABAF uses the book every year as an instrument to discuss burning issues, particularly those relating to national and global development. This year was no different.
The theme of the festival, which spoke to current happenings on the Nigerian socio-political landscape, was Change: Imagining Alternatives. “With Change: Imagining Alternatives, we are examining the possibility of building a better alternative to this counterproductive ecosystem,” Mr Toyin Akinosho, Secretary-General of CORA, said in a press statement, giving a foretaste of the weeklong festival.
Still, one programme many will never forget was the symposium themed “They Won the Epic Struggle, But Is This What We Signed For?” At the session, Mr Kunle Ajibade, Executive Director of TheNEWS/PMNEWS, engaged two notable Nigerian journalists and activists, Mr Babafemi Ojudu and Mr Abdul Oroh, on their recently released books, Adventures of a Guerrilla Journalist and Demonstration of Craze, respectively. They had ample time to speak about their Kafkaesque experiences.
Remarkably, the duo are not only journalists and activists; they also had stints in public service, which made them perfect fits for the discourse. Ojudu served as a Senator and Special Adviser to the Presidency, while Oroh was Commissioner for Information in Edo State and a member of the House of Representatives. And they both had their time in Abacha’s gulag.
The two journalists spoke, among other things, about what inspired them to take up journalism and activism, their experiences in the trenches during the military era, the struggle for the actualisation of June 12, the several periods they spent in detention, and their later experiences as political office holders.
Ajibade—who also did three years in Makurdi Prison after being jailed for life by the Abacha regime—opened the conversation thus: “The country was eagerly awaiting the official announcement of the winner of that election. What it got instead was an annulment of that election, which was a clear violation of electoral law. It hurt the feelings of a lot of people. So thousands of Nigerians went to the streets in protest. That was not the first major protest in Nigeria.
“But the magnitude of this particular one and its duration were different. What forms did these protests take? What was the nature and character of the military regime that triggered a raging anger in Nigerians and friends of democracy around the world? How was the crisis eventually resolved? The answers to these questions and many more that will be raised here constitute the first leg of this symposium.”
It was an evening of discourse, memory, revelations and, of course, fun and laughter as the trio did justice to the theme of the symposium. It was also an evening of deep, sober reflection, as their agonising experiences during the military era naturally called for it.
Before the conversation began, Mr Waziri Adio delivered a keynote titled “Five Tasks for a Reimagined Nigeria,” in which he presented five things Nigerians must do to move the country to the Promised Land. He set the stage by quoting from the preface of his memoir, The Arc of the Possible:
“Our country can do much, much better. However, it is not going to happen by itself. We do not need people of extraordinary abilities or resolve to move the needle on governance in Nigeria. But we must be ready to put in the work at the technical and the normative levels. A lot of work.”
The “lot of work” Adio believes Nigerians must put in to move the needle of governance forms the basis of his keynote. The five tasks, which he describes as needs, are:
“There is so much work to be done at different levels: technical, conceptual, normative, individual, collective, etc. The question is: are we ready to put in the work, a lot of work?” Adio asked rhetorically.
At the symposium, Ojudu set the ball rolling by explaining why he became a guerrilla journalist and how he and his colleagues functioned under the regimes of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha.
“I think we had a job to do. We wanted to inform. We wanted us to be informed. And there were people who thought that by informing others we would be exposing quite a lot about them. And as young men and women then, we were driven by ideas, by a task we had given ourselves. The kind of temperament we put into what we did was what we were taught at Ife: to challenge authority and to vigorously fight if there was a need for it.
“So, we went out to reject every attempt to keep us down, every attempt to shut us up… At every point they wanted to shut us up, and we said no. That was how we found ourselves doing all kinds of unthinkable things to publish at that moment. We knew what we were going into. We knew it was going to be dangerous,” Ojudu said.
He lamented, however, that they did not have a successor generation to continue the work.
“And when I look back now and see what is happening today, I feel very bad that we didn’t have a successor generation that could have continued—even at a time when the risk was not as much as what we went through. Today, what we have is a regurgitated kind of journalism… No more investigation. No more commitment. No more risk-taking. And when you have a nation with very tepid journalism or media, it’s going to be difficult to have development,” he noted.
Oroh began his discourse by recounting how his time at The Guardian led him into activism when a colleague, Andy, introduced him to Mr Olisa Agbakoba, who wanted him to write about prisoners he was defending pro bono.
That meeting not only led to a close friendship between him and Agbakoba; it also resulted in the formation of the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) on October 17, 1987. According to Oroh, CLO initially focused only on the plight of detainees awaiting trial and not political activism. Their involvement in activism, he said, was a spontaneous reaction to military highhandedness.
“We were not interested in liberating Nigeria from the military. We were only interested in prison reforms… But as we were trying to get them out, the military started showing interest in us,” Oroh said.
He also spoke about how tension escalated after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, leading to the clampdown on journalists, activists and trade unionists, and Abacha’s plan to succeed himself as a democratic president.
He narrated how Agbakoba narrowly escaped assassination—a plot revealed later by the assassin, Sergeant Rogers himself.
Ojudu also shared some of his experiences in solitary confinement. One included picking strands from his beard to separate grey from black hairs in order to retain his sanity. He also recounted how he cried all night when he thought a woman brought in crying was his wife, only to learn she was General Jerry Useni’s former girlfriend arrested over false allegations.
He described the abuses and threats he faced during interrogation, including one occasion when Zakari Biu put a gun to his head.
There was also the case of a Sierra Leonean woman, a gold and diamond dealer who was falsely accused of being Wole Soyinka’s girlfriend simply because powerful people did not want to pay her for goods they had taken. She was detained for one and a half years.
“So it was a bad time, a time one would never want to experience again. So when I see people now… canvassing for the military to return, I just say, ‘Do they know what they are saying?’… It’s not that one does not dislike what is happening now, but it’s not an alternative,” Ojudu said.
Oroh also spoke about his several detentions, which traumatized him for years. He read an excerpt from his memoir, Demonstration of Craze, describing the lasting psychological scars.
He recounted humorous episodes as well—such as his secretary Titilayo Mustapha’s arrest and her defiant refusal to disclose his whereabouts. He also narrated how he escaped through Cotonou to board a flight to the United States, only for the plane to return briefly to Lagos to pick up more passengers, prompting hilarious moments, including Pat Utomi teasing him for pretending to read Le Monde.
Many other stories followed, including how Ojudu and Bola Ahmed Tinubu—then in exile in London—obtained an exposé on Abacha’s reckless looting of public funds. Tinubu had secretly recorded the source, and after returning home, Ojudu stole the cassette and returned to Nigeria to publish the story—despite Tinubu warning that it could cost him his life.
As predicted, three days after publication, Ojudu was warned that “death was hovering around” him and that Abacha had dispatched soldiers to kill him within 24 hours. He fled through the border to Cotonou and flew to Kenya.
The conversation wore on as Ojudu and Oroh revealed more details about their experiences. The Q&A session that followed deepened the emotion of the evening, as the duo—completely in their element—spoke freely about their bone-chilling ordeals.
At the end of the day, guests were unanimous that the experiences of the trio—Ajibade, Ojudu and Oroh—were more than enough to discountenance any call for a return of the khaki boys.
NAN
