Daily Trust - the online edition

Isiaq Ajibola, MD, Media Trust Limited

Trust: Can you give a brief background of what really motivated the establishment of Media Trust Limited?

Ajibola: The establishment of Media Trust Limited in 1996 was, can I say, a child of necessity, what management people call FANAFI. Find a need and fulfil it, i.e. when you see a need that you want to fulfil. We found out, for example that there was no formidable newspaper in Northern Nigeria. We found out that in 1996, we needed to have a media and marketing communications company.

That time we used to look at some media and marketing communications in Lagos, those already established like the Insight Communications, OBM, etc, many of them in Lagos.

Maybe because we had worked in Lagos before we came to Kaduna. Incidentally the then Editor-In-Chief and Chief Executive Officer of the company, Malam Kabiru Yusuf, whom we worked together in Lagos, had relocated to Kaduna and has abundant goodwill, so we started this idea of media and marketing communications in Kaduna with the hope of having a very strong company that would be able to respond to the media and communications needs of most companies in northern Nigeria. Certainly, there was this big gap also of lack of a newspaper in Northern Nigeria, and we thought and there was the need for a very strong and formidable newspaper in Northern Nigeria.

Trust: From your expression, it sounded like you needed to raise a working capital before you could start the paper. How much was your real target?

Ajibola: When we did the feasibility studies, that was late in 1997, we found out that we needed about a N80 million to really start a paper. I can tell you that we did not have more than five million naira when we started the paper in 1998 because we knew there was no place we could get that kind of money. And the best way was just to start somehow.

Of course, as at that time, we had done our media and consultancy services for almost two years, and already we had been signed on by reputable organisations like the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE), Petroleum Trust (Special) Fund (PTF). We started just like that and really squeezed.

You (pointing to Zainab Suleiman Okino, now Acting Managing Editor) are one of the pioneer staff, I’m sure she knew how we started. Editorial staff were not more than ten. We had only one accountant. Initially, infact, I was the accountant. So, we really did not have money, we also thought and decided, well, we would see how it went. We just risked it.

Trust: As at today, the company has outgrown all of you. As against your projection, the company has taken a life of its own, because with or without any of you now, Trust is already an institution. How do you assess yourself in ten years and where do you hope to be in the next few years?

Ajibola: Is it personally or as a company?

Trust: As a company?

Ajibola: As a company, to me, I see our growth as very fascinating. We thank God for that, but I don’t think we have really reached the level where one can beat our chest and say we have arrived or we have reached our optimum.

We want to be a world class newspaper. If you look at our vision and mission statement, we are saying we want to be a world class communication company. We are even looking beyond Nigeria. We want to have papers with very large circulation in Nigeria and beyond, one with very many pages of advertisement, using latest technologies with less emphasis on quantity of people.

I am not saying that we are going to stop employing people, we want to employ very qualitative staff that would make very great input into the papers using a lot of ITs and take the papers to a very high level whereby internationally anybody can be talking of Trust and be confident of it, so that in years to this time when we are not here, the company would be there. That is our vision really.

Trust: What plans do you have to retain the loyalty of staff you have?

Ajibola: In theory, we have to motivate them, isn’t it? In practical terms, there is something I don’t really understand myself, when I think about motivating our staff and retaining them and it boils down to the fact that it seems that it is very difficult to satisfy some staff. I know a situation whereby a staff was just given a new car and promoted and is still dissatisfied with his job. So you find out that it is not just the motivation, that may be the problem of some staff.

Maybe in our culture in Africa, we tend to expect more than what, we get or we tend to over exaggerate our contribution, all of us probably including we the owners, we over exaggerate our contribution to the company beginning from the clerk to the top. So each person would want something bigger than what he/she has gotten. Ideally what everybody is getting in this company today should be enough motivation for everybody to move to the next level. That is what I expect.

Trust: In this part of the world, I mean the Northern Nigeria, newspapers do not really perform. Already four major ones have been grounded and you had been with two or three of such. At what point in time did you really decide that look, we must succeed?

Ajibola: The experience of those places (Citizen and Sentinel) you are talking about, was an eye opener we borrowed a little from those experiences. It is not just enough for a company to say we don’t have all the resources. You can talk of editorial success, most of these papers made editorial successes, but they did not make commercial successes. Of course, there is a very thin line between editorial success and commercial success.

Editorial success, ideally, should lead to commercial success, because you need three successes really to make a newspaper to continue to grow: editorial success, commercial success and managerial success. In the history of those two or three newspapers you are talking about, there was editorial success more than those two other successes identified above, i.e managerial and commercial successes.

Also dont forget that the owners of Trust papers are members of the northern elite that have tremedious goodwill that translated in business immediately we started. And there is no amount of editorial success that would make newspaper successful, but where you have the three, it is most likely to move the company ahead. In the case of Media Trust, we have been lucky to have a fair advantage in all these three. We are talking about: editorial, commercial, managerial. We have a fair advantage such that it was able to take us beyond that danger zone whereby either you crash or you continue to survive.

Trust: That is a transition from darkness to light?

Ajibola: Yes!!!

Trust: Three of you started with few experienced editorial hands, and you come from the commercial terrain. Why did you get other hands to come along with you then?

Ajibola: And as you know, the job was divided in such a way that he (Malam Kabir) worries more about the editorial part of it, I worry more about the business part of it including the managerial aspect and that has produced a very good synergy, without being immodest, leading to the growth of the paper.

Trust: The North is not advert and commercial friendly, newspaper wise. At the onset, how did you deal with this situation?

Ajibola: When you create a good product, it is definitely going to bring along with it so many added advantages in the form of synergy. In newspaper business, the first important thing is editorial success, it is the very key, in many environments, not just the North, whether in the South, East or West, wherever it is, luckily for us, we made editorial success from the very beginning. It was a period when there was a military regime and our paper came and said the truth about military dictatorship, we opposed the government of Abacha. People liked it, they were willing to continue to read the paper.

Also, from day one, there were paid adverts in the preview edition, because we were conscious of the fact that we needed business success to survive.

So, we also worked on the business side, going from door to door asking for advertisements. We were very conscious of it, that without that, we would not survive, and people were willing to support us, because they saw what we were doing. And for the first time, in any way, the readership in the North expanded because there is higher income in the North, education is improving beyond what we used to have before, so it is now able to retain a newspapers. May be before, we didn’t have people who were working, the middle class that could buy newspaper. Our papers really came out at a time the north really needed a paper of their own.

Trust: At the onset, you took the commercial aspect headlong, and today it is a huge success. The right human capital was needed to help out, how did you wriggle out of that to off load some of the burden on you considering that it would have been something else if you had continued like that?

Ajibola: We head hunted. We got people that we knew before, like some of you, you were working somewhere else in Citizen, Sentinel. Much more than that, we also invited some fresh hands from the universities.

We have our own way of recruiting people. We always went for merit. Merit was the first consideration. It has helped a lot and that was how we got the people to assist us.

Trust: Would you agree that the need that had necessitated the establishment of the Media Trust some ten years ago still exists, I mean standard newspapers in the north?

Ajibola: There is more of that need, well why do you say is not there? Because there are fewer northern newspapers...

Trust: No we are talking of the standards like we have…

Ajibola: The need is still there…the need not just to have a newspaper, that time there was the need to have a paper just something for people to read. Now we are talking about professionalism. What I refer to as a good paper from this part of the country. That time the need was just to get something to read; now we are building upon that.

Trust: What is your message to Media Trust stakeholders from the reader, through the advertiser, staff, management to the shareholders?

Ajibola: My message is to thank every one beginning from our readers, because they are the most important stakeholders. We thank them for their support, we are telling them we are ten years now, that without them we would not have been where we are now. I have no other message for them than to thank them and appeal to them to continue to support us.

Without them we cannot be sitting here and having this interview. My second thanks go to the staff. Everybody here works diligently to produce this result we are having today.

Of course, here and there we have people who wouldn’t tag along, but the system often wouldn’t allow that; the staff have made very good contributions to the growth and development of the paper. And the shareholders, I also want to thank them for their support, the board especially, for their contributions, on strategic issues that gave appropriate direction to the paper.

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