Wole Olaoye is the Chairman/CEO of Diametrics Limited, Abuja. In this interview with IBRAHIM RAMALAN, the seasoned journalist and public relations czar believes that journalism is the best profession in the world. According to him, newspapers that have political party leaning are only becoming part of the problem, instead of being part of the solution. Mr. Olaoye is member of editorial board of Leadership newspapers and a columnist at Daily Trust newspapers.
What is your overview about journalism today?
As far as I know, journalism is the best profession in the world. Now it is unfortunate that some people perceive journalism as a dwindling profession.
I do understand the challenges facing journalists today however. But that does not change the fact that journalism is the best profession in the world. The truth is that, there is no short-cut to success.
A lot of people probably want to fly before they crawl. They barely master the rudiments of the trade before they start calling themselves consultants, experts, media analysts and stuffs like that.
Be that as it may, the quality of journalism today is still high.
I have been around and as far as Africa goes, we still have the most vibrant media industry in the continent, including South Africa. We have come a long way. What anybody who aspires to make this a profession should do is to stick by the highest ideals of the profession. If it does not pay now, it certainly will pay later.
The media of today is seemed to be dragged into politics. What is your take on the way forward?
Well, the problem now is we now have politicians in journalism. When they pretend to be political analysts, they are just politicians trying to buffalo their way in, railroad their views through the media and force their own perception on the public. So there is need for us to stay to the highest ideals of our profession.
Our profession has allowed us to view all sides of an argument. People don’t realise that when a newspaper has become stigmatized and has become noted for one particular partisan point of view, and it cannot carry anything from the other side, that newspaper is shooting itself in the foot. It has become part of the problem, instead of being part of the solution.
A large chunk of people will abandon the paper and say, ‘that paper, we know what it would say’. It is not as if it is a bad thing if you are devoted to an ideal. But when you have partisan political party leaning, then you are not a journalist who is doing political analysis, but a politician in journalism.
There are so many newspaper outlets in the country that hardly meet up with their staff responsibilities. Sir what are the home truths about the situation?
Most of the newspapers operating in Nigeria are under-capitalized. I have always counseled people who came to me for advice on starting up a newspaper business that they should not be too optimistic about returns. Advertiser will owe you, vendors will undue you.
In any case, there is no newspaper that can survive on copy sales in Nigeria. Forget about the various lies that newspaper sells about two hundred thousand copies. It is absolutely not true. There is no newspaper that sells up to one hundred and eighty thousand copies daily. Yet some of the very big and noisy ones at best sell twenty thousand copies. So you can’t rely on copy sales.
What investors in the newspaper industry ought to realise is that the gestation period of a newspaper is years, not months, because you are not selling cocaine. This means that there have to be enough financial muscle for the organization to survive until it stabilizes.
And there has to be prudence in the management. So I think it is about time the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) take introspective look at itself.
There is desperation by the government to end Boko Haram solely through military approach. Do you see any alternative aside military approach?
Terrorism is a serious problem and the only way to tackle it is to have a military end, religious end, which must be tackled by clerics and Islamic scholars who can debunk the ideology of hate and the ideology of homicide that fuel Boko Haram; and then you need sociologists, intellectuals to sit down and map out a program working closely with psychologists on how to heal the land from the hypnosis of terror, because most of these young girls in Hijab who go and become suicide bombers are hypnotized. And if you don’t realise that then you will not even get near the problem. In addition to that, there is the socio-economic aspect.
The Amajiri School started by the government is very good but we should have them in numbers. We have to get those kids out of the street. It is my suspicion that many of the recruits of Boko Haram have never known love, have had to fend for themselves.
So that is why it is very urgent that we fast forward the Almajiri project and make it all over the place in the north. Get those kids out of the street. Get them into some formal setting where they can still learn their Arabic studies and learn western education so that they can be useful to themselves and maybe get some skills and be useful to the society also.
Is there something or someone you consider as the greatest influence in your life?
That would probably be a combination of people. People like Arch Bishop J. K. A. Aggey. He was Arch Bishop of Lagos. He was my grandmother’s cousin. I admire him. He is dead several decades ago.
Another person I admire was Most Senior Pedro Martins, who was our own picture of what life should look like. He was a fantastic Catholic Priest. He was somebody who was a fickler for excellence. He was a manager of Holy Cross in Lagos.
Till date, he died recently at the age of 104; everybody agrees that this is one man who left the world in a better shape than he met it. He made his mark. So those were the people that fired my imagination as a child.
Well, as an adult, some of the people that I admired and one of the most loyal people that I ever had anything to do with was Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Those who do not know him could say any kind of rubbish about him. Yeah he had his own excesses and we used to quarrel about his own excesses. He wouldn’t take your advices. He would even turn your advice against you and lampoon you and all that.
Wale Soyinka also is another person I admire so much. He was my teacher, and mentor in terms of all these writings, and who I still see as a beacon. There is no guile in Wale Soyinka, no arrogance.
So I have been lucky that my path has crossed all these people and am better for it.
