NGE: As Enugu braces for a hat-trick — 2025, 2026, 2027

William Shakespeare probably never imagined the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), Enugu, Governor Peter Mbah or an All Nigeria Editors Conference (ANEC) when, more than four centuries ago, he made Cassius extend a simple invitation to Casca in Julius Caesar.

“Will you dine with me to-morrow?” Cassius asks.

“Ay, if I be alive and your mind hold and your dinner worth the eating,” Casca replies.

Transport that exchange from ancient Rome to Enugu in September 2026 and, with only a little licence, it could almost have been Governor Mbah speaking to Nigerian editors after hosting them for the second year running: will you come again in 2027?

The answer, in the spirit of Casca, might well be: Ay, Governor, if we be alive, if your mind holds — and if your dinner remains worth the eating.

There is good reason for the conditional because the editors had already come to Enugu in 2025, returned in 2026 and, if Mbah has his way, could be back yet again in 2027. At that point, Shakespeare can leave the dining table and football can take possession, because what Enugu is trying to accomplish begins to look less like a conference itinerary and more like a scoring sequence.

Football has its own language and rituals. One goal puts a player on the scoresheet, two make a brace, while the third transforms the achievement into something more memorable: a hat-trick, after which, by long-standing tradition, the scorer takes the match ball home.

The young 2026/27 English Premier League season has already supplied colourful reminders, with Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes striking three times in 28 minutes as United beat Ipswich Town 5-2 at Old Trafford on August 30, while Sunderland’s Brian Brobbey scored three against Manchester City at the Etihad on September 20. Brobbey’s feat carried the unusual footnote that Sunderland still lost 5-3, making him only the sixth player in Premier League history to score a hat-trick and finish on the losing side.

For our purposes, however, the lesson is simpler: once the third goal goes in, the vocabulary changes.

Enugu’s opening strike came in June 2025 when the Coal City hosted the Biennial National Convention of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, bringing more than 400 editors and senior media practitioners together under the theme, “Building a Secure and Cohesive Nigeria: The Role of Dialogue, Inclusion, and the Media.”

Barely a year later, the editors were back. From September 23, 2026, Enugu again became a gathering point for the media establishment as the Guild held its 22nd All Nigeria Editors Conference, with the formal conference opening the following day under the theme, “The Ballot, the Media and the Task of Keeping Democracy Alive.”

Two major national Guild gatherings in successive years naturally invite the football description: Enugu had completed its brace, although somebody else had scored two before.

Port Harcourt had enjoyed its own remarkable run under Governor Nyesom Wike, hosting ANEC in 2016 and returning as host in 2017, a feat that prompted the then NGE President, Mrs Funke Egbemode, to observe that it was the first time a state would host the Editors Conference back-to-back.

That distinction belongs firmly to Rivers and nothing in this playful comparison takes it away. Enugu’s sequence is slightly different because its 2025 event was the Biennial National Convention while the 2026 gathering was ANEC. Yet, viewed through the broader lens of major national NGE gatherings held in the same state in successive years, the parallel becomes irresistible: Rivers had 2016 and 2017; Enugu now has 2025 and 2026, leaving them, in our entirely unofficial football table, level on two goals each.

Mbah then made things more interesting when, at the end of the 2026 outing, he invited the editors to return in 2027, turning what might otherwise have remained a pleasant back-to-back arrangement into the possibility of a hat-trick.

There is still an important word between invitation and achievement, and that word is IF. An invitation is not a confirmed fixture and nobody should be awarding Enugu the third goal before the ball has been kicked. But if the Guild accepts and another major national gathering brings the editors back next year, the sequence becomes 2025, 2026 and 2027 — three successive years, three appearances and, in the language borrowed from football, the third strike.

That would put Enugu one ahead of the Rivers sequence in this little consecutive-hosting contest, while leaving Rivers securely in possession of its historical distinction as the first state to host ANEC itself back-to-back.

There is, however, more to repeated hosting than records and metaphorical scoreboards, particularly when the returning guests are journalists, for editors can be dangerous people to invite back.

A first visit offers the host the luxury of introductions and first impressions; a second brings comparison because visitors now have something against which to measure what they are being shown; and by the third, memory begins to resemble an audit trail.

The road that was being constructed in 2025 can be examined again in 2026 and, should the editors return, once more in 2027. The school that existed on paper can acquire pupils, teachers and classrooms, or fail to do so, while a hospital, security facility or public project carrying a completion date eventually encounters something government publicity departments cannot permanently negotiate with: the calendar.

For journalists, yesterday’s claim has an awkward habit of becoming tomorrow’s verification exercise.

Mbah appeared conscious of precisely that possibility when, addressing the visiting editors in 2026, he urged them not merely to accept official claims but to “look closely, establish the facts, and tell the story as you find it,” arguing that the place where government’s obligation to deliver and journalism’s responsibility to scrutinise should meet is the truth.

In football terms, it was almost like a manager pointing towards his own goal and telling the opposition striker to take his best shot.

The editors did look around, moving beyond the conference hall to roads, schools, health facilities, the Command and Control Centre, Smart Green Schools and other projects, while a wider inspection tour took delegates into different parts of the state.

Those who were in Enugu in 2025 and returned in 2026 already possessed something first-time visitors did not have: memory. If they return in 2027, that memory acquires a third reference point and the questions become almost automatic — what did we see in 2025, what had changed by 2026, and where do those projects, promises and claims stand in 2027?

That is where conference hosting becomes something more useful than hospitality; it becomes journalism with a memory.

Of course, not everything that brings people back to a city can be measured in kilometres of roads, numbers of schools or percentages of projects completed. Conferences develop lives of their own through the colleague unseen for two decades suddenly appearing across a hotel lobby, the breakfast argument more energetic than the plenary discussion, the newsroom story whose principal character insists everybody has narrated it wrongly for 30 years, and the laughter, music, friendships and camaraderie that never find their way into a communiqué.

Enugu has supplied two successive chapters of that experience and Mbah would like to add a third, but for now the scoreboard remains delicately poised. Rivers put together its memorable 2016-2017 double, while Enugu has answered with 2025 and 2026, leaving the ball for 2027 sitting invitingly in front of goal.

If the third shot eventually crosses the line, the Coal City would have moved beyond the brace into hat-trick territory and, at that point, somebody should remember football tradition.

Governor Peter Mbah may take the match ball home.

• Osewele, member of the Nigeria Guild of Editors was in Enugu.

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