Despite all odds, despite almost insurmountable hurdles, even despite negative prophecies and predictions, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was sworn in as the 16th President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria on May 29. The occasion, since 1999, usually reminds me of May 29, 1999, when Nigeria returned to civil rule after 16 years of military interregnum. I remember the high hopes we had as Nigerians on that day when General Olusegun Obasanjo was handed the baton of leadership by General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

I remember how I celebrated the occasion in one of the canteens somewhere, I think, at Ola Ayinde Street in Ikeja, Lagos, where I had gone for a sumptuous meal that I washed down with a cold bottle of Big Stout, my favourite drink then. Thank God, today, I have left that ‘Egypt’! On my way to Canaan. I had thought the occasion called for celebration.

If anyone had told me then that where we are today is where we would be 24 years after, I would tell the person that he did not know what he was saying. For years, I had continued to wonder how before our elders’ very eyes the country has been moving from grace to grass since independence. But no more, especially as before my own very eyes too, I have seen how dearth of good leadership has progressively deprived us of the dividend of democracy that we fought hard to get.

It is sad that this is where we are 24 years after returning our soldiers to their barracks. The price we paid for this democracy. Tinubu, the price! The price!!

Is it newspaper houses that were shut down as part of the fallout of the June 12 protests that we want to talk about? In some cases for over one year with the then military authorities not having any feeling for how the affected journalists and other workers in those organisations would eat and take care of their other obligations? Many were imprisoned without trial and some of them never came out as they went in. I guess those of us who served at the top editorial positions of The Punch were lucky, despite the fact that we were unarguably one of the most vociferous critics of military rule and whatever they stood for during the June 12 struggle.

Bola Bolawole that I succeeded as editor of The Punch was locked up in his office for three days while I spent a night at the Shangisha office of the secret police, plus a weekend (three nights actually)somewhere in the Ikeja Police Command where the then commissioner of police (COP Legal) ensured I had the best care pending the time I was granted bail by a court in Ikeja where the COP (Legal) took me to, knowing full well that I would eventually be granted bail because, as he told me, there was no charge that could stand against me. But he had to take me to court to convince his bosses that he had taken some action against me.

If Bolawole and I were so lucky, not so Chris Mammah, deputy editor of The Punch then. Mammah was detained for weeks. Those who knew the role of The Punch then would agree that what Bolawole and I underwent was a mere slap on the wrist considering what the military junta considered as our crime (I mean the paper’s crime) and also what befell some of our other colleagues who had more terrible experiences. Some did not live to tell the story.

The struggle consumed many people, prominent and not so prominent. It consumed many businesses, including Concord Group of Newspapers and other companies owned by the man at the centre of the June 12 protests, Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Abiola.