By Shonde Mustapha
The best way to learn is to practise what knowledge teaches you. James Clear said it in his book Atomic Habits: we should forget about goals and focus on the system instead. For me, that system has been writing and learning journalism for the past three years.
In that time, I have encountered failures that people outside this field rarely hear about. Yet, every time you open social media, the posts are filled with congratulations. We never write to impress in this profession. The rule is simple: no source, no story. I never forget that rule, just as no one forgets their own name.
Sometimes, story ideas come to me like revelations. I get excited about turning talent into professional work without any personal interest. Some ideas are born when they are published. Some die in the labour room while they are with my editors. Others never even reach the antenatal stage before they are flushed out. That happens because the rule echoes in my mind all the time.
If you open the Digest Press UDUS blog today, you will see twelve stories with my name on them. You will see people sharing the links on Facebook and WhatsApp and posting screenshots of the byline. What they do not see are the drafts I deleted. An editor once replied that a story had already been reported many times.
Painfully, I never took a screenshot of that message for Instagram. The story that died because the facts could not carry it received no celebration. In three years, I have published about twelve stories and buried five, and that ratio does not embarrass me because it taught me what not to print.
Walking into the office where students go whenever they have issues with their ID cards, I showed the officer a strange card someone had picked up on campus. I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture of where I found it because I wanted to explain why a campus journalist was standing before him asking questions. I thought I had uncovered a forged school ID.
He asked where I got it from, and when I told him, he looked at the picture and said it was one of the sample cards they printed before reaching a consensus on the final design. They usually produce samples before agreeing on the pattern to adopt. There was no passport photograph on it, and the details were incorrect because it was never meant to be the final version. He collected the card from me, and what I had already begun shaping in my head as a system failure turned out to be nothing more than the school still working on a design. I thanked him and walked away. That draft never saw the light of day.
When the holiday came last semester, the Benji hostel passageway was flooded. I walked through the water myself and saw corridors submerged beneath it, with stones laid across the walkway while students moved around their own hostel as though they did not belong there. I spoke with Jafar, Okechukwu, and the caretaker, Mubarak, and wrote a story that was meant to hold management accountable for how resources were being handled.
My editor read it and said it had already been reported many times. He was not wrong. By then, the water was already drying up, and the moment had passed. What I saw with my own eyes was real, but it was not news. It was weather, and weather only becomes journalism when someone can be held accountable for it. So I let that one go too.
There was also a rumour that spread around a hostel involving a woman, some men, and a disease—the kind of story that travels quickly in a place where silence is often the only privacy students can afford. I could have written it, and the headline would probably have travelled far. But I knew from the very beginning that the vulnerable people involved, both the woman and the men, would never willingly put their names to such a story. Something built on rumour is not journalism. So I wrote it as an opinion piece instead and relied only on what I could verify. I never mentioned HIV, and I never chased the alleged victim. The piece that was eventually published was weaker than the one I could have written based on rumours, but at least I could sleep at night knowing I had not harmed anyone just to earn a byline.
Another story that died was about private partnership hostels. I wrote a letter to BUA Cement Plc, asking to be directed to the appropriate office because I knew the company undertakes community projects. I wanted to ask why, despite those interventions, there was no private partnership hostel within UDUS. No reply came. I kept waiting, hoping for a corporate angle. Then, during a CJID programme held on campus between May 19 and 21, the Student Union Caretaker Chairman spoke during a panel session about hostel conditions and said the school was working on the issue in some way. His words were vague, but they came from an official source. I realised that my letter and all my waiting were built on assumptions I could not prove. I never got the interview I wanted with the SU Chairman, and BUA never replied. So that story remained in my notebook and nowhere else.
The one that still pains me happened on April 4, 2026, when headlines broke that Malam Garba Ahmed had been dismissed. I read the reports and saw scandal, fraud, a staff member gone, and students who might have been affected. Digest Reporter, Gamji Press, Sahara Reporters, Punch, and ICIR had all covered the story. I thought I could find the affected students and obtain the NYSC letter myself.
I spent two weeks searching. I sent messages to WhatsApp groups, called final-year students, and even drafted a Freedom of Information request. I could not reach Malam Garba Ahmed, so I went to Ayatullah, a renowned journalist, graduate, and entrepreneur on campus. I met him at his shop, where he also helps students with NYSC registration. During our discussion, I learnt why I had not been getting any official response from the NYSC. The matter had never reached them. The school management had intercepted it before it left the institution.
He explained that mobilisation passes through different stages before call-up letters are issued. The Senate had discovered names that did not match the matriculation year of that graduating set, so the list was corrected internally before it ever became a federal issue. I never sent the FOI request. I deleted the draft because the story I had already written in my head could not survive that one crucial fact.
That one still hurts because I almost published something that was not true. I already had the headline, the angle, and what I believed were enough sources. What I did not have was the truth.
That is why I want to move into investigative journalism, not because I want to chase scandals, but because I want to learn how to verify things properly before I put my name on them.