“I don’t know whether what happened to some of us, is happening now in a democratic dispensation.

forgive Nyerere for his involvement in the Biafra struggle. I recommended that what took place in the past between Nigeria and Tanzania should be forgotten.”

Next, on acoount of his investigations, he was able to report to Obasanjo that Mugabe was likely going to emerge as leader of an independent Zimbabawe. Botswana’s president was married to a white lady, its radio stations also relied on South Africa. The country could not therefore assist in a manner that will bring victory in terms of the struggle. These were some of the paradoxes which his trip unearthed.

One singular experience is still very alive in his memory “The president of Zambia delayed a flight in order to have a breakfast interview with a journalist. I was stunned …In addition the Zambian president treated me like royalty. I went to Colombo, not by commercial flight, but by Zambian presidential jet. After the meeting where the president introduced me to all the presidents and heads of state, as his Nigerian journalist friend, including Joseph Garba, who was leading the Nigerian delegation, he brought me back to Lusaka.” During the conference, he was jokingly referred to as a Zambaian, he recalls.

As a fallout of the trip, Adamu made a number of suggestions to the federal government captured in the work above “Government should set up a South African Relief Fund to which both the general public and the government should contribute… Nigeria’s outstanding payment of $2,000,000 (two million dollars) should be paid to the liberation committee without further delay… Before the year is out, Nigeria should take a stand either militarily or economically, that would definitely shake the entire South African region.”

He adds “most of these suggestions came to pass. Either they were thinking about it, before I made the suggestion, or they found it useful. If you look at the background of Obasanjo, he was even more radical, he had recommended in one of his lectures that excess military equipment of the civil war should be ferried to Southern Africa, to arm those we were recruiting. There was some thinking along those lines.”

Again, just as apartheid was coming to an end, the government of General Ibrahim Babangida asked Haroun Adamu, and four other journalists, namely, Dan Agbese, Onyema Ugochukwu, Olatuniji Dare, and Felix Adenaike, to travel to South Africa to get a feel of the mood and the situation on the ground. Adamu says “We returned and submitted a report to IBB. The government had some level of respect for the profession, and individuals working in it. There was the use of those in the media profession to help government in policy formulation, and this is what is important. I think this is what the present crop of journalists should take seriously, because people take journalists seriously. Look at the New York Times and the Washingtion Post, see what they are doing within the US political system. Free press is pivotal in a democratic dispensation. I don’t know whether what happened to some of us, is happening now in a democratic dispensation.”