The Audaciousness of Nduka Obaigbena

Nduka Obaigbena, the founding chairman and editor-in-chief of the ThisDay/Arise Media Group, evokes different passions depending on the audience that is assessing him. What you cannot deny is what is known as chutzpa—that quality of boldness, fearlessness, and self-assuredness that complements his power of vision to dream big, that undergirds his creative ingenuity and sustains the drive to bring it to reality. This quality is acknowledged in different strains in the book, Entertainment Media: Redefining Reality, Situating Entrepreneurship, edited by Lanre Idowu and Eniola Bello.

In it, Chief Segun Osoba describes Obaigbena as “the one who took the media by storm”. Waziri Adio calls him the man to “whom nothing is impossible”; Tunji Lardner jr. describes him as “the precocious phenom”, and Mayowa Idowu acknowledges him as the “Duke of Media engagement”.

Today, he is an accomplished media entrepreneur who understands his setting and who manages to blend the demands of business with the exacting realities of professional expectations. He has earned for himself the epaulettes of a bold advocate for a free, strong, and enterprising media, and an unwavering defender of free expression and of the media. As an entrepreneur, he has provided jobs for numerous people in the media industry. As a professional, he has trained many leaders in the media and government.

Born on 14th July 1959 in Ibadan, Oyo State into the family of late Prince Ukperi and Princess Margaret Obaigbena of the royal family of Owa Kingdom in Delta State, Obaigbena attended Edo College, Benin City for his secondary school education, before crossing over to the University of Benin where he earned an honours bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts. He has also attended various professional and management courses in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Republic of South Africa.
Obaigbena’s media journey began with the Nigerian Observer in 1978, where he displayed his creative talents as a satirist, writer, and cartoonist. He later became the coordinating editor of The Dawn magazine. He also worked as a Special Section Representative for the international news magazine, Newsweek. At Time magazine, he helped to develop Special Survey and Country Sections on four African countries: Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco, and Zimbabwe.
In 1986, at the young age of 27, he became the founding editor-in-chief of ThisWeek magazine, a generational publishing statement, which was strong in economic and political analyses, penetrating in national and international affairs, colourful, rich and entertaining in its back-of-book features on art and culture. The publication was an assemblage of some of the nation’s finest journalists at the time.
Obaigbena’s impact became so evident in governance and politics that he was appointed in 1990 as a member of the sub-committee of the Technical Committee on Privatization and Commercialization which executed the privatization programme of the Babangida administration. In 1991, he was a candidate for the Nigerian Senate, and in 1994 he was appointed a member of the Constitutional Conference which drafted the current (1999) Nigeria Constitution.
In 1995, he introduced ThisDay newspaper, which like the defunct ThisWeek also attracted some of the country’s brightest journalists, who have today become respected media entrepreneurs and administrators. Against the grain of conventional wisdom, ThisDay began publishing without its proprietor owning a printing press. Obaigbena’s ThisDay also turned the back page of the newspaper to the prime location for columnists, which today has become an industry standard. It was he who introduced the publication of the full table of daily transactions at the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE); which has also become the norm. His ThisDay newspaper also set the trend in colour paging.
Mr. Obaigbena’s trailblazing activities in the last four decades as a journalist and media entrepreneur have been noticed in critical quarters. In 1998, he received the highest journalistic honour of the fellowship of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (FNGE). He had the honour of being a two-term president of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria and chairman of the Nigerian Press Organisation from 2013 to 2020. He is now a life patron of the NPAN. In 2022, he received the national honour of the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON). Today, he is the 2023 Lifetime Achievement awardee of the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence in recognition of his rich contributions to the Nigerian media and the larger society.