Nigeria’s operating environment inhibits excellence, stifles creativity

Dele Olojede, publisher of the now-defunct NEXT newspaper and Pulitzer Prize winner, sat down with AJIBOLA AMZAT, Africa Editor for Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), in Stellenbosch, South Africa to discuss a range of topics bordering on his failed attempt to establish one of the most influential investigative news platforms in Nigeria, his journalism career, socio-economic conditions in Nigeria and issues affecting the media industry.

If you did not end up in journalism, what else would you have been?
Interesting! I would be involved in the life of the public in some way. Even I could be a politician as crazy as that sounds, hopefully, a different kind of politician. But something that allows me to be engaged in the life of the public, probably and most likely, I would be an academic so that I would continue my attempt to seek to understand who we are; why we are here; what our purpose is, and how we could organise ourselves in a way that makes human beings flourish. Those are always the most animating things for me. The quest for knowledge and the potential to translate the knowledge into practical action. If you look at Africa in the World that I host once a year, it is the idea of a festival to bring the brightest people to engage in things that concern Africa from wherever in the world they may come from. Good ideas come from everywhere, but we decide, which ideas are most relevant to us that we want to hear from the people experimenting with them. For example, at the festival, we have the topmost scientist in the world who is the leader in creating malaria vaccine…”

Will you ever consider serving in the Nigerian public service, if you have an invitation to participate, or have you completely ruled out Nigeria?
I have been invited many times before. (President Umaru Musa) Yar’adua asked me to join his cabinet. I turned him down. (President Goodluck)  Jonathan dangled this before me. I didn’t take the bait.

Perhaps they are not offering you a position you can’t reject?
No, it is because the operating environment will not allow me to be my best unless I am going there for ego and to steal. The operating environment has to give you a fair chance of realising the things that animate you the most. It is not just taking the job. I remember one of Yar’adua’s closest aides telling me at that time, you know a lot of people will give two arms and one leg for this opportunity that you just dismissed because he attended a meeting with Yar’adua in his office when he was asking me to come to his cabinet… I could not change my mind. I liked him, but I was not tempted in any way to take the offer because I was committed to NEXT. That was in 2007.

Would you change position if someone else comes around to offer you a position, and if the operating environment is right?
I have never stopped engaging in the affairs of the public. For example, I offered a lot of intellectual and moral support to my friend Nasir el-Rufai when he was running Kaduna State. I was the Chairman of the Board of the Kashim Ibrahim Fellowship, and I ran seminars for these young leaders in the state government, I visited him all the time. Because we have a situation of trust, he was able to tell me a lot of things, and I offered my advice when asked. That is just an example. I wrote Yardua’s inaugural address because my friend asked me to. As it turned out I spent a month with the late Yar’dua, before his inauguration trying to figure out what was in his mind, and what he wanted to achieve in his presidency, and used that to construct his inaugural address. I found out he didn’t have a lot of firm things to say. So, a lot of things in his inaugural address were my ideas of what I wished would happen in the country, including one particular passage I put in there and he allowed it to stay where he expressed regret for the election being flawed because Obasanjo and the PDP did all sorts of things to make sure he won, and he admitted it in his inaugural address, I put it in there. And he had the integrity to let it stay.

That is the most popular quote people draw from that address.
I put it there, it wasn’t like he said to me that he wanted to express regret for this. I said to him that ‘it is important, that you have nothing to lose by acknowledging that this election was far less than perfect and that you pledge to them that subsequent elections are going to be a lot better.’ He stuck to that pledge, he put a man of integrity in charge of the electoral commission. This sort of system that they built made it possible for the opposition to beat Jonathan years later. That has never happened before in Nigeria when the opposition beat the incumbent president. So, I don’t have to be a minister before I have that little impact that years later led to Jonathan being defeated. If your goal is clear and has a fairly high level of integrity, you will do the right thing. Everybody knows the right thing to do, whether you have the courage or the moral fortitude to do it is the only question.

So I put that statement in his speech, but some of his aides said ‘Oh Mr. President, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that,’ but he said ‘No, leave it’.  And he read it to the Nigerian public and then he acted on it. So, you see, ideas lead to action, that is what I love the most. I think ideas should form the basis for us taking action in the world. Once we get an idea, then let’s go act on it. Let it not stay there.

If your friend el-Rufai ever gets to become Nigeria’s president someday and asks you to join his government will you accept to serve?
I don’t think there is any doubt in my mind that if Nasir is running our country, I will be there to help him succeed. But that moment may have passed, maybe not, who knows. I am more inclined to look to younger people in their forties to be running the country than it is for a seventy or eighty-year-old person to be running it. It is just that the world is running at high velocity, you need young dynamic people who understand that new world better than the analogue people running it.

But in the US, your adopted country, old people have been running the country for nearly eight years.
Yes, but that is not the same. In the U.S., even if the government stumbles for a few years until they can toss it out, they have such an extraordinary density in things that work to the extent that that won’t matter. But in a fragile country like Nigeria that matters a great deal. So, America can have Trump (Donald) for four years, he would do some damage, but the country is not going to collapse, and the people are not going to be suddenly poor because the country is structured in a different way than the government is important, but if it wobbles for a few years, that doesn’t mean the country is going to collapse, whereas in Nigeria, if government wobbles as we are already seeing now; the country collapses.

What is your assessment of President Tinubu’s administration?
I am not close enough to it, to be honest, I don’t wake up every morning thinking about what Bola Tinubu’s government is doing today. From a distance, I can see they are failing dramatically, but that doesn’t mean they will keep failing. But there is a major failure when you dramatically increase extreme poverty in your country. It is a failure. Now that doesn’t mean they can’t do a cause correction, and I hope that they do. And I wish them well because not wishing the Nigerian government well is to basically attack the wellbeing of Nigerians because their government is so important to know whether they live in a safe and flourishing country or not, unlike say America or wherever, where you can afford to shit all over a particular government knowing that they will not fundamentally affect your life. In Nigeria, that is not the case. You cannot wish for a Nigerian government to fail, but right now they are failing. I think that is indisputable.

It’s over 10 years since NEXT went under. So, what you have been doing all this while?
Nothing (laughter).
But it doesn’t look like you have been doing anything because your assistant just informed me that your itinerary is choked from now till February and that you were hard-pressed to give an hour for this interview.

Well, I live here (Stellenbosch), in South Africa and in America, so I move between places. But the best way to answer your question is to say, that one of my main preoccupations at the moment is Africa in the World. That is what keeps me busy, lots of work, and lots of my work with ASPEN Institute, moderating seminars, and stuff,  and doing a bit of writing at the moment.

Does that include AFAR Magazine?
I don’t want to talk about AFAR yet. But yes,  I am thinking of doing some major writing and convening others to do writing. It won’t be a newspaper. It would be for more long-form journalism about stuff much bigger than Nigeria itself.

How soon would AFAR come on stream?
It is not ready for speaking about yet.
Some people were very angry that you closed the NEXT website. They thought you could have left the website running after the print version left the newsstands.

People are always angry at what they know nothing about. A lot of these angry people have no skin in the game. They always have solutions for something that they have not sacrificed anything for. That is just cheap.

Why did you close the website?
There was a need to make a clean break from something that was not working. It wasn’t working. I lost my investors’ money. I never earned a penny in the five years I spent on building NEXT. I never paid myself a penny. My wife also worked there and she was never paid a penny. I got money from investors who lost their money. My staff sacrificed tremendously. You had to call it at one point, and just say you were not extending people’s pain.

But grants were about to start coming; you got the 2011 John P. McNulty Grant.
I don’t believe in the grant model. No, I don’t. It could work for others. But I don’t like chasing people asking, are you giving us a three-year grant or an 18-month grant, then you don’t know what happens,  they may change their emphasis and so on. I have been on the board of some global not-for-profit organisations, and I still am on some, and I know what it takes. If you look at the media network of those global advisory boards  I served for a while, and they funded a lot of these things, I think they even gave a little bit of money to Premium Times. The issue is that these things go through periods of strategic redirection, and move on to do other things. So what then happens to you if you have been depending on that? I believe in the commercially viable model, right? The BBC model cannot work for us in Nigeria because the government itself is the enemy. So, that’s not available to us.

To me, we have to be able to build it properly to such quality and values that enough people are willing to pay for it to sustain it. So, I wasn’t really interested in chasing grants.
I remember asking you in 2008 when you were about to start NEXT, why going on print and not staying with digital publication, considering that even the New York Times was going digital. You referred me to an example of India where print publication was thriving. Three years later, NEXT went under. What lesson did you learn from the collapse of NEXT?

We were both right because, at that time in India, they were creating like 6,000 newspapers a year that went on for 10 years in a multiplicity of languages. The local newspapers in India were by far the biggest and most successful and they were building more and more. There was a time when they hit the peak of 6,000 new prints a year. That was a factual statement I was making. The error in that assumption was that, did that necessarily translate elsewhere, like Nigeria, which in retrospect, it did not. I still think that if you have substantial capital, there is still something to be said, possibly for a subscriber-only weekly, or a monthly edition in print so that you can service them directly. Paradoxically, the logistics of the digital economy is that all your shopping is now online, and because of that, it is now possible to have one-on-one print relationships with those who want a print edition and are willing to pay for it. The technology now allows you to do targeted printing. So, you don’t need all the massive press that we used to have. But at that time it wasn’t possible. So, it was an assumption that turned out to be false. But then when you were looking at India, you think maybe in the developing economy people still value a newspaper in the hand.

The paradox was that NEXT was actually the first newspaper to put professionally produced news products on Twitter because the publication started on Twitter, then built its online website, and then went into print. Now, if we had stopped just at online publication, perhaps we would have survived at the time.

Do you have a comeback plan?
Why should I? Everything is for its own time. I am well in my sixties, I will now start chasing some Nigerian newspaper projects. That time has passed. We trained hundreds of people who worked for us. They are doing interesting stuff elsewhere in the country and on their own. Those are the people who need to do it. One must act one’s age. It doesn’t make sense now to start such a project, it will just be a purely ego thing. It won’t make any sense trying to recreate NEXT now at my age. I did it in my forties. That seems to me about the oldest age that you can be doing a thing like that. And most of the people who drove NEXT were in their 20s. All the Tolu Ogunlesis, were in their 20s, very bright, high energy, and inventive; they know a lot of the news stuff more than I do. Those are the people who need to be building things, not me at my age. Rather It is time for me to be begging my children to be producing grandchildren.

After 234NEXT, Premium Times emerged to continue what NEXT was trying to achieve. What’s your assessment of the paper?
I think Premium Times still does not stick with just being a purely investigative platform but is rather becoming a general news platform. A general news platform guarantees either that you lose all your money, or you are not doing it at a high quality. Let us imagine that Premium Times just structured itself as a pure investigative platform. It does nothing else, right? So what this means is, first of all, it probably needs only six to 10 people as its entire staff. Everything else, they can get off the shelf. Its technology can be gotten off the shelf. They don’t need to build anything of their own, and so it will be very low-cost and then they can focus on something of extraordinary value, which is to let the public know what is truly going on. I bet that you could find enough people to pay for that kind of journalism as subscribers, but the moment you go into general news, trying to cover politics and so on, you become like anybody else. Don’t get me wrong, Premium Times still does a few things that you don’t generally get from many other news outlets that we have out there. So the issue, it seems to me, is that they moved away from what had a chance of succeeding, and of being also funded consistently by outside institutions.

Have you ever shared this insight with the founder of Premium Times?
I have discussed this, I believe, with Dapo before, that Premium Times has only one real chance of going back to quality and long-term viability. And that is to be a pure investigative platform. It should have no business doing daily news, quoting everyone from everywhere  ‘he said,’  ‘she said.’

Right now they are trying to be too many things to too many people. To my mind, that is not the way to go. But again, I am not close enough to the fundamentals to speak definitively about their situation. However, from a distance, it seems to me that covering every subject from everywhere is a missed opportunity not to be a purely investigative enterprise.

What kept you going on as a journalist covering various conflicts and chaos across the world for decades?
The easiest way to answer that question is to say I actually care about people, about human beings. I want to understand them. I am interested in the idea of justice and striving to make things better. I am committed to the public square. The area where I have some strength, some skill is in journalism. So, I apply journalism for that purpose. On a meta level, that will be my explanation for remaining committed to the craft.

How were you able to keep your family during those years when you were moving from one part of the world to another?
I always move with my family. By the time my children were seven, they had lived on three continents. When I opened up the bureau in South Africa, I went alone at first, they joined later and we all lived here. When I was posted to China, I took the whole family to China and we all lived in Beijing.  When I was posted back to New York, I took everybody back to New York. So, I was lucky that I was able to have my family with me in all of those places so that the children could also experience all those worlds from a very early age, which no doubt affects how they see the world today, and the things that they do, and the friendship that they make. I was lucky in that sense. So, my travels didn’t have a bad effect on my family life because we were together throughout the period. The kids are grown and gone now.

For so many young journalists, you seem to be something of a legend. What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind?
The legacy you talked about is already there, those young people you talked about. Legacy is not like building a statue; legacy is whether you touched enough people who then are inspired to go and do things greater than you did. That is how I would define legacy.  Legacy is the fact that we trusted young people at NEXT and trained the hell out of them, and we didn’t care where they came from; we didn’t even care what they studied. We just said if you want to be a journalist whether you studied accounting, law, engineering, or architecture, if you are interested in being a journalist, we would train you to be that way. We just wanted to recruit some of the best and brightest. From whatever field, we didn’t care. We never once said you were from here or there, and that is what we were looking for. As it happened our executive editor was a female Muslim from Zamfara, Kadaria Ahmed. That was deliberate on our part to make sure that we were doing as close as 50/50  in everything and gender, but after that, we didn’t care about any other kind of diversity. We just wanted to make sure that if we were hiring 100 people, it would be nearly 50/50, evenly split between the two genders. That is how we constructed the leadership of the NEXT. Apart from the executive editor, the chief financial officer was female, and the HR director was female. The males were actually in the minority in the executive leadership. And among editors, below the executive editors, it was nearly 50/50. And we had a bias toward young people who had not yet eaten the apple and could follow a different path. So, if you want people to be reasonably well-paid at least, relative to the market, and you insist that everybody has to be clean and that when we make mistakes in our writing, it would be an honest mistake, not because somebody bribed us to do something or not do something, and you infuse that with that sort of energy, then magic can happen as it did at NEXT.

Yes, we got the economic model wrong and were able to run out of the runway faster than we would have, but I never regretted the fact that we tried to pay people what I was earning at their age when I came out of the University of Lagos.