Elum Emeka Izeze, former Editor of The Guardian on Sunday, former Editor of The Guardian, and, until 2016, Editor-in-Chief/Managing Director of The Guardian newspapers, never tired of regaling me with an anecdote about an incident in the newsroom sometime in the 1980s. A test candidate, or some rookie reporter, had submitted a copy to Wole Agunbiade, one of the thorough gatekeepers in the newsroom.

As the story goes, Wole, upon reading the copy, was drooling at the prospect of a memorable frontpager, if not lead story. Except that he needed clarification on a couple of points, to enable him tidy up the copy and process it for use. Wole sought out the author of the copy, and as he elicited responses from the candidate, the latter admitted to a crest-fallen Wole that the story was a piece of fiction which he had concocted and delivered!

I am reminded of that anecdote on reading Femi Kusa’s latest hallucinations about The Guardian, Alex Ibru, Andy Akporugo, and Kingsley Osadolor. His three-part drivel is entitled, “June 12 Honours… Knocks On Bayo Onanuga and Co., Alex Ibru,” parts two and three of which he posted on the WhatsApp platform of The Guardian alumni on Sunday, July 20, 2025.

The trilogy earlier appeared in his column, “Natural Remedies,” on July 3, 10, and 17, 2025, in The Nation newspaper, where he frequently misappropriates the column to launch broadsides and ventilate his pettiness with no connection whatsoever to Natural Remedies, which leads one to ask if he as Editor or Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian could have tolerated such blatant misuse of platform by Elizabeth Kafaru who ran a Thursday column on Natural Health at The Guardian.

Anyone who has a modicum of respect for facts, accuracy, and unvarnished account of significant events, would be embarrassed by the cocktail of misstatements, fuzzy recollection, and outright mendacity of Femi Kusa, who has returned to his all too familiar but disgusting pastime of the cowardly vilification on the one hand of the late Founder and Publisher of The Guardian, Alex Ibru, and his pitiable and woeful attempts at impugning the professional integrity of myself, Kingsley Osadolor. Under his own hand, Femi Kusa has issued a caveat emptor on any memoir or autobiography he decides to inflict on the unwary.

Femi Kusa, a former Editor of The Guardian, a paper of record, states erroneously that Alex Ibru was shot on Eko Bridge! He claims unabashedly that one of the issues Alex Ibru faced as Minister of Internal Affairs was the court-ordered release of Chief Great Ogboru! In one paragraph, he mentions Great Ogboru thrice! According to Kusa, “Then, the Great Ogboru case came up.

He was accused of plotting a coup against Abacha. A court freed him. As Internal Affairs Minister, Mr Ibru was to let him out of prison custody….He referred Great Ogboru’s matter to the stubborn and radical Dr Olu Onagoruwa, Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation. Dr Onagoruwa said Ibru should obey the court. So, he freed Great Ogboru. Abacha was enraged.” The elementary task for Femi Kusa is for him to go educate himself about the case and properly identify the individual he was writing about.

While taking refuge under the canopy of uninformed speculation, Kusa asserts in public that Gen. Aliyu Gusau recruited Alex Ibru to join the regime of Gen. Sani Abacha! I am certain that Izeze would chuckle on reading Kusa’s fairy tales of amity with Gen. Gusau. It is also hilarious that Femi Kusa who was the butt of acid jokes by the eggheads on the Editorial Board of The Guardian would turn around in 2025 to pose as a critical voice sought for decisions about editorials.

The joke always was that Femi Kusa went to the Editorial Board meeting with a pile of newspapers and tear sheets of the first edition of The Guardian, and his head was buried in correcting the tear sheets and snacking on the refreshment. He would raise his head once in a long while and make what members often regarded as inane contributions to a topic being discussed.

I witnessed it myself after I became a member of the Editorial Board in 1997. I challenge Femi Kusa to point out any memorable editorials he wrote for The Guardian while he was Editor and later Editor-in-Chief.

In January 2019, the military raided the Abuja offices of Daily Trust, after the newspaper published details of impending military operations against Boko Haram terrorists in the North-East. Femi Kusa weighed in on that occasion, and dragged me into his ponderous pieces, just like he did with his pigsty obituary commentary when Alex Ibru died in November 2011.

He plied false narratives about the closure of The Guardian in 1994, and posed as the supremo of editorial judgment. Then, as now, he denounced the planning of the front page of The Guardian on Sunday edition of August 14, 1994, and the use of the feature photograph which he bizarrely described as two cockerels squaring up for a fight, whereas he was elaborating on his fiction. I was restrained by friends and colleagues from engaging with him in 2019.

The greater persuasion I had was my stern resolve in 1991, as Deputy Editor of The Guardian while Kusa was the Editor, not to respond to his time-wasting, blame-thrashing and often scurrilous memos. News Editor Ogbuagu Anikwe received truckloads of such irritating memos from Kusa. The memos were often copied to his personal file with the HR Department. Understandably, Ogbuagu was relieved on discovering that the HR Department had ignored the copies Kusa forwarded to them.

Five years ago, in 2020, while putting together the manuscript of “The Making of The Nigerian FLAGSHIP (A Story of The Guardian),” Aaron Ukodie and O’seun Ogunseitan sought to interview me. We met in Lagos, and one subject matter of interest to them was the story, “INSIDE ASO ROCK: The raging battle to rule Nigeria,” which I authored and was the lead in The Guardian on Sunday of August 14, 1994.

From the line of questioning, it was clear that they earlier interviewed Femi Kusa who made the same outlandish but self-serving claims, just as he has regurgitated in his latest diatribe published this month in The Nation.

Among other points, I referred Aaron Ukodie and O’seun Ogunseitan to The Guardian library to check out the paper of August 14, 1994. Contrary to the misinformation they had been fed with, I told them that The Guardian on Sunday on that day had first and second editions. The first edition, with all materials submitted by Friday, was rolled off the press in the small hours of Saturday, as was customary, after the printing of the daily newspaper, while the second edition was printed later on Saturday night.

The first edition was usually denoted by a single bullet on the imprint at the last page of the paper, while two bullets indicated a second edition.
I requested them to check if the second edition was not a verbatim reproduction of the first edition. After their research, Aaron later called me to confirm that there had indeed been two editions of the paper and that the story was the same in both editions.

I explained why that was important, because on weekends and public holidays, the dispatch man rode his scooter to deliver papers (including the first edition of The Guardian on Sunday) to top editorial and Management staff at their residences. If any material was to be taken down, that opportunity was available.

But read Femi Kusa’s fairy tale : “I signed the papers for Kingsley Osadolor to go to Abuja and waited for his report as his Editor-in-Chief. I waited all evening on the Saturday Kingsley Osadolor was to take the paper to bed.

“He said the report was not ready. I was to read it, approve it or disapprove of it. If I disapproved of it and Mr Alex Ibru did not like my decision, he could through the back door ask the Board to fire me. I was prepared for that.

“I was, because I understood Mr Alex Ibru well in such delicate matters….Kingsley Osadolor saved my job because he did not show me the report by the time I left the office at about 2 a.m. on the Sunday that the edition was to be published, whereas the printers were to have taken the paper to bed four hours earlier at 11p.m. on Saturday. In the morning, I went for an Hour of Worship. I hoped to return to the office to write a query on why the Editor failed to submit the report for vetting.”

Thirty-one years later, Femi Kusa hasn’t written his query.
To be continued tomorrow.
Osadolor, a Lawyer, is former Editor of The Guardian on Sunday, and former Deputy Managing Director of the newspaper.