ARTISH Presents: On The News With Kadaria Ahmed
Credits
Words: Edwin Okolo
Videography: ARTISH
Creative Direction: ARTISH
Location: Radio Now Office, Marina.
Producer: Toye Sokunbi
The first thing you must understand about Kadaria Ahmed is that she defies labels. Or rather, her impeccable run and influence as a journalist, activist and storyteller in the last 30 years of Nigerian media, encompasses so many career highlights. "It feels like multiple lifetimes," Kadaria says at the start of our interview.
The woman I meet in a corner office, seven floors up of the industrial highrise-buildings in the heart of Marina, is a lot more unassuming. I am a little intimidated but wholly impressed to be in the presence of one of Nigeria’s most respected journalists, a woman who has broken glass ceilings and cultural expectations to interview presidents, at moments that swayed the course of Nigeria itself.
On Kadaria's table is a pair of binoculars, a tool she says helps her occasionally dissociate from the constant tensions that arise from running Nigeria’s only independently run public service radio. She's calmly having one of those moments as the ARTISH crew set up lights and cameras in her office but is immediately present when one of her producers seeks her out for her opinion on a show script. As we ready her for filming, she fusses about getting her headscarf right and jokes to ease the purposeful busy-ness of footfalls around the room.
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"I was in university during the Babangida years, so I have been teargassed for facing down the military," she says, as a casual comment when the subject of #EndSARS comes up. She recalls with startling detail, events stretching from her childhood in Zamfara to date, echoing the lapses and progresses for Nigerian civil liberties over the years. Coming from a catholic education to serving her time in the trenches in the late ’80s as a student activist protesting the military regime of Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida. This was before she joined BBC World Service, where she became a double minority, facing off gender and ethnic realities in an industry dominated by white men.
These demagogues are recurring characters in Kadaria’s life. Her penchant for rule-breaking makes her no less of a target for obfuscating experiences - for better or worse. During her time at the BBC World Service, for example, Kadaria says she learnt there were consequences for not respecting the BBC hierarchy, as she often got in trouble for it. Ibrahim Babangida also reappeared decades later, seated across Kadaria for a TV interview back in 2015. Only then, he was no longer a feared dictator, but a rehabilitated technocrat who Kadaria blitzed with questions that reckoned with the legacy of his leadership. Like how Babangida's regime infamously, annulled the June 12, 1993 elections, delaying the inevitable course of Nigeria's democratic process by another seven years of military rule. From her light-filled medium-sized office in Lagos Island, some of these moments serve as dauntless validation for her continued quest to hold government officials and authorities accountable.
The Nigerian experience remains universal, but Kadaria’s approach to her mandate evolves as she ages. After years of traversing between radio, print and TV formats, she seeks to correct the deliberate erasure of Nigeria’s complex political history and, the blunting of its contemporary opposition structures in polity and politics. The only medium that serves her mandate as a broadcaster, and equips the next generation to challenge institutionalised power, is her barely 3-month old company, Radio Now.
It’s a bit odd to deign Radio Now as a “start-up”, given Kadaria’s wealth of experience and influence. The faces of young reporters, presenters and showrunners around the office, may tell you otherwise. Not everyone agrees with her choices, or how she chooses to run this project. She mentions complaints from older journalists, concerned that populating her public service radio station with “young people” is counterintuitive to the goals she hopes to achieve. Kadaria remains unswayed because her life is an ongoing exercise in the limitless possibilities of independent journalism, and a democratised public space free of bureaucracy.
This radical model is what she’s trying to replicate with Radio Now. The way she sees it, much of her career has been made possible by people who stuck out their neck for her, simply because of her good work. This is why Kadaria is forever indebted to women like the former editor of The Guardian (Nigeria) Amma Ogan and Mrs Olusola Momoh, co-founder of The Channels TV group, whose wisdom and mentorship, overtly and subtly provided guidance to navigate a male-dominated world. To her, It only makes sense to play that grace forward to the next generation. “We didn’t know what we were doing when we started out, so young people should also be given space to learn, make mistakes and grow”, she says.
At the top of the list of people to whom Kadaria is grateful for her becoming, is an aunt who was the first female school principal in Northern Nigeria in the 70s. She also names, her mother, celebrated Hausa poet, Hafsat Abdulwaheed-Ahmed, who advocated for an 11-year-old Kadaria to be allowed to further her education at a catholic school in Kano. At school, she was educated by Irish Nuns and imbued a different perspective on life. That first brush with a culture wholly different from hers taught Kadaria tolerance and awakened the very beginnings of a lifelong curiosity with seeking out multiple sides of the truth.
While at Goldsmith College, one of the leading arts and humanities schools in the UK, “There was a certain level of freedom”, Kadaria says, that further expanded her world view, as a girl from Nigeria’s conservative northern region. After Goldsmith, she interned at the BBC, which led to a full-time job at an opportunity to join the BBC World Service. Working in the BBC World Service was the first place where many of the values she’d struggled with as a young girl growing up in Zamfara, were finally challenged.
While it had its own flaws, Kadaria’s time at the BBC World Service, under the tutelage of Elizabeth Ohene and British journalist and playwright, Robin White, gave her the freedom to challenge the rigid ideas of hierarchy which she’d been conditioned to accept. It also impressed on her the importance of a free-press in nation-building. Working with Africans from across the continent, with whom she shared a similar experience of the complex relationships between African nations and their former colonial occupiers., also gave her a global understanding of race relations, personhood and autonomy.
When she returned to Nigeria in the early 2000s, she joined NEXT Newspaper as an editor, thanks to a recommendation from the editor of Financial Times Africa, William Wallis. A few years later, another recommendation from Uduak Amimo, a junior colleague she had befriended while at the BBC World Service, led to a rare opportunity to conduct the 2011 presidential debate for an African cable network. The network had initially billed retired CNN host, Jonathan Mann, to co-host the debate alongside Kadaria, but Mann pulled out from the show at the last minute. In the end, Kadaria had to host the whole debate herself. What many people that watched tuned in that day didn't know was that it was Kadaria’s first time in front of the camera.
Since then, Kadaria’s work has transitioned fully into the public service realm. Subsequent presidential town halls and a slew of highly influential television shows have allowed her to continue shaping public discourse and influence the government’s response to a free press. “There’s been progress, but not enough,” she says of press freedoms in the 20 years since Nigeria became a democracy again, referencing the years of guerilla journalism when some publishers had to resort to mobile printing presses. In those years, newspapers that criticised the military government had to be distributed in the middle of the night for fear of military raid. Kadaria implores vigilance, however, because “that harassment hasn’t really stopped, rather it’s just become more sophisticated".
According to Kadaria, the struggle will continue to evolve as more people come to terms with what is possible for Nigeria in the realm of human rights. Her eternal optimism about the future of Nigeria and her desire to create platforms for young Nigerians to find their voices is why she currently runs Radio Now. “The Radio Now agenda is Nigeria” she says, adding that many of the battles young Nigerians fight today, are battles that have been fought in some form since before Nigeria’s Independence. For her, success for Radio Now is the company transcending its launch point in radio and offering its brand of public service journalism across multiple platforms.
Radio Now’s programming currently sets aside the long exploited ethnic and religious differences in favour of collective power and accountability. Kadaria understands this ethos that must be protected from personal and foreign agenda, as such is particular about who gains access to the platform, and works to ensure it is never used to amplify extremist voices. “We are not where we were in the 1990s,” she says, describing the present and the possible future that exists for Nigeria, “I refuse to be pessimistic.”