A soft-spoken man sits in the quiet enclaves of the Barker Center, reflecting on Nigeria’s past and prospects.

Though he appears quiet at first, Waziri Adio spent years in the thick of things when political life in his native country was dominated by military rulers and authoritarian regimes.

Adio is a journalist through and through.

Three times he has won his country’s top reporting awards. And beneath his pensive manner he watches his native land with a sharply critical eye, bent keeping on Nigeria’s youthful democracy in line.

Adio spent this year at Harvard as a fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, living in Dunster House and lecturing on the challenges and responsibilities of free press in Africa.

To Adio, a responsible free press and a successful democracy are inextricably linked—a message he’s tried to spread at Harvard during his Nieman year. In the fall, he spoke before the Harvard African Student Association and the Center for International Development to warn against premature celebration of emerging African democracies.

“There are tensions between journalists and governments all over the world,” he told an audience of students and fellow journalists. “What distinguishes a democracy from an authoritarian regime is how you manage that tension.”

Now, as he readies to leave the University at the end of the month, Adio prepares to return to Nigeria as a reporter and pick up where he left off.

A Radical Under Military Rule

Adio wryly recalls how, as an impressionable 10-year-old, he idolized a Nigerian television journalist who routinely put the country’s politicians in the hot seat.

“The guy asked them all the impossible questions and people actually answered him,” Adio says. “Government officials were not supposed to be questioned. And this guy was very, very bold. And I told myself that I wanted to be like this guy when I grew up.”

Adio entered the University of Lagos in 1988 and studied mass communications—a program so competitive it took him three attempts to get admitted. Looking back, Adio remembers his ignorance to the financial hardships that would come with the territory once he became a professional reporter.

“It was much later after I entered the university that I realized that journalists were not well paid,” he says. “From the outside, you thought it was one of those glamour jobs because you see these guys on TV well dressed...Then you see these guys who graduated 10 years ago and didn’t have a car [or were] dressed shabbily.”

A year after graduating Adio found a job in 1993 at an obscure newspaper called New Vision. But determined not to become one of the shabby ones without a car, he became restless with the paper’s small circulation and joined the staff of the Temple newspaper.

In addition to reaping the benefits of a larger circulation, Adio was exposed to the risks of being a journalist under the military rule of General Sani Abacha.