Most reporters spend their working lives standing a few steps to the side of history. They are close enough to hear what is said and to see who flinches, and far enough away that the story always belongs to someone else. After 35 years as a broadcast journalist, Abioye Ayorinde of the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State (BCOS) has decided to step into the frame, at least for the length of one memoir.
Ayorinde’s memoir titled Audacious Odyssey: My Experience in Journalism, which runs to about 113 pages and 31 short chapters, gives the reader a glimpse of events that marked those long years of service. He worked the House of Assembly, the foreign desk and the general beats, and served as State House Correspondent to governors in both military and civilian times. Even so, he chooses moments over years. He holds a Master of Communication Arts from the University of Ibadan, won the Oyo State Productivity Merit Award in 2009, and is a Pastor at Christ Life Church. The book wears all of that lightly. Each chapter is a single episode told in plain language, and each closes with a short passage called The Takeaway.
The opening chapter, “Face to Face with Death”, sets the tone for what to expect. What gives the book its weight is the quality of attention. Again and again he returns to the odd fact at the centre of the job, which is that you are sent toward the very thing everyone else is running from. The pages are full of near misses, and he is honest about the fear. He does not play the hero. Reading him, you sense a man who learned early that luck and good company count for more than courage, and who is openly grateful to the God he credits with seeing him through.
The best episodes put the reader in the room where Oyo history was being made. In the days after General Sani Abacha’s death, hundreds of angry military pensioners besiege the Agodi Secretariat until the Military Administrator, Colonel Ahmed Usman, walks out of his own gate toward them, with his aides and the press scrambling behind. Ayorinde compares the scene to a herd of elephants watching a lone leopard stroll up. Usman asks who their leader is, scolds them for disturbing a nation in mourning, and the veterans melt away. The author’s reading is that the Colonel appealed to their conscience as fellow soldiers, and that a crowd without a clear leader will always lose to a man who does not blink.
The governors, colonels and political strongmen who walk through these pages are seen the way a reporter sees them, from the edge of the crowd, in the seconds when a decision is being made. Ayorinde is less interested in judging them than in watching what they do when the pressure is on. Some stay calm. Some lose their tempers. One walks toward trouble while everyone around him wants him to turn back. The book leaves you to decide what that says about power, and about the people who follow it around with notebooks and cameras.
The practical lessons are what young reporters will reach for first: how to dress for an election, what to carry, whom to greet, where not to charge your camera. They come without fuss, in the voice of an older colleague who has already made the mistakes. But the book is at its best when the advice gives way to something quieter.
The most personal pages are about the pandemic. Ayorinde fell ill, kept his symptoms to himself for a while out of fear of the stigma that attached to the disease, and then asked the ambulance team not to collect him from his home so that his family would be spared. His wife, Iya Ayo, drove him to the pickup point at the Lekan Salami Sports Complex with the children in the car, and nobody said a word on the way. He spent two weeks at the Infectious Disease Centre at Olodo, which he praises warmly, and tested positive again about three months later. He writes about it with restraint, and the quiet carries more weight than any of the chases.
There is lighter material too. A pilgrimage to Israel, where he was both pilgrim and official reporter, gives us gospel singer Mama Bola Are jotting down song fragments at holy sites, and a camera recording at an airport that drew a polite interrogation from plainclothes security officers. They let the crew go only because their identity cards were in order and the flight had not yet left. King Sunny Ade turns up at Ori Oke Mokola to the open astonishment of the doubters who said he never would.
The closing pages step back from the anecdotes. Governments will change, Ayorinde writes in effect, powerful men will leave office and yesterday’s explosive headlines will become history, but institutions survive only when the people inside them do their duty. The journalist must report faithfully, the editor must defend professional standards, the leader must use power and language responsibly, and society must refuse to turn citizens into enemies simply because they disagree with those who govern.
As Abioye Ayorinde leaves BCOS after 35 years, that passage reads as both a summary and a charge. The man who once ran from a fireball with his jotter in the dust leaves the newsroom with a book that keeps what he learned where younger reporters can find it.
Audacious Odyssey is worth reading for journalism students, for anyone starting out on a beat, and for anyone curious about how Oyo’s governors and crises looked from the seat of the press bus.
