COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN THE NIGERIAN MEDIA: 5 Chapter PROBLEMS, PROSPECTS AND THE WAY FORWARD. By Owei Lakemfa, Head Industrial Relations, NLC I am honoured to stand before you distinguished audience to deliver this paper. When I left active journalism in 2001 after eighteen years to become a full time trade unionist(sounds curious, isn't it?) I told myself that although I was divorcing my first love, I was not certain the divorce would be granted. I have since realised that once a person is truly married to journalism, it is a matter of “till- death- do- us- part” partnership. So despite my schedules, like a religious obligation, I still maintain two weekly columns. I can therefore safely refer to you as my comrades of the pen profession. On Wednesday October 13, 2010, I was one of millions of humanity that kept vigil watching television as the thirty three Chilean miners who had been trapped for sixty nine days were being rescued from the bowels of the earth, seven hundred metres deep. Mining is clearly a deadly, dangerous and quite hazardous work, but so also is journalism, at least in the under developed world. In our own case, the profession is so risky that our forebears under colonialism had prison as second home. Chief Anthony Eromosele Enahoro at 21 in 1945 became the youngest editor when he was appointed to edit the Southern Nigerian Defender. At 22, he was convicted for sedition against the colonial governor, Sir Bernard Bourdillon and sentenced to nine months imprisonment. Two years later, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for giving a speech in Warri during which he told African policemen to disobey orders to shoot African workers if they went on strike. The West African Court of Appeal reduced his sentence to eighteen months. Just as he emerged from prison, he was back; this time, for chairing a lecture for independence by a sacked worker, Osita Agwuna which Enahoro considered as part of the freedom of expression. For this, the editor went to jail for six months; his third jail sentence in three years! Things did not get better for the journalist after independence with the Preventive Detention and Newspaper Act of the First Republic. General Yakubu Gowon's regime was quite intolerant of the media; amongst its casualties were Minere Amakiri who was beaten and had his head shaven with broken bottles for writing a moderately critical article on then Rivers State governor, Alfred Diette-Spiff on his birthday. There was also the case of Segun Sowemimo who was battered by soldiers and died of the injuries he sustained. His offence was that he was carrying out his journalistic duties at a gathering in Ibadan where the governor was unwinding. The telegram announcing his death which read simply;“The Man Died,” became the title of Wole Soyinka's prison memoirs.