Repossession is never as easy as it seems. Once a privatised enterprise has passed through mortgages, receivership, asset sales and successive owners, “taking it back” is no longer a simple reversal of the original sale. It can lead to years of litigation without restoring the original productive capacity of the firm.
The piece by columnist and former Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Guardian, Martins Oloja, entitled “Why Should We Celebrate Daily Times @ 100, FRCN @ 75?” published on 5 September, was an angry one. And Oloja has many good reasons to be angry.
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Daily Times, Nigeria’s newspaper of record, was 100 years old on 1 June, and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), the legacy successor to the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), was 75 in April. The anniversaries of these institutional brands evoked mixed feelings, especially regret, because they have not grown into what their founders intended.
What it Used To Be…
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Oloja narrated the decline of Daily Times, from the newspaper that produced some of Nigeria’s most outstanding journalists and was a formidable, professional, commercial, and asset powerhouse in its heyday, to a scrap of memory, struggling for its future.
Among the many golden assets of the newspaper was, for example, a 60 per cent equity interest in Naira Properties Limited, the company that was the majority shareholder in the Nigerian Stock Exchange house.
And that, of course, was apart from having many other valuable landed properties in Nigeria and London, and a content repository that was a treasure trove of Nigeria’s history. Its training arm, the Times Journalism Institute, was also one of its eight subsidiaries.
Yet, today, the brainchild of Richard Barrow, Adeyemo Alakija, and VR Osborne could use help from the Salvation Army. It’s more of a cautionary tale than the monument it once was.
Whose Radio Now?
The odyssey of the FRCN has not been significantly different, and Oloja’s agony and frustration over what might have been poured into his article in a bitter, relentless wave of nostalgia.
The problem, however, is that while nostalgia can sometimes provide relief, it is impotent to face the future. Not many would disagree that the transfer of the Daily Times was fraught with controversy, from disputes over the purchase price, relative to the property portfolio to financing, share ownership, the purchaser’s obligations, and post-sale asset management.
But the way forward is not in the past. The suggestion that Daily Times should be retrieved from Folio Communications 22 years after the sale and handed over to what is no doubt an accomplished group of media managers is like chasing the train long after it has left the station. It will only end in grief.
But regret is a waste of time. For me, it’s not very important who bought Daily Times – whether it was sold to a group of journalists or to some fishermen on Ekeremo waterside. We have seen journalists manage media houses successfully and others fail disastrously. We have also seen non-journalists turn around ailing media houses, the most obvious example being The PUNCH‘s Chairman Emeritus, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola.
A Litany of Sales
We’ve seen this before. After President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government sold the Port Harcourt and Kaduna Refineries to Bluestar in 2007, Obasanjo’s successor, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, reversed the sale under pressure from labour and other interest groups, who didn’t want “our national patrimony” disposed of so casually.
Of course, that was a convenient scam that has now cost the country billions of dollars in futile promises to fix the refineries. Ajaokuta Steel and the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) tell similar stories of well-intentioned government repossession that ended in deeper misery for all parties, except the predators.
Repossession is never as easy as it seems. Once a privatised enterprise has passed through mortgages, receivership, asset sales and successive owners, “taking it back” is no longer a simple reversal of the original sale. It can lead to years of litigation without restoring the original productive capacity of the firm.
There are several examples of privatisations that worked, such as Eleme Petrochemicals, Ashaka Cement, and the Nigerian Aviation Handling Company, as well as those that have partly succeeded and others that have been catastrophic failures. The reasons could range from technical competence to the availability of new capital post-acquisition, and from the freedom to price and operate commercially to the regulatory environment. No one-size-fits-all.
Regret As Medicine
But regret is a waste of time. For me, it’s not very important who bought Daily Times – whether it was sold to a group of journalists or to some fishermen on Ekeremo waterside. We have seen journalists manage media houses successfully and others fail disastrously. We have also seen non-journalists turn around ailing media houses, the most obvious example being The PUNCH‘s Chairman Emeritus, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola.
From a business point of view, the question is not whether the enterprise has become what one thinks the founders wanted it to be, but about how it is innovating, adapting and creating value sustainably. We may romanticise the past, but no business is immortal, as we have seen from the examples of Blackberry and Kodak. In a relatively free market, mortality is not necessarily a bad thing; out of the ashes of a badly run business may arise another to take its place, sometimes offering even better value.
And it doesn’t matter whether such businesses are a bequeathed legacy, a contested sale, or a start-up. This applies to the Daily Times as it does to over 314 news platforms – from the legacy media to digital natives – in Nigeria’s existentially challenging media landscape today. Nature hates a vacuum.
Oloja may be right. Daily Times’ influence has attracted vectors, the first of which was the Murtala/Obasanjo government. If the takeover and subsequent privatisation had not happened, perhaps Daily Times might have been all we hoped for and more. But that will remain in the realm of probability. And in that realm, things may also have been worse had the sale not happened.
Apples and Oranges
Let me now say a word about FRCN. Oloja’s comparison of FRCN with public broadcasters such as the BBC and the SABC may not be entirely accurate. There are fundamental differences between state-owned/controlled broadcasters, such as the FRCN, and public broadcasters, such as the BBC or the SABC, whose legacies Oloja highlighted.
While all three – FRCN, the BBC, and the SABC – are publicly owned or constituted, there are material differences in appointments, finance, editorial authority, and regulation.
The legal foundation of each one, its corporate character, ownership, and editorial freedom, affect the quality of its content and programming as a whole.
It’s inconceivable, for example, that the fragmentation by fiat which the writer referred to in Radio Nigeria will happen in the BBC or SABC. What the piper in the Nigerian government cannot undo with businesses in its control does not exist.
The Market As Teacher
Yet, in a world where even established services like the BBC are losing captive audiences due to licence-fee evasion, as more and more households access on-demand channels, and with fewer public resources available, the existential challenges might compel broadcasters of all shades to innovate or be left behind. No one needs to count the years for failing businesses. That’s a job the ever-changing consumer market does so well.
Oloja may be right. Daily Times’ influence has attracted vectors, the first of which was the Murtala/Obasanjo government. If the takeover and subsequent privatisation had not happened, perhaps Daily Times might have been all we hoped for and more. But that will remain in the realm of probability. And in that realm, things may also have been worse had the sale not happened.
Or has the New Nigerian, the regional equivalent of Daily Times and relic of the 19 Northern state governments, done significantly better?
The best tribute to Daily Times and Radio Nigeria is not to recover their past. It is to recover the standards they represented and build institutions capable of meeting them in the future.
Azu Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book,Writing for Media and Monetising It.
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