I said it was simple; we should picket the most powerful culprit, which was the AIT/Ray Power, and in the print media, focus on Thisday Newspaper. But along the line, that leadership of the NUJ developed cold feet, and journalists suffered. Some employers in this unenviable league buckled under and journalists watched their salary arrears go down the drain. But the NUJ was not the only journalists union that had failed to secure basic standards; quite sadly this has been the case in most parts of Africa for over half a century after“the wind of change” swept through the continent bringing in its wake political independence. To tackle this problem, the Economic Community of West African States(ECOWAS) along with other interested organisations in November 2004 sponsored a forum of experts to produce a Standard Condition of Service that would serve as a model for the region. I was invited to that forum in Dakar and participated in the follow up validation workshop. Despite assurances, the NUJ failed to show up at the validation exercise and when I returned, I took a copy of the final document to the then NUJ leadership which expressed polite appreciation, but apparently dumped it in a drawer. Then in October 2006 following a workshop in Abuja sponsored by the African office of the International Federation of Journalists(IFJ), the new NUJ leadership under Ndagene Akwu asked me to head a committee to write a Standard Condition of Service for journalists in the country. This document was adopted by the union NEC at its Makurdi meeting in September 2007.Then a stakeholders conference in Calabar discussed it the following year. In 2009, Ndagene's Deputy, Mohammed Garba, emerged the new NUJ president. I had a brief discussion with him on journalists' welfare, but by my analysis, the NUJ seemed to have once again abandoned the issue of a standard negotiated Condition of Service, this time for a nebulous Media and Cultural Staff Salary Scale. This latest project appears to me as another public relations stunt by the Communication and Information Minister, Prof Dora Akunyili. Way Forward Basically, my submission is that: 1. There is no viable alternative to Collective Bargaining and the enthronement of a Standard Condition of Service with country-wide applicability. 2. Even if a Media and Culture Salary Scale is considered fundamental, it would only be sustainable if it is part of a comprehensive Condition Of Service.