He was a towering figure in Nigeria journalism and letters with a mixed legacy

He is famously known as Peter Pan. Peter Enahoro, who passed on last week, was a rare figure in Nigerian journalism. That may itself be enough for any individual as an accolade. But Enahoro was more. He was a thorn in the rib of our military elite during the Nigerian crisis when the military elite was a thorn in the rib of the Nigerian people. As a journalist, he was a social critic and an activist of the word.

The best years of Enahoro, historians and biographers will agree, took place in the throes of Nigerian crisis. This happened when soldiers took over the reins of power and the nation was on the boil. His stance for democracy and against the yaws of sectional and martial high-handedness turned him into what playwright Henrik Ibsen ironically called the enemy of the people. He was a friend of the people.

His life was in danger. At one time, they came for him in his Anthony Village residence in Lagos and only his father was at home. It was clear his stay in the country was no longer tenable if he wanted to be alive. So, the man who was only 20 when he joined the flagship newspaper in the country, the Daily Times, and became editor of the Sunday paper in 1958 at 23 and became features editor that same year and at 27 was its youngest editor of the Daily Times, fled the country.

At one time, he wrote three columns a week under different names, but Peter Pan reigned over other identities and it has become what his friends and admirers called him. After graduating from Government College, Ughelli, he became a journalist almost by compulsion. He was serving as an information officer with the federal bureaucracy – Federal Ministry of Information – and his job was to beef up positions of government. But instinctively, he embarrassed the great Nnamdi Azikiwe by insisting he answer a thorny question. His job was over. He had swapped roles with journalists when he was supposed to be a public relations officer.

That was the beginning of his illustrious journey in the Daily Times and his turbulent relationship with the military elite. He was not quiet in exile. He morphed, though, from an obsession with the Nigerian problem to an African journalist. He did not do that directly but by working for European establishments. He showed that he was not only good at the written word, but also at the spoken. For 10 years, between 1966 and 1976, he was a contributing editor to Radio Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany. He later became the Africa editor of the National Zeitung at Basel, Switzerland, although he was based in London.

He served as editorial director of New Africa magazine before he became the publisher of Africa Now, a fiery magazine that took on African governments. But Enahoro was to return to Nigeria in a narrative that will taint his legacy. He became a military apologist and was on the side of the same elite he skewered in his younger years in the hot years of the June 12 struggle. Anthony Enahoro, his elder brother and family patriarch, was in the trenches with journalists, civil society activists and politicians. It was a time of many tragedies and suffering.

He was also rewarded with a position as managing director of the same Daily Times, although the newspaper had lost its magisterial aura in journalism and had become a fawning presence to the military.

Enahoro was also an author, and his best-known work is How to be a Nigerian, a satirical firecracker on the foibles of his fellow citizens.