Adios, Mr Sam - tribute to my boss, friend
It was an afternoon, a few weeks into the new year, 21 years ago. I was new at Graphic, barely two weeks as a proofreader. A man tramped into our office, his huge frame refusing to escape attention.
He stood in the middle of the office, where he had a clear view of everyone as the tables had been arranged in an L-shape to allow easy interaction and the passing of dictionaries among proofreaders.
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I looked at him and turned to look at my fellow new colleague. He, too, had fixed his eyes on this man. It was our first time seeing him.
“I am Sam, Albert Sam,” he said. “So?” the Head of Proofreading retorted. They had worked together for a long time and were on first-name terms.
“I am told we have new proofreaders.”
“What do you want from them?”
“Ah, won’t you tell them your boss is here? Albert said with a mischievous grin that infected the Head of Proofreading.
My colleague and I introduced ourselves to him. He welcomed and cautioned us to be diligent and gave two proofs, one to each of us.
Just as he turned to leave, a female colleague entered with a proof. It was his fellow editor. He stopped, fixed his eyes on her and gave another mischievous smile, which I later came to know was his signal that he had a jovial statement to make. The lady knew this already. She preempted him.
“Albert, why? If you like me, take me.”
“Don’t give me temptation. I know how to find it myself,” Albert replied.
The whole room burst into a belly laugh.
When he left, the Head of Proofreading told us that was his nature, full of humour. It turned out that he was the man that I was destined to work with for over a decade as his deputy when we both left the newsroom for the Communications Unit.
Humour
Working together with Mr Sam after a while in the newsroom, I realised that humour was one of his ways of freeing his mind from hours of creative thinking to write a compelling story.
And it served him well.
He was one of the most experienced journalists in the newsroom, with practical skill spanning sports to foreign news writing, a rare multi-skilled writer.
In a personal conversation one day after a programme at Adabraka, he told me about his journey through Graphic, a fascinating story that lack of space precludes being retold in full.
Suffice it to recall that he joined the Graphic as a Staff Writer. He was later assigned the role of an investigative reporter before being promoted to be Regional Editor of the Upper Region (now split into Upper East and Upper West Regions) and then Ashanti Regional Editor.
He was also once the News Editor, then the Foreign Editor and an Assistant Editor of the Daily Graphic.
His work as a good journalist won him recognition by the Ghana Journalist Association, which conferred on him the prestigious title, Journalist of the Year 1991.
The story that won him the award was a classic example of how a journalist with a keen sense of news can find a big story in an apparently uninteresting publication.
He picked a lead from a police wanted list and followed it to discover a big story of two female employees and a missing ₵28 million belonging to a financial institution, a story that was a front page for weeks.
The GJA indeed recognised his journalistic prowess and described him as “a well-rounded reporter” in the citation that accompanied his award.
Contribution
Indeed, Albert Sam had demonstrated the potential to make a great contribution to journalism even while in school, training for the profession.
While at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) in the ‘70s, he was writing for the Sporting News, a foremost sports newspaper in Ghana then.
At the same time, he was contributing articles to The Mirror with admirable consistency. No wonder he eventually got employed by the publishers.
And two years after joining Graphic after school, he took on an international assignment that saw him covering the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) in the Middle East.
He was thus titled “War Correspondent” by the UN, the first (and, probably, the last) from Ghana to gain such a title from the world body.
He subsequently covered other important international assignments like the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, the European Parliament in Strasbourg (France) as well as the Liberian Peace Talks in Abuja, Nigeria, among others.
Honour
Only last year, while on retirement, Graphic honoured him during its 70th Anniversary celebration when it recognised its journalists over the decades whose contributions were outstanding in keeping the company’s reputation for authentic news. Part of his citation read:
“By your writings on the pages of Graphic newspapers, you have changed destinies for the better, shaped the national course for progress and inspired people to heights.”
Later in his career, he branched from journalism into public relations as the first head of communications of the Graphic Communications Group Ltd. I later joined him as his deputy.
Here, too, he made good contributions to public relations practice. He took up the role of helping practitioners to hone their skills in media relations as a facilitator to prepare them for the professional public relations exams of the Institute of Public Relations by teaching media relations.
Skillful mentor
Mr Sam was a skilful mentor. In the years that I was in the newsroom with him, I saw him on many occasions discussing stories with young reporters and helping to shape their stories. But almost always, he never ended without throwing a funny statement or two at the mentee and getting everybody around laughing.
It was no different when I became his deputy at the Communications Unit. His management style was the liberal one but he was firm when he had to demand that a target had to be achieved.
He would give opportunities for his subordinates to take initiatives and be accountable. It helped me grow.
I remember him for his way of telling you to put more in a task you carried out for him: “This one …hmmm.”
It was enough feedback that you had not met his expectation. You had to take it back and come later. If he was happy with your work, the whole world would hear about it. He shielded you from the world when you had performed poorly. “The buck stops with me,” was always his defence for a subordinate under attack from another manager.
Quality
One quality that always stood out about him was that he never felt too big to take ideas or even learn from his subordinates. If I lost anything he taught me, this quality certainly cannot be one. It has served me well.
He valued relationships. Even after retirement, he never stopped calling me and chatting with me on a variety of subjects, laced with his usual humour, of course.
Sometimes, we would discuss his write-up.
In fact, on the Thursday before his unexpected demise on the weekend, we had had more than 30 minutes on phone, chatting. Afterwards, he sent me a funny video – New Covid for Men — in which curious men looked at ladies and either hit a wall or fell into a swimming pool.
That was how he bid me farewell, unknown to me. He made me laugh only to cry. He was indeed a great part of my professional development, and I am forever grateful I got the chance to work with him.
By Corporate Communications Manager, GCGL, Mr Emmanuel Agyei Arthur.