Nigeria, Jan. 15 -- The death of Yakubu Mohammed, co-founder of Newswatch newsmagazine, coming only weeks after the passing of Dan Agbese, feels less like coincidence and more like a solemn punctuation mark in the long, turbulent sentence that is the history of Nigerian journalism. It is as though an entire generation of journalistic giants-men who did not merely report history but wrestled with it-are quietly taking their final bow, leaving behind a legacy that today's Nigeria is in danger of forgetting.

Yakubu Mohammed belonged to that rare breed of journalists for whom the profession was not a career but a calling. At a time when the Nigerian media landscape was suffocating under military dictatorship, censorship, and the ever-presen...