Title: AGAINST ALL ODDS
Author(s): Nyaknno Osso with Sam Akpe
Publisher: Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation
Pagination: 399
; 2024
Celebration of Life
The book, AGAINST ALL ODDS, came at a fitting time of a landmark celebration in the Author’s life. In our setting it is not uncommon to have books of biographical nature written and presented to mark milestones in people’s lives. And so, it was with NyaknnoAbasi Osso, a well-known name in the world of information management, research, and news media librarianship, who introduced the book to celebrate his 70th birthday.
Biographical Background
As it is usually the case with works of this nature, AGAINST ALL ODDS traces the origins of the Author, who hails from Ene in Ikot Abasi Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. The only child of his mother, who had lost seven previous children—all sons born to the same husband—NyaknnoAbasi has ten other half siblings born to his stepmother, who had been sought and handed over to his father by his mother. It was an act of love taken by a wife who did not want her husband to be childless in a setting where childbearing remains a strong fruit of marriage. The Author’s first name, NyaknnoAbasi (I leave this one in God’s hands) provides a pointer to the relief and renewed hope that his arrival brought to the family.
Structure of the Book
AGAINST ALL ODDS occupies 399 pages, divided into 18 chapters of a hair-raising and lucid account, which chronicles the Author’s success, trials, and tribulations. I have grouped the chapters under seven headings: Ray Ekpu and the Newswatch years (chapters 1, 5, 6,7); the Homefront (chapters 2, 18); Spirituality (chapters 10,14,15,16, 17); Education (chapters 3,11); the Obasanjo Factor, chapters 8 and 9; Practical Guide (chapters 12,13) whilst chapter 4 (My life as a Disc Jockey) stands alone.
Osso tells his story with the help of Sam Akpe, a competent writer and editor, who also serves as a consulting editor at Osso’s Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation. Osso credits Akpe with the idea that his autobiography should be written “as a source of encouragement to the younger generation.” It is a task, Osso informs the reader, that entailed organising “20 sessions of ‘conversational interviews’ each lasting for about five hours, to produce this book” for which he remains indebted to Akpe.
Career Highlights
AGAINST ALL ODDS presents Mr. Osso as an achiever with a good story to tell. His claim to fame rests on several props. These are his early work from 1975 to 1984 at establishing a news media research centre at the Chronicle Newspapers in Calabar, his exploits at Newswatch Magazine from 1984 to 1988, where research assumed a central seat in newspaper publishing, and birthed a significant work, “The Newswatch Who is Who”. The third was his association with Olusegun Obasanjo, first as a consultant to the African Leadership Forum initiative. The fourth was his involvement with the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library project. The fifth rests on the Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation. The last and by no means the least is the retracing of his steps from a spiritual wilderness like the Biblical Prodigal Son to a return to his faith, a reconciliation with his maker, and exploits in expanding the Kingdom Business.
Individually, these were commendable initiatives that expanded the frontiers of record-keeping, information management, knowledge-spreading, and spiritual fulfilment. Collectively, they amounted to groundbreaking developments in a fifty-year journey by a committed professional whose diligent exploits have been complemented by several destiny helpers and an abiding faith in God.
The result is the amazing autobiography of the 70-year-old man from the staid, rural life of Ene in Akwa Ibom State. It is an account that takes the reader on an excursion of the academic city of Ibadan, the commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos, the intellectual gathering at Otta, and the guiles and wiles of Nigeria’s political capital city of Abuja. It is a journey through the leading cities of Europe and the United States in the quest for linkages that have brought significance to the information management business, and attention of the right type to Nigeria as a country.
There are many important themes in the book, AGAINST ALL ODDS, but, perhaps, the predominant one is one of self-actualisation. It is a story with useful nuggets on how ambition can drive success, how one’s environment can influence one’s outlook and guide action. It is an account that shows how time, location, opportunity and the company one keeps can guide one’s destiny. It also stresses how spiritual sensitivity can provide the balance that life needs.
For one who comes from rural Nigeria, Nyaknnoabasi Osso has come a long way to rise to the zenith of his profession, rubbing shoulders with society’s high and mighty at home and abroad. Throughout the book, the tone is upbeat as the author never betrays any tinge of self-doubt. Rather, his story is one of the triumphs of the human spirit AGAINST ALL ODDS.
After graduating from secondary school at 16 in his native home, Osso relocated to Ibadan in search of greater opportunities to expand his educational horizon. An uncle, Prof. Eno Jumbo Udo had arranged for him to live with his young family in Ibadan whilst preparing for admission into the university to study Medicine. That was not to be as he was admitted to study Chemistry, which the uncle advised him to reject and resit the examination to Medical School.
Chance Encounters
It was whilst studying to retake the examination that a chance encounter with the University library altered Osso’s career path to Library Studies.
“When I stepped into the University of Ibadan Library. Everything changed. I made up my mind to live with books. The place was so neatly organised that I started wondering whether anyone ever touched those books. I was to later discover that it takes an organised mind to organise a good library. I became thoroughly influenced by the Librarian, Mr. K. Mahmud, an Egyptian” (p232).
Another chance encounter with his uncle’s friend, Prof. Donald Ekong, who on learning that Osso had just completed a course in Library Studies and had started working at Ibadan asked him to come to Calabar and work at the University of Nigeria Campus, where he was the pioneer VC. Osso’s trip to Calabar showed that Prof. Ekong was out of town. A chance visit to the State Library paved the way for his employment there. Another chance meeting with Mr. Raymond Ekpu, editor of the Chronicle, took him to the Chronicle, where he was asked to write a feasibility study on how to set up a news media research centre at the Chronicle.
The assignment, funded by the Chronicle Newspapers Ltd, took him throughout the East, then to the North, Lagos, and Ibadan, and resulted in the conclusion that “apart from the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and Daily Times, no other media organisation had anything we could call a library” (p9).
Ekpu wanted Osso to implement his recommendations, which eventually led to his joining the Chronicle and bade goodbye to the idea of working with Prof. Ekong in the university in Calabar. Osso distinguished himself at the Chronicle. When Ekpu, his destiny helper, left Calabar for Lagos, Osso remained in the service of the Chronicle until another chance encounter brought Ekpu and the late Dele Giwa to Calabar for the 1982 Convention of the Nigerian Guild of Editors. Ekpu introduced Osso to Giwa, who was impressed with the work he was doing. Later, Giwa invited Osso to join the Concord but before Osso could take up the appointment, other events dictated that a bigger opportunity was lurking round the corner. The birth of Newswatch afforded Osso to set up the Newsmedia Research Library, which launched him into national prominence. The newsmagazine became known for the high regard it placed on research, and the editors graciously sang the praise of Osso as the research chief.
Nyaknno says of the impact of Newswatch:
“The rise of Newswatch was a result of the quality of researchers, the competence of reporters, writers, and the editors. There were people within the system that made the work of reporters and editors easy. Newswatch had good writers. But the researchers made their job easy. They were not journalists. But they performed vital functions. When the writers got relevant information from the researchers, they used such information to background their stories and pass them to either Dan Agbese or Yakubu Mohammed or Uncle Ray, and finally Giwa. What this meant was that most of the reporters would only do the leg work, then they would give their reports to the senior writers who would write and pass them to the editors. The editors would edit, and by the time that story got to Giwa, it would be a brand-new story. The name of the reporter would just be added for the fact that they wanted to give him or her confidence to continue, knowing that one day, he too would be an editor.” (p64).
His stay at Newswatch gave him the opportunity to introduce a well-received product, the “Newswatch Who-is-Who” as the first step in diversifying the organisation’s income stream. It also betrayed a weakness in their marketing department and signalled the beginning of division in the organisation. The marketing team did not see the publication as an organisational product; rather some saw it as an ego-trip by the research desk. The confusion was further compounded when an initial order of a print run of 2500 copies ballooned into an order for 10,000 copies.
Says Osso,
“At that point we did not consider the implication of printing 10,000, in terms of size and warehousing. When the printing was completed and delivered in a trailer, the question was where do we store all the books?” (P288).
The Author suffered a breakdown because of the attendant stress in producing the book; it also gave him the opportunity to start thinking about life beyond Newswatch.
Legacy and Impact
His next significant step took him to work with General Olusegun Obasanjo as a consultant to the Africa Leadership Forum. Osso had approached him based on what he read in the Daily Times, and a subsequent meeting convinced Obasanjo that the idea of a data bank for the Forum made eminent sense. It also showed the Author’s drive, ambition, and farsightedness.
“People warned me when I started working with him. They said, “This man doesn’t give money to people. Why are you going to attach yourself to him?” But that attachment has opened several doors and created the right connections for me. My decision to work with him was because I didn’t just want to work in a media library and end there” (p89).
Another idea crossed Osso’s mind, while he was at Newswatch. He had read about how President Jimmy Carter opened his presidential library on October 1, 1986. His curiosity led him to clip the story and subsequently find more information on it.
“From there, I made a proposal to Baba—in 1988. The thrust of my proposal to Obasanjo was that there is a tradition in the United States of America, that when you become the president, you don’t just leave the office of the president and go home. You become a statesman, and then they organise all the papers that you used in developing policies during your stay as president; all the engagements that you had; everything surrounding that administration is packaged in what they call a presidential library where people come to do research on your administration. I told him that in his own case, right from the time he and others forcefully took over power from General Yakubu Gowon in 1975, to when he handed over to President Shehu Shagari in 1979, such documentation would be of huge interest to politicians, historians, students, journalists, academics, to mention a few. Those materials were supposed to be kept in one place for proper referencing, research, proper recording and storage—so that nothing gets lost. That means if anybody is doing research on him, he knows where to get information about him. That is how it is done in America. He liked the proposal” (90-91).
But nothing came of it until 1998 when Obasanjo was released from prison following General Sani Abacha’s death, and Obasanjo was planning to run for the country’s presidency. One thing led to the other and Osso was corralled into Obasanjo’s campaign research team and subsequently appointed a senior assistant when Obasanjo assumed office in 1999.
His stay with President Obasanjo in the Presidential Villa gave him the opportunity to realise the presidential library concept—the first of such endeavour in Africa. He was sent on tour of presidential libraries in the United States of America, namely President Jimmy Carter’s Library in Atlanta; President Bill Clinton’s Library in Little Rock, Arkansas; President Ronald Reagan’s Library in Simi Valley, California; and President George W. Bush’s Library at the College Station in Texas (p112).
Today, Osso devotes his energy to the work of the Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation in the firm conviction that it offers a path to enthroning a pride of place to biographical and historical research as a tool of development. It is what Akpe describes as “Osso’s magnus opus because it is a breath-taking, almost limitless, up-to-the-minute online archival and retrieval system, a first of its kind in Nigeria.”
Spiritual Journey
Nyaknno Osso has suffered a lot of challenges in his life’s journey. Dreams of demons and spiritual attacks have tortured him; acts of wickedness have wearied him. When sickness and restlessness turned his life into a nightmare, he shopped around for peace, moving from one religious gathering to another in search of the elusive peace of mind. He attributes these setbacks to his spiritual waywardness along the way. For 20 years (1970 – 1990), he stayed away from the Church.
“While I was struck and almost paralysed with the unknown sickness, one of the pastors who prayed for me declared that it was rebellious of me to walk away from God, after my mother had ordained me in her womb and given me a name, NyaknnoAbasi. He said that such (an) ungodly attitude meant that I had condemned myself to challenges. The sickness was therefore seen as an avenue for me to return to God’s original plan for my life—which was that I would be a man of God. That was how I started finding my way back again. God saved me from untimely death” (p367).
His spiritual retracing of steps assures him that,
“You cannot be a good Christian until you imbibe and allow the Spirit of God that lives in you to be activated, or you encourage the activation of the Holy Spirit that lives and dwells in you. Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:16 that we should not tamper with this body, because it does not belong to us. It is the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in it. How many Christians know that the Spirit of God dwells in them? If we knew, we would not do most of the things we do” (p126).
Without a doubt, AGAINST ALL ODDS presents Osso as a man of passion for hard work and achievement, who does nothing in half measures, and who is an embodiment of God’s abounding grace. It offers a lot to chew upon to the youths and the elderly. It is a book of insights into the worlds of Information Management, Journalism, Politics, Religion, and Spirituality.
