Honing the Craft – A Conversation with Eugenia Abu

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Eugenia Abu is a distinguished broadcaster, author, media consultant, and one of Nigeria’s finest broadcasters and compères renowned for anchoring the 9:00 pm news on the Nigerian Television Authority for seventeen years.

In episode 24 of Her Media Diary podcast, Dr Yemisi Akinbobola had the honour of speaking with Eugenia Abu, a distinguished Nigerian broadcaster, author, and media consultant. Eugenia’s journey from being an intern at a local radio station to an internationally recognized media icon is nothing short of inspirational. Her story is a testament to the power of perseverance, mentorship, and continuous learning.

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I am beyond excited to have you here, Eugenia Abu. I am often the researcher asking people who they saw on TV when they were younger that inspired them to do the profession. Now, I didn’t live in Nigeria for too long, but there are two things that I remember on TV in Nigeria back then. One was Indian films, and the second was Eugenia Abu on NTA. But you’ve done so much more than that. You’re a very intelligent and well-read woman. You’ve got an English degree from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. You’ve got two master’s degrees, one in communication policy studies from City University of London, and a second in creative writing from Kyle University. And you’re an alumni of the Chevening scholarship and a USIS fellow. And I’m not done yet. In 2007, you published your book In the Blink of an Eye, And then you later published a collection of poetry called, Don’t Look at Me Like That. And again, It doesn’t end there. In 2018, you set up the Eugene Abu Media Center, which is a reading and mentorship hub for young Nigerian creatives. And obviously, for your contributions and journalism, you’ve won a whole load of prizes, including the prestigious Nigerian Media Merit Award for best broadcasters. And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg because we won’t have enough time to list everything that you’ve achieved. So I am more than honored to have you here.

I’m truly delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

I know that you were born in Kaduna in the sixties, right? And you started writing very early on back then. What was life like for you growing up in Kaduna back then?

I was born in Kaduna, and then I grew up in Zaria, which is an hour away from each other. I went to Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, but somewhere along the line, my father moved to Makurdi to become a permanent secretary of a newly created state. I did my primary school in staff school, ABU Zaria, and then went on to do my secondary school in Kaduna, although I was born in Kaduna. So there it is.

So what was life like in those early years?

My parents both worked. My mom was a nurse, later becoming a matron and the owner of a hospital in her later years. My dad was a civil servant, so it was pretty quiet. And we had quite a big family. There were eight of us. It was a big house and I had my elder sister, who’s still my favorite and closest. Her name is Eucharia. My twins are named after both of us. I cried a lot when she was going to secondary school. So I jumped into secondary school at nine. After she left without me, I made such a storm that I was sent along to join her.

So you had a love for books very early on because I also read somewhere that you started writing from the age of seven. Is that true?

Eugenia Abu: That is true indeed. My dad would go to work, and I kind of like, scribbled a lot. I was a child who stood on a stool and brought down Encyclopedia Britannica. And I was reading things above my age grade. But my dad was the sort of person who paid attention. So he would give me lots of sheets of paper. So I always had paper, and then I had all the stories I would write and my father was patient. He would listen, and he would refill my paper. He would buy me pens of different colours and made it easier for me to be so inspired by him. So I would write a lot of things, and he paid attention. Today, parents don’t look at what their children are writing. I think my dad could tell in his spirit that I would be a writer one day. And so he encouraged me by all these pieces of paper around the house. He never shredded them. He never let anyone throw them away. He put them together in a file for me. My mom was the policewoman of the house. My father couldn’t raise his voice. My mom was the one who was the disciplinarian. My father was a quiet disciplinarian, was, excited whenever he saw us do some work, and I guess he was the proudest man on the planet when I began to anchor the network news many years later.

Tell me more about your relationship with your sister and how you became so close.

There were eight of us. There were six daughters and two sons. My brother was right behind me, the senior son and my elder sister was the one whom I accompanied to secondary school. Even though my father, thought at the time that I was too young, at nine, he literally didn’t want me to start. He thought I was too young and that I needed to grow up a little more to make secondary school. He was an educationist so he felt that I wasn’t mature enough. But at some point, my mom drove me all the way from Zaria to Kaduna and I wrote the entrance exam. And so, our then principal said to my father, don’t worry, she would not pass. If she does not pass, then you can come and take her. She’s very young. She’s not likely to pass the exams. Little do they know, that for me, when you say I can’t do something, then I resolve that I will conquer it. And I did conquer it. And so my life in the secondary school began. My sister was my confidant, was the one I could run to when a senior was bullying me, she would take punishment for me if I was a little too chatty and got on the wrong side of the law. And we bonded harder. And all our lives, she has remained the same. And it’s because of that closeness that my husband decided that he would name the children, the twins, after myself and herself. She’s an architect. I’m a broadcaster. I’m more well-known. She’s very quiet. I’m chattier than she is. But honestly, I miss her very much when she’s not around.

I read somewhere that you initially wanted to be a lawyer but got into broadcasting accidentally. Tell me about that. What inspired you to want to become a lawyer?

I’m that person who wants to stop, come down from a car and try to ensure that somebody who is being worsted by a taxi driver, that taxi driver doesn’t get away with murder if the other person is right. I don’t like to see injustice. So from very young, I felt that the best way to be able to contribute to that side of things in life was literally to become a lawyer and defend people. And for a long time, I was so sure that that was what I would do. And every time the likes of Femi Falana or those big names went to jail for something they wanted to correct, or for something that they were not happy with, or they were having issues with the law, my mom would say, ‘look at, I know you, this is what you are going to be like then what would you do with your children?’ And then I say, ‘But those people have children, too. We’ll just pack a bag, and when it’s time, I’ll be going until we resolve it, then I’ll come back home.’ And she would laugh. But as providence would have it, they didn’t give me law at ABU Zaria. There was absolutely nothing I didn’t do. I tried, I applied, and I passed, but they kept saying that there were too many people wanting to study Law from my State. They couldn’t take all of us. And so my mom said, ‘You know, you’re a young lady. I don’t want you to wait forever to get this admission, take your second best’, which at the time was English. But I think that God understood that it was best for me to do that. I may never have become a broadcaster if I read law, so God must have his plans for me, I believe, and I’ve enjoyed the ride so far.

Tell us about that journey into broadcasting. And how did you start that journey?

It was an interesting journey because I was sitting at home, having finished school in 1976, and then gone on to do my A-levels for two years. So by 1978, I had applied to Zaria and I had like a three-month wait until 1979 to get into school. And I was at home, bored to death when I heard a radio station doing the test transmission, that was Radio Benue in Makurdi. And so I went over to the station. I first asked my dad that I was listening to the radio and every time this radio station comes up, they’re having test transmission. ‘I want to go find out what that is about.’ He said, well, just go. And I went. And I met this gentleman who said to me, have you ever done any kind of broadcasting before? And I said no, I just wanted to know if I could get an opportunity to be on air. He said, have you been auditioned before? I didn’t know what audition meant, which is a professional word for have you been tested? Is your voice good? Do you know what to say? Do you know how to go about this? So I said, I have no idea what audition is. He said, have you ever gone to a radio or TV station and they tested you? I said, no, I’ve never done any. In fact, I’ve never been in any one of them. He goes, well, I have to audition you. At the time he said it, I had great fear because I had no idea what this was, what kind of exercise is auditioning. And I went into the studio. He ran the tape, ran my voice and said, well, I think you can start tomorrow. It was incredible. And so I went home and I said to my dad, well, I’ve got a job now. It’s a vacation job. And then I went on to do request programs. I ran continuity. So I was waking up in my home at 04:00 a.m. it was my test for being a good broadcaster. They would come to fetch me at five so I could open the station at 06:00 a.m. A Lot of the time I would set an alarm, which would not go off. So I would be dragging myself out of bed, trying to freshen up and running into the car. It introduced the discipline of the craft to me. You had to be there. You had to open the station at 06:00 a.m. Otherwise, what kind of continuity announcer are you? So I ran continuity announcing for them, and this lasted another four or five months. Then I got admitted into Zaria and left. But for every vacation job, I returned to Radio Benue for the whole three years while I was in the university, they took me with open arms, unlike today, where young people think it’s all about the money. For me, it was the craft. Nobody paid me anything. And believe me, the reward was just being able to practice, to learn under bigger names or bigger broadcasters or senior broadcasters, to manage equipment, to write the words, and just to be available to do the job. So by the time I did the continuity announcing, they were now giving me programs to do, so beyond doing the continuity announcing, especially in the morning belt, I now had programs I was recording. I now had live programs I was presenting, for example, the request program, where letters would be written at the time, not the Internet. You read a letter from someone, and he will make a request of a certain type of music. It was also there that I learned NTBB (Not To Be Broadcast). We basically would have music that was not right for broadcast and we had big, bold writings on them saying, NTBB and the continuity announcer will never play that music. You can go and find out why. But then your management had already said this was not good for airing and you would never play it. You never crossed that line. So that’s the journey. And so when I finished from the university, the radio wanted to hire me. At the time, of course, you had three, four, five people wanting to hire you. And my father said to me, I think you should choose between the radio and proper civil service, and you might want to go and learn some new things in the civil service. So I joined the Directorate of Information in my state, and that was where NTA headhunted me.

I want to take a few steps back to your time at Radio Benue and studying at the same time. If you were to reflect on that whole period and pick one thing that you want to pass on to others. What would that be in terms of your experiences and your reflections on that time?

Allow me to pick two. One is that sometimes you are in school and you don’t pay any tuition. Radio Benue was a school for me, and I think it’s important that those who are listening understand that you can be in a mentoring space or you can be in a school space, a learning space professionally, where you didn’t pay and you should take it seriously and not look at the money. I learned quite a lot from people, for me, it was a learning curve. The second thing was, there was discipline. It was about the craft. your words, every word was important. Your supervisor ensured that they saw a script until they could trust you. So it’s about the discipline and the craft that you knew you had to be early to open the station for your listeners.

So by the time NTA was headhunting you, were you ready?

By the time NTA was headhunting me, I would say I was one-third ready. And, I’ll tell you why. Because I was coming for every vacation job, and I was doing this vacation job with the radio Benue. But there was an interregnum of one year where I did national youth service with Ogun State Radio. So I went from radio to radio. After that first radio experience, I would say perhaps I was one-quarter ready. I was familiar with the terrain by the time I went to OGBC and they knew that I had this experience, they gave me more responsibility as a Corper, and they gave me a children’s program and a women’s program called Homemakers. I was producing two programs a week. I don’t think there was any other Corper that had that responsibility. So I was learning quickly how to interview, who to interview, and for what. I was learning quickly how to run a children’s program early on in my life. By the time I arrived at NTA, I was halfway ready.

I would say it was an interesting dynamic that when I arrived at the Information Ministry, we were writing newsletters which were ending up under the staircase and in the rain. And that upsets me because we were putting a lot of work in the newsletter. So we had the Benue State government newsletter, which I contributed to, and then one day I said to the Director of Information, sorry, sir, can we not have a TV program that would encapsulate these things and attract more attention? I don’t know whether anybody is reading m this newsletter, though. And I think it’s important that we have what we’re saying and what the government is doing thrust to the people in a pleasant way. And I think TV will do it better than a newsletter. Makurdi is a very provincial town, but a very warm community. And I’m like, TV will attract the attention of everyone. He said he thinks it’s a good idea. So where do I want to get a studio then? There weren’t many studios. I said, well, we can use NTA. They are a Federal government institution, they should partner with us. He said, then go and ask them. I was a brand new grade-level eight officer. I had senior officers. So I said, sir, why are you sending me there? He said ‘Because I think you might be able to get their attention.’ So I went to NTA, booked an apartment with the GM, and said, my Director sent me. Could we have a slot on television and could we use your equipment? We don’t have any to do a TV program. And I explained what the TV program was about. He accepted. And my boss said, ‘Now, what will we be doing every week’? I said, sir, you should speak to your principal officers. He said, ‘No, I want you to go and write out something’. Go and do the script for the first episode. I don’t know why he was picking on me, because I brought the idea. So I wrote what the first three editions will be. Then one day he said, ‘So we’re going to have a TV program and we don’t have a presenter’. I said, ‘Yes, sir. we must get a presenter’. He said, ‘So who would that be’? I said, ‘Sir, I don’t know’. He said, ‘You have done radio before. You go and do the presentation’. I said, ‘Sir, I’ve never done anything on TV. He said, ‘Go and try’. And that’s how my journey on television began with that program, first four editions. I had, no clue. I had to learn how to look at the camera. I had to learn how to wear the right clothes all on my own. I had to look at other TV broadcasters and see what they were doing. I mean, this was 1982, for goodness sake. I had no clue. So, I then found that everyone was tying a scarf for television. And I thought, okay, let me try. I didn’t know how to tie a good scarf then, but that was the house style of NTA. And I thought, let me try and see. And then after six weeks, I said to him, everybody is asking if the governor is going to run, sir, whether he will run for a second tenure. he says, ‘How is that our business’? I said, ‘Well, we are a government program, we should ask the governor whether he is running or not’. Then he said to somebody beside him, “This girl is truly crazy. She is young and crazy. She wants to ask the governor if he is running. Well, we can’t access the governor. If you can access him, you can interview him.” And I got my first big interview because I then got the governor’s attention. He agreed for us to interview him. And I asked him the question everybody was asking on the street. ‘Are you running, sir? Your Excellency, would you be running for a second term? And he said to me, ‘If my people ask me to run, Eugenia, I will run. The interview was well received. It was statewide, and, my Director couldn’t believe that I pulled it off. That’s my first big interview among several others. But that was the journey. It was from that program that NTA decided that this young lady had something. The general manager whom I went to see then decided to ask me if I wanted to work for NTA. I said no, I wasn’t interested. I was quite happy where I was.

My father said to me, If you marry and you work with the government Information Ministry if he decides that he wants to work in another State, you can’t join him. A federal institution is such that you can move from place to place, and NTA has stations everywhere. You might want to take that opportunity. And once my dad said so, I took it and joined NTA as an editor. So I was at the desk, and one day, I can’t remember the exact circumstance, one newscaster didn’t come to work. And this general manager then ordered that I go and read the news. I panicked at first.  He says, “I’m not asking you. It’s a directive. You can speak well. When you came to ask me if you could do a program for the government, you presented it at the time. What stops you from reading the news? And that was the story of how I began to read the news.

Right! You said no, but you did it. And that’s the key thing. You did it anyway.

Yeah, I did it. I had to find the courage from somewhere. And having done radio for a while, again, the craft is more with radio. If you’re a broadcaster, nobody can see you. It’s the inflection of your voice, your tone, and, the general ambience of how you present the program that makes a radio program exciting. You must colour the words for people to believe. When Nelson Mandela was released, I was listening to the radio. The presenter at the time was phenomenal. I could literally see Nelson coming out of jail with his hands up in the air because of the way in which the radio presented it. So if you are going to be a good TV presenter, if you’ve done radio, you’ve done the job three-quarter way. Radio prepared me for the ability to step up a little higher because I’ve already done the ambience, and the tone. So my writing, my ability to present, inflect my voice, assisted me to become the TV presenter that I’ve become today.

So how did you go from NTA Makurdi to being a nationally recognized anchor?

That’s a really, important question at this juncture. My husband then moved to Lagos. Lagos was a bigger space. And he was pursuing his dreams. He himself was a radio journalist and Head of Current Affairs of Radio Benue, which is where I met him while I was interning. And so he moved to Lagos not to broadcast but to do business. So within a year of living in Lagos with him and being at NTA, I then went on to do my masters at, City University. I came back from my Master’s program and then fully joined Lagos on transfer and was immediately placed on the desk. I wasn’t reading the news for like 3-4 months. And this is because to be in the big league required quite a number of things, one of them being that you watched those who were doing it before. And so I was watched while I did my editorial work. An adopted uncle who was in the Administrative department then said to the Deputy Director of News, ‘Did you ever know that Eugenia was a good newscaster in her state? You should put her on the bulletin’. I don’t think anybody paid attention at first. Then one day they decided to try me at 07:00 p.m. because you really begin to prepare yourself for the big league by reading the smaller bulletin, the 04:00 news, the 07:00 p.m. news. Before you finally get onto the 09:00 p.m. news. And one day I was suddenly put on for the 09:00 news. And, that, again was the journey to network news.

And what did all of that teach you in that journey to network news?

It taught me that there’s a process, and today that process is vacated by a lot of young people. They want to read it now. They’ve not been prepared. They’ve not watched anybody do it before. They’ve not been mentored. you need a lot of patience to make the big league.

And when you think about that first time on air, on network news, just take us through your mind throughout the whole process, throughout the time you’re on air, what was going through your mind?

At first, I didn’t think much about it, especially because I had done this over and over in Makurdi for several years. however, I was conscious of the fact that I was now being watched by an entire nation. I felt, for me at the time, that it was the weight and the responsibility on my shoulders that I now represent a bigger thing. I now represented the entire nation. I now have the responsibility to pronounce people’s names properly, no matter where they came from. I may be familiar with names in my state. It’s time now to pronounce Yoruba names as close to the original speakers as possible. It’s time now to pronounce Hausa names. You now knew that it was important that you know the various heads of state, the various prime ministers, and how their names are pronounced. Because we also had foreign news. You now know that you cannot say Ak Milan instead of AC Milan. Those things became weighty issues because if you got it wrong, you had your bosses standing by the door. So it meant that I had a lot of weight on my shoulders. in my head I was thinking, will I measure up to my colleagues I found on the ground who have been on this trajectory longer than I’ve been? Will I measure up or will I, after two weeks, be told that I didn’t measure up, therefore I could no longer read it? which would have been quite a disappointment and an embarrassment.

So today, as we speak in 2024, with the work that we at African Women in Media and so many organizations do around women’s rights and media, the environment is that women working in many industries have seen a significant shift over the last decade or so. But working in the industry since the late seventies, what was it like for you as a woman?

It was tough, I can tell you for free. There was this general impression that women just had really nice faces and therefore served as props on TV for a very long time. At my time, it was a little less, but still, there was that discrimination. And I would use a story to illustrate it. I had a producer who was male and at that time I was the lead anchor. And so this gentleman who was junior to me, I was leading him for the network news for the day. And, the tradition was that the lead newscaster takes the most important interview, and it usually would be one live interview. And this interview was about Ken Saro Wiwa. He had died and the commonwealth had expelled Nigeria as a result of his passing. An Ambassador from South Africa, I think the Nigerian Ambassador who was visiting had been mandated by the government to express government displeasure with being expelled. And so this ambassador was visiting, and I was told that there was going to be a live interview. By rank, I was the one supposed to interview the gentleman, and so I read everything I could possibly find in order for me to be able to interview him, and I was ready for this interview. And then I showed up and found that in the scripting and numbering, my male colleague had been given the interview, and he was my junior. He had only joined network service years after I had joined. I said to the producer, is this fellow going to do the interview knowing what the tradition is? He said yes. And I just ignored it in order not to sour my mood. I remember at the time, the president of the National Association of Women Journalists was pretty angry, and she came to me and said, how would you allow that to happen? Why didn’t you fight it? I said, no, I’m not very good at fighting in the office space. Don’t worry, it’ll take care of itself as we go along. And one day, two months later, the same producer said to me, ‘Could you pronounce this name, please? I know you travel a lot, so you must know how to pronounce this name from France, could you help us pronounce this and teach the newscaster’? So I said, I’m sorry, I think you’ve forgotten that I’m not that bright. How could you be asking me this question? I don’t know much. He said, ‘How could you say that, Mrs Abu’? I said because you remember two months ago when you allowed my junior to lead? And so I got my revenge like that. So I don’t think women should do the physical fighting. I don’t think you should raise your voice in the office space. If you’re a good writer, you can fight whatever discrimination by writing. I went through a lot of it over time, where a male colleague will be put ahead of you or a less endowed colleague be promoted ahead of you. You have your pen and your paper, and you have your voice at a meeting. Don’t raise it. Stay calm. and fight it for all other women coming behind you. That’s the job.

I remember when you spoke at the African Woman in Media 2018 Conference at the University of Ibadan, and you mentioned that when you were having your baby, nobody advised you on the options for maternity leave. Tell me more about that story.

Over the years, I’ve been blessed with a number of children while I was working. When people ask me when I give talks to women, what’s your work-life balance like? How did you manage? I think God was just kind to me. Apart from this, you have to be intentional. You cannot have children and be at every party and then work so hard. So my social life pretty much suffered so that the window I had which I would have spent doing my social life, I spent with my children. I had spent all my life in NTA, coming back to work at the end of my three-month maternity leave after having my last baby. I still close from work with everybody else at the same time. And nobody, not a soul told me that because I was a nursing mother, I should be closing earlier, because they give nursing mothers up to six months, a year, to breastfeed, and therefore, you were expected to close earlier than most. I had no idea. The closing time was 2 pm. I was still closing at 5 pm, and I had no idea. Nobody told me. So, for all my children, I literally did the work of a non-nursing mother without knowing that this existed. I think I was young when I joined, so I had no idea that these things existed. Women should take time to see the extant rules. There was no creche to put my children, so I had to juggle between going back home, checking on them, and trying my best to go back and breastfeed.

In fact, when I look back, I’m like, how did I do this? Because there was a time when I sat in the car bawling because my house girl had just sacked me. You know what it’s like. You have someone who helps you look after the child. You have a meeting at 02:00 and she turns up and says, I have to go now. My uncle is calling me at 01:00. You’re like, they’ve warned you at this meeting that you’re always coming late because of the children. You send word that you’re going to be late. You come in 20 minutes or five minutes, but you’ve sent word. And then on this day, after all of this, you don’t even want to not turn up and your house girl sacks you. So I make friends with my neighbours, I’m friendly with my cousins and my sisters who live in the same town. And in a snap, I can drop the children off at any of these homes. It was good then. Not anymore. There were house girls you could trust even then, but then they sacked you still, you know. So you have to prepare your mind that this can happen when you have babies, you have a meeting, the baby is bawling, the maid has sacked you. It’s crazy, but we conquered it.

I often read several interviews that you’ve given, and I noticed that a few of them asked pretty much the same question about how you maintain your beauty. I noticed that you always give exactly the same answer. You said, ‘I don’t know if I am that beautiful to be able to answer the question’. Now, my question is, you’ve been in the media for so long, and I suppose you’re very much used to questions that are quite offensive, like that kind of question. I also imagine you’ve built a lot of resilience and approaches of tackling these kinds of gendered experiences. How have you built that resilience?

I’ve had an interviewer who had asked me before what it was like to be pursued when I was younger and whether broadcasters were more given to going out with soldiers. And I said to him, ‘Well, I wouldn’t know. I was never pursued by a soldier, so I can’t answer that question. And there was another one. He didn’t ask me the question, but when he wrote the interview out, he did say that it was clear that I had an acid that I was using to stay the way I was. I had to call him when the interview got published in the papers, and everybody was calling to say, what’s this acid? Can we buy it? And I said to him, what’s this? But before I called him, I’d actually checked it out. It’s an acid that is inborn, in your DNA that keeps you looking young. And so I called him and I said, ‘Why didn’t you just say you thought that Mrs Abu looked ever young or evergreen? Why are you using this acid that is making the whole world call me?’ Keep it simple, that’s the journalist mantra. I get all these incredible questions. Some questions that are private about my family. I try not to talk about my family as well. If you see a lot of my interviews, they ask me about my husband. And I always say ‘He’s my friend, he married me when we were very young and all of those things’. But I think the best advice for anybody who is so public is to keep away from the public as much as possible, except it’s absolutely necessary.

Thank you so much. What an inspiration. I think what I’ve learned from your story is not being afraid to take that journey, to be prepared, so that when the opportunity arises, you’re able to hit the ground running, but also always learning and not stopping to learn. Thank you so much.

It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.