“The TV program I’m doing now is what I was planning when I was arrested. The radio station is something I thought of while I was in there,” she said.
She had been editor in chief of The Sunday Magazine and in 1995 published stories about an alleged coup plot against Abacha. She also had refused to endorse him for president. She and three other journalists were arrested, tried in a secret military court and sentenced to life in prison.
She won the IWMF’s Courage Award in October 1995, soon after being jailed. She was freed three years later, after Abacha died. She spent two years in Virginia writing a book, Days of Terror, on her tortuous experience, then returned to Nigeria to testify before the country’s panel on human rights violations. She confronted the jailers who tried to blind her. After one of them apologized, she forgave him in a riveting move that was seen as a step toward reconciliation and healing.
Today, as chief executive of Spectrum Broadcasting of Nigeria, she rolled out an FM radio station this past summer with a formal inauguration in October. From a sister company, she operates an independent production studio which produces a news feature program used by many media outlets. It is called TSM TV, after the defunct magazine she used to edit. For the most part, she has weaned herself from the parallel job of anchoring the show. She’s got her hands full with building her radio network.
“Over here, you want to build an institution, you build it from scratch. You want to be self-sufficient, so you create your own environment. You put up your own transmission tower,” she said.
The Spectrum complex is outside the new capital city, Abuja, “on a beautiful hill over the city.” There were no roads going to it, no water or electricity.
Building the Spectrum complex has been her most demanding job yet, Anyanwu said. “I’m not a contractor, builder or environmentalist. But I’m trying to set buildings on top of rocks. I have to negotiate with villagers whose ancestors lived there. And how do you get water in a place that is totally dry? We’ve been drilling wells and putting in electricity.”
Once the Abuja station is fully launched, she will seek radio licenses for other parts of Nigeria.
She’s also still trying to get U.S. and European veteran broadcast journalists to come in for hands-on training of her fledgling radio staffers. It’s been decades since she did radio, she said, and she wants to import talented teachers to help train her staff, “to see if I can run a contemporary type of radio.”
She has been disappointed so far. “I haven’t gotten the kind of support I expected to get.” She said the Western media help that comes to Nigeria consists mostly of seminars. “I want someone who will come here and stay six months and work with us,” she said.
With her platter full at the age of 52, she reflects on what it meant to win the Courage Award nine years earlier. In prison, she second-guessed herself “with a lot of questions in my mind about whether I should have done this or should not have done that.” The IWMF recognition she said, “opened my eyes to the fact that, okay, this is not something that is unique to you. Many other people also have problems. And people out there are interested in you and to what happens to you.” In the end, she said, the award reinforced her conviction that “yes, you did right.”
It also came at a crucial time for her health. She was kept in such dank cells that she appeared at risk of going blind. The Courage Award put the jailors on notice “that the world was interested in that person. It made them more careful.”
Another impact was on the Nigerian people, she said. “It’s interesting – but we’re not a people or a society that makes sacrifices. You’re not appreciated for it. But the fact that foreigners took a special interest … it struck home to [Nigerians] that this person did something right, that it was something admirable and it earned quite a bit of respect.”
She said the Nigerian government today should be trying to recognize people who have sacrificed to help change the country, to build them up as role models in the same way that, in the West, a John Glenn or Louis Armstrong were hailed for their achievements and elevated as role models for others.
“We now recognize that we did the right thing. You have to speak truth to power. We now have to stand up and fight. We have to cherish our freedom but we have to reward those who made sacrifices, to build up the country for the greater good.”
She gets plenty of recognition from rank and file Nigerians as she builds her broadcast complex. Her reporters break stories that cause the government to act. Last year, she took a long train trip and documented the pitfalls. Train travel is not dangerous “but the standard is very poor; it doesn’t work very well,” she said. The government grilled the railway boss about her TV show and a week later released funds to improve the system.
Anyanwu said Nigeria’s five-year-old democracy is coming along but with many problems. The government has to strengthen the country’s infrastructure, she said, including better management of oil assets with more revenues going toward better housing, health and relief of poverty. In addition, corruption remains a “huge challenge.”
The media itself faces barriers. “We’re now in the fifth year on our democratic journey. We’re hoping that as we move further and further on this experiment there will be a higher tolerance of free expression.”
Overall, she’s bullish on the future. “There is great potential in Nigeria. It’s a place where you can dream great dreams. In the developed world, there are not too many areas where you can reinvent the wheel, come in with these new ideas and can see it working,” she said.
She is Nigeria’s first woman broadcast entrepreneur but she said women owners are making breakthroughs in many fields, including in oil, “and some of them are fabulously wealthy.”
Corruption and disorder cloud the picture, but she said, “I’ve found it to be a place that challenges you, brings out the best in you if you have that resolve and you have that courage and daring to move on and transcend the difficulties.”