THE LETTER THAT CHANGED NIGERIA'S COURSE

Versão em Português

Translated by Isa Mara Lando

After spending an entire day covering Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa in December 2013, journalist Musikilu Mojeed received a phone call. It was a source who said he wanted to hand over a revealing letter. Mojeed answered the call and never regretted it.

When he got hold of the document, he discovered that it was a message from former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan, who was then serving as the country’s president. In the letter, Obasanjo listed a series of problems with Jonathan’s administration, including failures in tackling corruption and drug trafficking and an inability to end Nigeria’s ethnic conflicts. But its most significant revelation was something else: the letter made it clear that Jonathan, contrary to what he had publicly stated, intended to run for another term in office.

So struck was Mojeed by this information that he worked through the night preparing the story. When it was published, it landed like a bombshell in Nigerian politics.

The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the party to which both Obasanjo and Jonathan belonged, had not been aware of the president’s intentions. The revelation triggered a split within the party. Many prominent politicians who had previously been PDP members defected to other parties, undermining both Jonathan’s governability and his re-election campaign.

The election, held in March 2015, ended in defeat for the incumbent That story was recounted on Sunday, September 6th, by Mojeed himself at the piauí Journalism Festival in São Paulo. He is the editor-in-chief of Premium Times, a newspaper founded in 2011 that has since become a leading force in investigative journalism in Nigeria.

In addition to Mojeed, the festival, held at the Cinemateca Brasileira, featured seven other journalists from different countries who shared their experiences of leading major news organizations during especially turbulent moments. Among them were Dean Baquet, who led The New York Times from 2014 to 2022; Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the digital newspaper The Kyiv Independent; and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. The full list of participants is available here.

Before helping to found Premium Times, Mojeed was part of the reporting team at Next, a newspaper with a national circulation. After publishing a series of reports exposing irregularities in the government of Umaru Yar’Adua (2007-2010), the newspaper became the target of an attempted newsroom raid by state agents. The Nigerian investors who financed the publication were pressured to withdraw their support, and the newspaper, deprived of funding, was forced to shut down.

It was at that point that Mojeed and several colleagues decided to create Premium Times.

To keep the operation financially viable, the newspaper has been exclusively digital from the outset, a pioneering model in Nigeria. “We knew that advertising would never sustain an independent newspaper in a country like ours. If you accept advertising from an organization and criticize it the next day, there is a very good chance they will withdraw their sponsorship without any embarrassment. If we want to remain standing and sustainable, we simply cannot rely solely on advertising,” Mojeed said at the festival.

He was interviewed by Angélica Santa Cruz, a reporter for piauí, and Pedro Borges, co-founder of the news and communications agency Alma Preta.

Mojeed was already a well-known figure in Nigerian journalism when he published the former president’s letter. At the time, he also served as the Nigeria representative of the International Press Institute (IPI), an organization dedicated to defending press freedom around the world.

“We have been trying to educate Nigeria’s security forces about the role of journalists and explain why journalists are not criminals, why they are not the problem,” he said on Sunday, September 6th.

Part of that effort by the IPI took shape in the Black Book project, which identifies by name public officials who have violated journalists’ rights or obstructed the work of news organizations. The publication did not spare even high-ranking officials, including state governors and a police Inspector General. In Mojeed’s view, the project’s impact was immediate. “Today, nobody wants their name to appear in the Black Book.”

This represents progress in a country where the independent press has historically been treated as an enemy of the government and where journalists frequently face threats of violence. Mojeed himself is an example: in March 2020, his home was the target of an attempted break-in. Shortly afterward, Samuel Ogundipe, who was then a reporter for Premium Times, was intimidated by two security agents.

Premium Times’ work also extends to international issues. In October 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly criticized the Nigerian government in language similar to that which he has used toward other countries. He declared that Nigeria would be designated a “country of particular concern” because, according to him, a genocide against the country's Christian population was underway. Mojeed’s newspaper played an important role in showing that the story was not as straightforward as it appeared. The figures cited by Trump were inflated and, behind what was portrayed as a religious conflict, there was, in fact, a broader context of disputes over land and agricultural resources.

General elections in Nigeria are held every four years, and the next one is scheduled for January 2027. Mojeed said that Premium Times will continue its investigative reporting, regardless of who is elected.

“Anything you investigate in your own small corner of the world, anything that shines a light on what others want to keep hidden, is investigative journalism,” the Nigerian journalist said.